Adding a little variety to a meal plan help

[Jim MacDiarmid]

Here is my meal plan for an upcoming 6 day, 5 night trip to Yosemite and Ansel Adams Wilderness.

I'll be doing 15-20 miles days at 7,000-11,000 feet elevation. I'm 36, 5'10" 175 lbs with problaby 7-10 lbs of fat to burn.

I think I've done a decent job of planning out approximately 1.25lbs of food/3100 calories per day, but as you can see from the list, I'm eating the same thing every day except for my dinner entrees. (I have the FBC cookbook, but I've gotta use up my backlog of MH dinners first)

Any advice on switching my snacks etc up that keeps the weight and calories about the same? It all has to fit in a Bearikade Weekender.

[Greg F]

One of my staple foods for backpacking lunches are dried peporoni sticks. Unlike beef jerky which is generally low in fat these are packed with fat and are very high caloric density. The ones I buy are longview brand which is a local brand but I am sure a similar product is avialable. They are also very dense so shouldn't take up too much room.

http://www.mec.ca/AST/ShopMEC/HikingCamping/Food/Snacks/PRD~5005-487/longview-roni-stix-original.jsp

They are 90 calories per stick and about 15g per stick which works out to 180 calories per ounce.

The other thing I usually bring for lunches for the first 3 days or so is cheese. An older drier cheese stores better and usually is higher density.

I question your dried Mango Calorie numbers. You have 1.5 oz giving you 400 calories which is over 9 Cal/gram which is not possible. Pure fat is about 9 calories a gram most dried fruit approaches 4 Cal/gram

[Jim MacDiarmid]

Greg,

You are correct about the mango number, and I've fixed them. I must've had something else in that slot originally, and not changed the numbers when I substituted mango. The real numbers are 1.35oz/120 calories, so my food weight went up and I lost 200 calories.

I'll check out trader joes and my local market for peperoni sticks. The temp range for my trip is likely to be 50s to 30s, so storing some cheese shouldn't be a big issue. I may swap out some of the mango and/or candy bar trail snacks for peperoni.

[Sarah Kirkconnell]

Cheese carries well – especially the harder cheddar styles. If it warms up it gets soft and sometimes a bit oily but is fine to eat.

If in cool weather I tend to carry chocolate (for some reason it is hard for me to eat it in hot weather).

I need to look at your list but are you carrying oil for dinners? A Tbsp of olive oil per dinner really helps with making dinner taste better but also fill you up.

Don't forget lots of drink options since it will be colder and you won't drink as much :-)

[Laurie Ann March]

Dark chocolate covered marzipan is a great calorie boost (and tastes pretty yummy too). Same with almond bark made with dried fruit and dark chocolate.

Energy bars… http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=423656322861

[Anonymous]

"I'm 36, 5'10" 175 lbs with problaby 7-10 lbs of fat to burn.

I think I've done a decent job of planning out approximately 1.25lbs of food/3100 calories per day, but as you can see from the list, I'm eating the same thing every day except for my dinner entrees "

Jim,

Based on your body fat estimate and the 138 cal/oz of your current diet, I think you could substitute 4-5 oz of high carb snacks or drinks like Perpetuem for some of the hig fat items in your food list. This would enable you to make better use of your body fat, which is more than enough to get you through a 5 day trip. If you go this route, you could also knock a couple of ounces/day off your total food weight. I recently completed an 8 day trip into the Upper Kern and Kaweah Basins, a fairly strenouus route, using 19.25 oz of carried food/day supplemented by 4# of what I'd call excess body fat. I lost 4.5#, which is close enough to my estimate for backpacking. My carried food was 45% carbs, which was calculated to support the burning of the 70% of my caloric requirement provided by a combination of body and dietary fat. It worked out pretty darn close.

[Jim MacDiarmid]

All great advice so far.

Sarah – Olive oil figures prominently in my dinner menu. The calories are just a bonus to giving some flavor to the MH meals. I'm not too worried about the digestive tract effects I've read a bit about inre olive oil as I use a fair bit in my everyday cooking (vinagrettes, pesto, grilled sandwiches etc)

Tom – I'm not at this point very scientifically minded regarding my food consumption, and some of your posts in the pasts have been a great help. Perpetuem figured prominently in my original meal plan, to the tune of ~half my daily calorie intake, ~14 scoops of the stuff/day. I would have been eating solid food at breakfast and dinner and drinking my calories throughout the day. I did this last year on my Tahoe Rim Trail (failed) attempt. I wanted to bring Perpetuem this trip, but still haven't figured out a convenient way to deal with it. While the constant calorie intake helped a great deal in my performance, there were some drawbacks. One, that the powder was messy. The individual packs were too expensive, so I bough the 64 serving container and repackaged it. It seems to turn to concrete when it gets wet, which is a problem if it rains, and it did. And when resealing an opsack, squeezing the air out sent particles of powder all over, kind of defeating the purpose of an odor-proof sack. A Third issue was dealing with purifying water. Since as I understand it, Aqua Mira is less effective in murky water, I'd have to wait 20 minutes to mix up my perpetuem, which would neutralize the advantage of not having to stop to snack. Or, as I did last year, I'd have to carry a twice as much water, so I'd always have enough on hand to mix. Maybe though I'll replace some breakfast and lunch calories with 2 scoops, fit in a ziplock bag portions of Perpetuem.

[Anonymous]

"Maybe though I'll replace some breakfast and lunch calories with 2 scoops, fit in a ziplock bag portions of Perpetuem."

The Perpetuem powder is definitely a major PITA to deal with. Your idea of using a zip-loc baggie is where I have ended up. Once the #%$&@* powder is safely packed in the baggie the rest is easy; don't bother to open the baggie again, as powder gets all over the place, especially trying to get it over the ridged lip of the baggie. Better to hold the baggie at an angle and shake gently until the powder moves away from one of the bottom corners of the baggie. Then make an ~1/4-3/8" diagonal cut across the corner to open up a hole. Now it is easy to pour the Perpetuem into your bottle, sort of like a funnel. No muss, no fuss, no bother. Also, an easy way to get the Perpetuem into the baggie is to use a wide mouthed canning funnel. It's a lot quicker and less messy then trying to spoon it in or pour from the container.

One way to have to stop less often is to mix the Perpetuem at double/triple/quadruple strength in a smaller bottle into a sort of slurry. That way you can take a sip of the slurry and reconstitute to normal strength in your stomach by drinking pure water from another, larger bottle. You will only have to mix one, or maybe two batches/day that way, and you can treat your clear water with Aqua Mira the normal way during the day without having to wait 20 minutes before mixing it with Perpetuem at every water stop. This technique works really well when you're "on the move".

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