1.25 lbs of food per day?

[ROBERT TANGEN]

I can't really argue with any of the above, since I am just an Apprentice Debater, not yet a Master Debater, but is Twight right about ingesting only gels such as GU and drinks such as Gatorade, or is it OK to chomp down on bars, gorp and chicken fried steak while still on the move?

[Miguel Arboleda]

Now that I've spent the last nine years working on lightening up my gear I think it is time for me to really learn more about nutrition and how to think about it and use it on the trail. Thing is I know much less about it than I should (I have diabetes, and though I'm concerned about food every single day and have read quite a lot about it, it's still not quite right) and am quite stumped for where exactly to start. Does anyone have any good books for laymen (without explaining things as if I was a baby) on nutrition and eating outdoors (especially mountain travel) that they could recommend? It's so confusing that the information is overwhelming. It seems quite a few people here seem to have gotten the knowledge from somewhere… Thanks!

[paul johnson]

I chow down on bars and GORP myself. Have used GU.

Not sure how much faster liquids and gels make it through the stomach. This is a question that i'd like answered also.

[James Pitts]

All my background on nutrition comes from my background in running and sports nutrition. I have found the translation to lightweight backpacking to be pretty straightforward. There are TONS of books on this topic (sports nutrition) but I can't point to a single one that has influenced my thinking. The "carbo drip method" and other ideas like this have been around for a long, long time. The basic mechanics of performance sports nutrition are pretty well understood. A lot of the more recent advances in sports nutrition are more "fine tuning" and offer advantages that are lost on the vast majority of people. A lot of stuff is just bunk designed to sell pills and powders… at least if you ask me.

[Mitchell Keil]

Miguel:
The link that was posted several posts above
(http://thru-hiker.com/articles.asp?subcat=12&cid=39)
appears to this layman to be a wonderful and very complete resource on trail nutrition. It conforms to much which I have read over the years and which my wife (who was a trainer for a number of years) had been using with her exercise clients in consultation with several sports nutritionists in our neck of the woods. I am sure that you will consult with your MD about any nutritional/diet changes made for the trail.

So far I have found this discussion to be one of the best we have had in the forums. What I am dismayed with is the lack of freeze dried food that fits in with what we have been discussing here. Most of it is so heavily saturated with Salt and the wrong kinds of fats that it almost toxic. Most of the time I open the packages and doctor the contents with my own ingredients. When I don't take freeze dried meals, I do take freeze dried chicken chunks and/or veggies and make my own meals as I am sure most of us have done. The link above really gave me some valuable info on making meals and carrying the right ingredients to maintain my stamina.

[Erin McKittrick]

Seems like there are two separate considerations.

1. Maintaining energy while hiking. Many people seem to agree that frequent snacking is good for this, and that you need carbohydrates in the snacks. (I'll use candy bars and granola bars over energy bars for this myself – cheaper and tastier).

2. Having enough calories. Varying the timing of eating, and the type of food, may have an influence on feeling hungry. But in the end, if you don't carry as many calories as you're burning, you're relying on body fat. On a short trip, that might be ok. On a long trip, it isn't. (I'm planning a 9 month trip, and I'll really be in trouble if I'm losing weight the whole time). In my experience, the only way to keep the calorie count hign enough is to carry lots of fat – as much as possible (I find that 45-50% calories from fat is about the upper limit of useful).

-Erin
http://www.groundtruthtrekking.org/WildCoast.html

[John S.]

My hiking motto is…JUST EAT! All that worrying about ratios and such is nonsense to me. My snickers bars rule. Check the arctic 1000 on their food. They ate more junk food than you can shake a stick at.

