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When the plane first crashed on the ABC drama ‘Lost’ and deposited its surviving passengers on an island, lottery winner Hurley (portrayed by Jorge Garcia) had the pudgy physique — and then some — of the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island. After 50 days away from fast food and Western comforts, guess what? He’s still the size of three Gilligans. But stay tuned; this could end up in the script.

As the TV show returned to the air this month, viewers could ignore their own winter weight gain and focus on Hurley’s chubby conundrum: Why isn’t he losing weight?

To solve this riddle, we turned to nutritionist Monique Ryan of Evanston, Ill. (moniqueryan.com), who has a private practice and works with world-class cyclists, triathletes and the Chicago Fire soccer team. (It also helps that she got hooked on ‘Lost’ during the summer reruns.)

“You would expect that maybe he would (lose weight), but you’d have to sit down and look at what he’s eating the whole day,” said Ryan, author of the new ‘Performance Nutrition for Winter Sports’.

“He might also be an individual with a very slow metabolism. We tend to assume that everybody has complete control over things like that, but they don’t. Some of that is genetic.” ‘Lost’ doesn’t dwell too heavily on the islanders’ menu — it’s not on the Food Network, after all. But Ryan said the most plentiful foods would probably be low-fat staples like fruit and fish. One episode featured Hurley complaining to a doctor about some gastrointestinal distress from gorging on fruit.

“Even fattier fish is going to be lower in fat than any kind of beef you get at a restaurant,” Ryan pointed out. Although the castaways recently opened an airplane hatch that had a cache of processed foods such as potato chips and peanut butter, Hurley’s consistently rotund physique prior to the discovery remains a weight-loss mystery. And consider this: Ryan noted that Hurley probably is getting more exercise in his new lifestyle.

“Because they’re doing everything manually — they’re walking, they’re looking for food, they’re cooking, they’re washing their clothes by hand _ that’s a lot of calorie-burning,” she said. “It’s daily activity that we used to have in our lives that we don’t anymore, which is contributing to a greater percentage of people being overweight.”

Like, for instance, Hurley. So why is his gut still the size of a couple of flotation devices? In an e-mail, co-creator/executive producer Damon Lindelof and executive producer Carlton Cuse gave this teasing reply:

“Hurley’s inability to lose any significant weight, like many other things on the island, is shrouded in mystery. That mystery, however, will be definitively solved during February sweeps ... well, as definitively as anything ever gets solved on ‘Lost,’ anyway.”[[In-content Ad]]

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