Life on the campaign trail is not conducive to good health. The days are long. The stress is intense. The sleep is fleeting. The food is plentiful -- and much of it is, well, crap.
Many candidates, staffers and the journalists who cover them put on quite a few pounds during the campaign cycle.
Clay Aiken, the former American Idol star who ran for a North Carolina congressional seat in 2014, put on 30 during his time on the trail; or, as he put it, "30 fucking pounds."
How did this happen? He explained in the latest Candidate Confessional podcast.
"I ran in a very rural district too, so pretty much every day Bojangles, because you don't get out of the car. I mean, you're in the car all the time. So it was fast food and then of course every event you go to, people have put food out for you. They've prepared food for you. And it is good. But if you don't eat it, you look rude. So I just had to keep stuffing my face. Thirty pounds."
Aiken's Bojangles meal of choice that summer was a four-piece supreme dinner with dirty rice. There were no healthy choices there, he explained. But you did have the option of mentally tricking yourself into believing your calorie intake wasn't so bad.
"You convince yourself that it is healthy because it is chicken," Aiken said.
As for the weight, "it's gone now," he added.
This podcast was edited by Christine Conetta and record by Nicholas Offenberg.
Listen to the podcast above or download it on iTunes. And while you’re there, please subscribe to, rate and review our show. Make sure to tune in to next week’s episode, when our guest will be Tim Miller, the communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 run for the White House.