[Miguel Arboleda]

Well, that really would be ideal… and that was how I ate before I became diabetic, but when you're up in the mountains far from help and suddenly you get hypoglycemia it's utterly terrifying to look at your stash of food and realize that you have nothing with, for instance, a high glycemic value, meaning that even if you eat something high in calories, like a Snickers bar, its sugar spike will die off so quickly that you might not be able to get as far as you need to in order to be able to get the right kind of food. Therefore it is imperative that I eat food that will burn a long time, and yet not be so bulky and heavy that it makes it impractical for lightweight hiking. As others have said here, things like whole grain food and olive oil do a lot toward filling this need, but I'm more concerned with the nutrional balance of food, taking into account that I cannot always be attempting to just keep a certain caloric level (which is easy to do with foods high in calories) but must also find a healthy balance of nutrition so as to not have diabetic reactions like nerve damage from lack of Vitamiin B or excruciating cramps from lack of Vitamin E and alchohol consumption. This is what I want to start out on the basics with, and to build from there. If anyone has information sources for going deep into the subject, that is what I would like to explore. The above sources mentioned so far are a great start.

[mark henley]

Check out the forums on Bodybuilding.com … there's a lot of good sources about hard exercise vs. food intake as a lifestyle, day in and day out, that touch on people with just about any medical challenge you can think of.

Of course … I would add one other thought to this discussion.

I could eat just about anything I wanted up until I turned 35, and diet balancing didn't seem to be an issue for me. But once I hit the magic age, and with every year that passes from 35, I find that my diet has everything to do with both my energy levels and how I feel from day to day.

If Snickers works for you, then I'm envious … I love snickers.

They don't work for me however …. and I'm sure that everyone will be different, depending on how their body works.

So … what I've learned from this thread is that you should experiment with different food sources on shorter trips, recognizing that they are the fuel for your only source of transportation in the backcountry, and see what works and what doesn't work for you … in other words, your mileage may vary.

And Erin … 9 months?

Man …. I'm really envious! (I recomend Dr. Bronners)

Happy trails!

[Jim Colten]

Erin said: In my experience, the only way to keep the calorie count hign enough is to carry lots of fat – as much as possible ;

Ann Bancroft (the polar trekker, not the actor) has a great story along those lines. She says that while on a training trek for the north pole trip Steeger caught her staring at him while he munched on a ball of butter as if it were an apple and he responded with "Don't look at me that way, before you get to the pole you'll be doing the same thing!"

She reports that he was correct.

[Erin McKittrick]

Yes, butter is great in winter (unfortunately too messy in summer). Even better with brown sugar (like the first step of making chocolate chip cookies). And I am very happy that snickers bars (and heath bars – my favorite), work for me too.

And Mark – yes 9 months is not a typo. I'm headed out this June to walk (and packraft and ski) from Seattle to the Aleutian Islands. http://www.groundtruthtrekking.org/WildCoast.html
Definitely not without resupply, though, so I should be able to wash up occasionally…

Experimenting with what works for you on shorter trips is good, as long as you remember that you'll need quite a bit more for longer trips. Seems obvious, but not considering this basic fact made me very hungry on my first long trip… (leading to browsing berries with the brown bears, illegal salmon netting, defending these salmon from the bears, etc…)

-Erin

[Anonymous]

Erin, I think you're spot on about longer trips requiring more food. You can go in with extra body fat and carry less food for the period of time it takes you to metabolize it, as long as you have enough carbs available to support fat metabolism, which is basically a function of cardiovascular fitness, weight and exercise level. Once you've used up your body fat, you're dependent on whatever food you're carrying, unless you want to start catabolizing muscle tissue.
I've been carrying 1.25# of food per day for a couple of years now yielding ~2700 cal/day for trips up to 12 days. I go in carrying ~3-4# of extra body fat and it's mostly gone by trips end. This leads me to believe that I'm about at my individual limit for that amount of body fat and
calories. If I decide to extend my trips any further, I'll add another 4 oz, initially, and see what happens. Everybody has their own metabolism, hiking pace, and dietary preferences so I guess it boils down to everyone is an experiment of one. But I'll hazard a guess that a fit individual weighing say, a lean 200#, would probably have to carry more than 1.25#/day.

[James Pitts]

Well, that's about 3800 calories per day (weight loss from burning body fat + food ration) and that's about right for a backpacker.

I would say that in this case 1.25 lbs of food per day with 4 lbs of weight loss over a 12 day hike would be roughly the same as 1.75 lbs of food per day with no weight loss over a 12 day hike.

Put another way, because you know yourself better than I do, how much food would you have to carry to hike with no weight loss? I am guessing 1.75 lbs based on some simple math that I just did.

