Lauren Kessler

I signed up for a week at Mountain Trek, a fitness and weight loss program - okay, a fat farm, a boot camp -- in remote eastern British Columbia to shed some of the pounds I had accumulated writing my last book. I'd gained weight not just sitting at my computer, which is easy to understand, but also during the most active, physically taxing part of my research for the book, which involved taking a job as a bottom-of-the-rung, minimum-wage caregiver at an Alzheimer's facility. There I walked close to five miles each eight-hour shift as I cared for a dozen old folks who could no longer care for themselves. Bending, kneeling, lifting, sweeping, mopping …I worked up a sweat. And, miraculously, like just about every other woman who worked there, I gained weight. Well, not so miraculously. The accumulated poundage had a lot to do with my habit of coming home from my shift and standing in front of the refrigerator where I made my way, shelf my shelf, through whatever food I found there. The job was exhausting, not just physically, but every way, and the only way I knew to comfort myself was to eat. And so I did. A lot. When I was finished writing the book, I was close to twenty-five pounds heavier than when I started. I could no longer fit into four of my five pairs of jeans (the fifth being my fat jeans stored way back in the closet, hoping I'd never have to wear them again but secretly fearing that I would). I signed on for Mountain Trek looking to lose weight. But what I found was even more important than what I lost.

In the dead of winter, I made my way via two airplanes and a long, snowy van ride to the Mountain Trek lodge above Ainsworth Hot Springs. There I was awakened each day before dawn, downed a protein shake, did an hour of yoga, ate a small, elegantly presented breakfast (part of the 900-calorie-day diet) and then ventured out with one of several fit, happy and dangerously handsome male guides for four or five hours of backcountry snow-shoeing. (And yes, the female guides were hot too.) In the evening, after another small, elegantly presented meal, I headed off to weight training or circuit class or forty minutes on the stationary bike. I had tried to persuade my best friend and fitness buddy Lizzie to come with me. I had tried to persuade anyone to come with me. My children couldn't believe I was doing this. They referred to my one-week adventure as Siberian Starvation Camp.

I loved it.

I loved watching the sky lighten through the windows of the yoga studio. I loved being outdoors all day. I loved really using, testing, my body, living in it fully, feeling a new kind of weariness when I went to bed, a good weariness. (I especially loved someone else doing my laundry.) For seven days I lived a simple, scaled down life I could not have imagined living at home. No television, no radio, no newspapers, no telephone, no email. Although guides drove us through three towns on the way to various mountain trails, there were few reminders of twenty-first century life. Not a single coffee kiosk (There are nine Starbucks in my town.). No Wendy's McDonalds RedLobster Borders Barnes&Noble. I spent evenings in front of a fireplace not an HDTV screen. I saw, after just a week, that it was not just me that was over-full, it was my life.

Yet…I live in a comfortable house on five acres just over the hill from what is considered a lovely, bucolic (except for the barista on every block thing) small city. I don't go to sleep to sirens. I don't take a subway to work. The nearest subway is 550 miles away. The tallest building downtown - the only tall building - is ten stories. You can drive through the heart of downtown at any hour in ten minutes. But the difference between my home life and the simplicity and spaciousness of my week in British Columbia was glaring. I came home to my family sprawled in front of the TV watching a DVD of a past season of "24," a show I love and have been known to watch addictively. But it was suddenly too powerful to ignore the fact that the show was the distilled essence of everything that is scary about twenty-first century life: terror, chaos, anxiety and paranoia in an atmosphere suffused with and defined by technology.

I came home to 792 emails: Hoodia for sale, watch replicas, Viagra, "I'm Olga and I'm single," explosive growth stocks, messages that begin "hey, dude." Eight of the emails were worth reading, and none of those eight were particularly important. If I didn't respond, no one's life would be altered in the least. It was a sobering experience.

I was struck hard - it is almost a physical blow -- with the realization that my life is not just full of gadgets but full of garbage, noise, trivia and crap, and that this garbage, noise, trivia and crap takes up a lot of my time and is clouding my vision, fogging my brain, deadening my spirit and making me feel empty inside. It is the emptiness that I have been trying to fill with food - not just during the stressful writing of this latest book but during the last three decades of my life.

This is what is known as an ah-ha moment.

The eight pounds I lost at Mountain Trek was great. But the insight I gained…It was - I hope - life-changing.

Part 2 - Costa Rica

Copyright Lauren Kessler

Lauren Kessler is the author of five works of narrative nonfiction, including Pacific Northwest Book Award winner and Los Angeles Times bestseller Dancing with Rose, Washington Post bestseller Clever Girl, Los Angeles Times bestseller The Happy Bottom Riding Club, Full Court Press and Oregon Book Award winner Stubborn Twig. Stubborn Twig was chosen as the book for all Oregon to read in honor of the state's 2009 sesquicentennial.

Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, O magazine, salon and The Nation. She is founder and editor of Etude, the online magazine of narrative nonfiction, and directs the graduate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her writer husband, Tom Hager, her three brilliant and faultless children and a cat that thinks it's a dog.