Lose weight? It's not what you think.

38% of adults and 17% of children in the United States meet the criteria for Obesity. 

​- Healthy People 2020

This week Angel Mathis is stepping in with a post about weight, putting on her hat as a health care provider, and trying to provide some advice about how to deal with a topic that's both important and complicated from both a health and outdoor perspective.

The topic of weight, body size, and the outdoors is something that storytellers at our events are talking about, and I want to talk about it too. But I don’t want to reinforce the common idea that to be an outdoor enthusiast you have to be a certain size or shape. I want to help make room for people who frequently don’t feel welcome in the outdoor community - and that includes people of size - to use Jenny Bruso’s term. But I also want to celebrate people's stories like Demetri Zouboukos in Episode 63 of the Boldly Went Podcast, where weight loss was a major part of the process in overcoming barriers to accomplishing adventure goals. So it's complicated. 

Weight is a topic that I’ve dealt with professionally for years, because I’m a healthcare provider by training - a nurse practitioner. I want to help people be healthy not just because I want them to be able to experience the outdoors (which I love), but because it’s my original vocation. There are plenty of great things about that, but my experience as a healthcare provider has also been an experience of what’s wrong about the way we approach weight.

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