First Person

Why I'm Walkingby Judi Herring (Med '89)

On Aug. 7, 2006, I left home in Jacksonville, Fla., for a walk. It’s September as I write this and I haven’t yet returned. My journey is not a personal quest for insight or inspiration, but a public journey intended to bring focus onto a cultural crisis from which many have chosen to look away.

The thermometer in our support car, positioned over the pavement where we’re walking, reads 123 degrees. Walking mile after mile across sticky-hot asphalt, I consider that snakes and lizards stay in shade. They can’t handle the heat because they can’t sweat. My evaporating sweat allows me to remain cool enough to survive in the midst of this sun-fired oven called the Mojave Desert because I am a human with the marvelous ability to adapt to this challenging environment. The combination of the human body and brain has allowed us to survive across the Earth’s surface, in the oceans’ depths and high into space. The only challenge to which the human body seems unable to successfully adapt is excess fuel consumption: overeating.

This mile I’m walking is one of about 2,000 I will have walked before I return home. I walk with Gary Long, who journals his walk at the Web site www.afatmansjourney.com. Aware that complications of his obesity (coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure, diabetes and high blood pressure) were going to kill him, Gary decided to recover his health or die trying. Gary left St. Louis in February 2006 weighing 380 pounds. He walked more than 900 miles and reached New York City in late July. He flew to Los Angeles, where he continues his journey back to St. Louis.

I am not Gary’s doctor, nor even his friend. After hearing of his journey from my niece, I called him to explore his agenda. I learned from hours of discussion that we share a common passion: to help solve the obesity epidemic in our country by inspiring and educating one person at a time. On Aug. 18 in Los Angeles, I started walking with Gary as a comrade in arms, a teammate and a supporter. Gary says that his obesity is his problem and he’s doing whatever it takes to fix it. I’m saying obesity is every citizen’s problem, and we are not doing enough to fix it.

Through millions of acres of scorched wilderness, the strip of asphalt stretches from horizon to horizon, shuttling cars full of people getting their kicks. Yes, it’s Route 66. It’s hot. I’m sweaty, dirty and walking beside an obese man. We meet countless obese and overweight people, strangers interested in our walk, and we talk with them about our journey and the Fast-5 diet tool (which suggests dieters eat healthily for five hours each day and fast for the remaining 19, thus burning body fat). Many of the strangers’ stories are hauntingly consistent as they describe the struggle to combat the impulse to overeat to be demoralizing and defeating. In our casual setting, they openly share stories of the embarrassment of broken chairs and broken beds and the meticulous, time-intensive skin care required to prevent chafing.

Before this walk, I had a comfortable salary as the chief of urology at a university hospital. I traded that for my current salary, which is marked by a single elliptical digit. If this is the future opened to the graduates of U.Va.’s School of Medicine, will undergrads still apply?

I hope so, because if we keep trying to attack the problem in the operating rooms and clinics with surgery and drugs instead of taking the battle for health into the trenches where fat happens, our country will continue its self-defeating spiral of overconsumption and snowballing complications. While doctors are busy treating the complications of obesity, more people must fight in the everyday world by educating individuals to make healthy personal choices and to resist reflexively eating food in response to the media blitz that cultivates the impulse to overeat. This cultural barrage sabotages the impulse control required to avoid the consumption of excess food.

Many times in my surgical practice, when I cut into an obese patient’s belly with a scalpel, I considered that the real problem in need of a solution was the foot-thick layer of fat I was forcing out of the way to gain access to the surgical goal. My surgical skills would alleviate pain or maintain the patient’s life, but would they do anything to address the underlying problem? No. The cure for the illness I fight now is not found in a textbook of medicine or surgery. It’s a cultural sickness.

This 2,000-mile journey is an opportunity to meet many people for whom being overweight and obese are important issues. I learn from them about the challenges they face in their daily efforts to get healthy, and they learn from Gary and from me that there are tools and choices that can help them counterattack the forces that led to their overeating. I left the ranks of traditional medicine and have joined this fight. I walk to educate listeners about diet choices that give power back to people and I encourage them to make life-changing choices.

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