Fitness Road Took Woman to Mount Everest

by John McCann of the Herald-Sun
Dec. 29, 2008

DURHAM -- Need a little motivation heading into the new year?

Here, try on Jan Croft's story:

That woman lost all kinds of weight and got herself in such great shape that she ended up climbing Mount Everest.

Well, she didn't actually climb Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world. But Croft did go to that mountain on the border of Nepal and Tibet and did what's called trekking, where the goal is not reaching a mountain's peak but rather dwelling lower on the big rock and taking in the scenery. Yet a trekker still attains some pretty steep heights, and it's not something Croft, at 5 feet 3 inches tall, could have done at 250 pounds.

In 2002, Croft's doctor told her she had breast cancer and needed surgery. Croft actually got that diagnosis on her birthday. And it wound up turning into the gift of health and fitness.

Croft had just started at Durham's Rice Diet Program when she learned she had breast cancer. Only two days into what was supposed to change her life, Croft was ready to call it quits. But program director Robert Rosati encouraged her to stick with it. And, man, did she!

"When you're living on the fringe, your body has no reserves to take care of whatever comes along," Rosati said.

By fringe living, Rosati -- associate professor emeritus of medicine at Duke University, and he's board-certified in cardiology and internal medicine -- is referring to eating too much and drinking too much, and all of that. See, when you really think about, our bodies are always trying to fight stuff like cancer, he said. But when we gorge our bodies and won't exercise them and don't hardly rest them, then our bodies don't have the right opportunities to mount defenses, because they're using every bit of themselves to keep us going every day, Rosati said.

"Jan got with it," Rosati said. "She's lost a bunch of weight. She's exercised like a maniac."

Now at 169 pounds, Croft, 68, is quite the health advocate. One time in her home state of Mississippi to receive praise for her lifestyle change, Croft wound up showing former Gov. Bill Waller, who was having problems with swelling, how to read food labels in order to help him reduce his sodium intake.

And this past year at the N.C. State Fair, Croft actually took her own fresh apple, banana and a little rice instead of getting a candied apple and eating all of the deep-fried this, that and the other offered along the midway.

Mind you, Croft is a Southern girl who grew up ruining watermelon by shaking a bunch of salt on it. Hamburgers, hot dogs and fried chicken -- sound familiar? -- dominated her menu.

"All the bad stuff. Biscuits, gravy," Croft said. "I was eating around 10,000 calories a day."

Now, Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps reportedly consumed 12,000 calories a day while he was training. And he's all slim and chiseled. But the guy trains like crazy. The average person doesn't put in nearly the amount of work that he does.

But Croft does get plenty of exercise, hitting it hard at Duke University with Greg McElveen, an exercise physiologist at the Michael W. Krzyzewski Human Performance Research Laboratory. See, it wasn't chemotherapy that made Croft lose those 80 pounds. She didn't do any. Croft had a lumpectomy and did radiation treatments, but her weight loss is the result of eating right and busting her tail during those workouts with McElveen.

"I was determined that this is not going to get me, because I've got a lot of things I want to do," Croft said.

Got any mountains you want to climb?