Can you lose weight by hiking? Not walking - hiking.
Sure can, and I am proof. 10 days of hiking - urban and rural, mostly hills and many of them steep because it was Tuscany - for 6 hours/day left me with a 7 lb. weight loss. That's with my usual modest but tasty meals in Italy, never hungry at all. Some daily beers or wine: good food requires it. This loss was entirely unintentional. I was shocked when I got on my scale at home (cuz my pants were falling down). Not good or healthy, really.
Also perturbed because that too-fast (1 lb/wk is normal for weight-losers, and I do not want that) loss clearly reduced my deadlifting power this morning.
We have asserted here that you can't lose weight with exercise alone, but that refers to, say, a reasonable and realistic one hour/day biking, swimming, lifting, walking, and the like.
I did a little lazy research. Jogging at 5 mph burns around 550 calories/hour, about the same as energetic hill hiking. Comfortable walking is around 250, speed walking around 300. That ain't enough burn to make measurable difference. One donut or bagel has 300 calories, a slice of pizza around 350-400. But if you multiply that hourly hill-hiking number by 6, you are getting to real daily numbers and getting into real fat-burning.
It's said that 6 hr/day hill-hikers on The Long Trail (Appalachian trail) need about 5000 calories/day to prevent weight loss over days or weeks of hiking.
It is true that all calories are not physiologically equal, but you can come up with rough numbers: the average sedentary adult female needs around 2500 calories daily, male 3000, to maintain weight. Those numbers are average and perhaps high for trim fit people.
(Sedentary - a modern sin - is often defined as daily exercise equal to or less than a 3 mile walk daily at a 3-4 mph pace. Just above that is "Lightly Active", etc. My one hour daily sched of weights, cardio, and calisthenics gets me just into the "Moderately Active" category by most measures because of the high levels of intensity with HIIT, calisthenics classes, and heavy weights. Intensity can try to compensate for duration. I'd put our hiking guide last year in the Hebrides in the "Highly-Active" category. Craig MacDonald was not only Highly-Active and highly-fit, but highly humorous and sarcastic in the Scots way. Always happy to tease you for a half hour if you bought him a dram or two of Highland Park at the end of the day. That is his beverage.)
Readers know that one of the rewards of my fairly-demanding work-out regimen is to be able to do things like hill-hike all day without fatigue, until I grow old. What's my point? I dunno. Maybe that fat loss is dietary, except when it isn't. Just facts to consider.
Tracked: Oct 25, 15:39