How hiking helped me learn to be body positive

Francesca, one half of the Rogue Ramblers, tells us how hiking helped her get over her body confidence issues and how getting ‘hill fit’ has changed her life.

Wild swimming has helped Francesca achieve body confidence

The majesty of mountains manifests itself to us, most often, during our missions to make it to the summit. Their craggy outcrops and steep slopes offer a challenge to even the fittest adrenaline-junkies and endorphin-seekers. While we’ve all had days during which we turn back, leaving the trail ahead untrodden, defeated by conditions and the otherwise uncontrollable, many of the moments that matter on the mountains are either lost or won in the mind.

I, like many hikers, had to learn this the hard way: In attempting to utilise Mother Nature and all her undulations as part of my own inward-looking attempts to sculpt the body I thought I’d always wanted by getting hill fit.

Throughout my formative years, I was a young girl who held onto her puppy fat for a little too long, if society’s beauty standards were to be believed. And you can bet your big-bottomed dollar I believed them. For a teen whose age perfectly matched up with her dress size, most of my attempts to get fit failed miserably, in a mire of shame, self-harm, embarrassment and, admittedly, a little bit of laziness. The thought of working out in front of another living soul, red-faced and puffing, was enough to send me into a tailspin. So, in my desperation to achieve a healthy weight while avoiding the gym, I tried liquid diets and at-home workouts closer to punishment than exercise. I tried all the social media squat challenges but was more comfortable squatting for a pack of biscuits on the supermarket bottom shelf. I fasted and binged, until the incessant peaks and troughs became too toxic to handle.

Into adulthood, I altogether gave up, throwing myself into weight gain and the subsequent loss of what little fitness I had in my younger years. I largely hold Manchester’s pints and fried chicken – two of my all-time loves – responsible. After being told I was obese by my nurse when she consulted her BMI chart during a routine check-up I realised something had to be done.

Now at my heaviest, I was more unprepared for the gym than ever. (Spoiler: I’m still not there.) By this point, ‘fitspo’ was the new ‘thinspo’ and it was a world I felt intimidated by, looking in through the floor-to-ceiling windows at gym-goers on cross-trainers. At size 16 to 22, depending on the high street store, I couldn’t find gym gear to fit, anyhow. Understanding the dangers of my past mistakes, I needed another option. I grew up in Nottingham and had a vague recollection of school trips in a leafy domain favoured by coachloads of day-trippers known as the Peak District. A quick Google and I figured I’d found my solution.

So, one bright morning in September about five years ago, all 86kg of me headed to the hills with Stew in tow on a delayed Northern Trains service to try and sweat off the night before by hiking up Mam Tor. Little did I know the hills would offer a harder but more rewarding challenge than any workout I’ve managed since.

Those first few hikes were very shaky and occasionally teary (but who am I kidding, tears on mountains aren’t out of the question even now). I won’t bore you with the details because we’ve all been on hikes we’ve found hard for a plethora of reasons; weather, tricky routes, our own physical and mental limitations. It was a hard day. I still remember feeling like a fool for even trying.

But there was something so special about carrying the physical weight of your body – the one you’d resented for so many emotional reasons – up a hill to an invigorating viewpoint. In my mind, it’s a feeling reaching your reps can’t compete with, even though you get the same happy endorphins.

For me, a lot of my body angst was centred on my legs, filled as they are with a perfectly normal amount of cellulite and a little extra chunk. In hindsight, that they were able to carry me up hills and down dales was mindset-altering over the next few months. After the first hike, I got home too exhausted to analyse what I’d done. The second or third time, I was mainly focussed on the post-hike pint. Maybe after the tenth hike, I started to appreciate the power of my legs; the very thing I had hated so much I’d marched myself up a hill to ‘fix’ them.

From that point on, the hills held a mental and physical challenge as well as a place I could feel comfortable, confident and let go of my self-consciousness.

Where I had noticed other people stream past at what seemed to me breakneck speeds Road Runner would’ve been proud of – making me green with envy and embarrassed by the beads of sweat on my brow and trickling down my back – I now saw companions walking their own walk. I felt able to return over again to the hills, feeling a little bit stronger each time, lifted up by others who also felt the call of the wild, enjoying the nods and hellos. These fleeting moments reassured me, even on days when I wasn’t feeling my best because it didn’t matter to anyone how breathless my greeting was, just that it was offered with a smile – or at all.

For Francesca, the hills are the most accessible gym in the world.

The lovely thing about hiking is there will always be someone with a quicker pace, better gear, and more map-reading skills than you. But walking isn’t a mile a minute race, it’s a marathon. For that reason, it really can be for everyone. And for that reason, perhaps, I found it to be a (largely) judgement-free zone.

After a while I noted many positive physical effects on my body. I was stronger, slept better, and felt more confident. But even had I been no fitter than when I started on that oh-so fresh-faced hike up Mam Tor, it didn’t matter; I was hooked on the natural high and barely noticed I was exercising while out walking anymore.

This is how the hills and mountains of the UK taught me that getting hill fit is the only type of fitness I'll ever strive to attain and the only regime I’ll ever follow. After all, it’s the only plan which makes time for a nutritional pork pie at the top, a pub lunch, and a pint.

Moreover, nature requires no membership fee and no 12-month contract. In principle, then, the hills are the most accessible gym in the world. Perhaps that’s why many important figures in the body positivity movement also find peace and community among the mountains, where every step is a great human equaliser.

However, there are undoubtedly accessibility issues which plague the outdoors and divide nature's devotees. I’m no expert but I – even as a cis-het white woman with a lot of privilege in these spaces – can see we’re a long way away from ensuring nature is available and safe for all. I acknowledge this very article documents that, as much as I have had my own body issues, I have the privilege of being able-bodied. As someone who has learned to, if not love, at least appreciate their body after numerous physical and mental hurdles, I have closely followed the American revolution of outdoors diversity and body positivity on social media, keenly applauding the likes of Mirna Valerio, Jenny Bruso, Fat Girls Hiking, and the Unlikely Hikers.

The wild swimming community has encapsulated this beautifully in the UK, where clubs and groups and supportive spaces online welcome all kinds of bodies. So much so, as a woman previously at war with her body, I felt inspired and empowered by other’s photographs – drawn to the wide smiles and twinkling eyes of dippers rather than the body parts which make up the sum of the whole human. Indeed, I’ve often wondered whether part of the out-of-body euphoria associated with cold water therapy can be attributed to the sheer joy and liberation of being in a swimming cossie in public – something I couldn’t and wouldn’t have even considered a decade ago. Maybe, as with all activity outdoors, it’s the whole package.

Everyone’s journey to happiness and health is different. I welcome the day I can get the same joy my friends find at the gym. For now, I’m happy with the hills as my very own personal trainer. All I know is that on my own journey to fitness - this totally subjective and relative concept - the hills taught me about our capacity to achieve things we thought ourselves incapable of, whether it’s scaling a mountain or wearing a cossie in front of strangers. Moreover, getting hill fit taught me that body acceptance, mental wellness and the solace of nature were the #goals and #gains most important to me. There will always be steeper hills to hike and higher mountains – sometimes of the mind – to climb. But the hills teach us that our own pace, whatever that is on any given day, is the only one we need to accept and keep up with; that’s the true meaning of getting hill fit to me.

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