[mark henley]

James … about 5 lbs a day?

[James Pitts]

I estimated the extra .5 lbs by taking the amount of fat calories burnt from weight loss (3500 X 4 = 14,000) and converting that into food calories assuming a 50/50 blend of carbohydrates and fat. Then I divided by 12. It's a verrrrrry rough calculation especially since food has protein to consider as well as packaging and other ingredients. I mainly wanted to illustrate that if the 1.25 lbs per day figure includes an assumption of 4 lbs of weight loss in fat over 12 days of hiking that one would have to normalize these numbers if one wanted to know what they meant for any given individual. A very, very good point was made that factors like metabolism, conditioning, and other factors play a big role here (for example, outside temperature and insulation quality). But if you wanted to know what 1.25 lbs/day of food meant to you then you would have to factor out the 4 lbs/12 days of weight loss and then adjust to your personal situation.

In the end you have to "hike your own hike". I think we all respect that. For me it's really good to share these experiences and I very much enjoy the dialogue.

[Anonymous]

Hi James,
Your estimate of 1.75#/day leads to another consideration: If you're carrying .5#/day of additional food, how many days food could you pack before you run out of volume and end up using a bigger(heavier??) pack. Depends on lots of other things, obviously, but you can probably see where I'm going with this. In my case, I started out with a bigger pack and ended up with a smaller one that weighed about 1# 12 oz less, partly due to smaller food volume, but also due to lightening my gear. This is the one area where body fat(3500 cal/#) trumps dietary fat(~4000 cal/#). In the end, I think all grams are equal in the eyes of the SUL deities.

[James Pitts]

Hey Tom. I have have mulled over your post here for a while now. I agree that most SUL deities would agree that a gram is a gram. Actually, anyone that knows that a gram of feathers weighs the same as a gram of lead would know this. Most of the gear lists I see quote "skin out" weight which excludes the weight of the hiker. These lists also don't quote weight of significant consumables (water, food, fuel specifically). I think this is fair since it normalizes the gear lists to be independent of the hiker and the duration of the trip. So these lists become meaningful to the broader community. With a little work I can tell what this list means to me and you can tell what it means to you. We can all know what the list will mean for any given trip.

Stating that a food ration weighs 1.25 lbs per day and not stating that this is based on an assumption of 4 lbs of weight loss over 12 days is like weighing in your pack at the start of a hike and not including the contents of your pockets. In the end a "joule is a joule" (energy is conserved) and whether or not the weight is on your waist or in your food bag it has to be moved about for 12 days.

So I agree that a gram is a gram, but in order for people to really know what a figure of "1.25 lbs of food per day" really means they would have to know all the parameters involved.

Personally, I have a really hard time NOT running a calorie deficit on the trail and losing weight. So I indirectly wind up "saving weight" (pack weight specifically) using this approach. I quoted an equivalent, estimated, calorie burn of 3800 calories for this food plan and said it "made sense". It's darn hard for me to eat 3800 calories in a day. I am just not used to consuming that many calories. I always wind up losing weight… until the last day when I wind up hitting a pizza joint and downing a few too many beers. ;)

[Anonymous]

Ah yes, pizza and beer. The fantasy of a frosty bottle with a rivulet trickling down the side has gotten me back to the trailhead before closing time on many an occasion.
I know what you mean about having trouble getting 3800 calories down in 1 day. That's the beauty of carrying it around your middle. It just gets dribbled into the bloodstream on demand without involving the stomach(or tastebuds). The point I was trying to make about a weight volume correlation(probably not very clearly) is that by reducing your food requirement by 1/2# per day, you can reduce pack volume required, with the potential to be able to get by with a smaller, lighter pack-especially on longer trips.

[Einstein X]

PJ wrote: "When c-um. (Profanity Police nabbed me; the period to indicate an abbrev. wasn't sufficient, hence the hyphen)…."

Now i do understand using abbreviation since they safe you a bit of writing time. I do think though that writing the whole word 'cummulative' instead of the stuff between () would've saved you a bit more time.

LOL

Eins

[Einstein X]

This is a very interesting discussion and one on which i hav much to learn.

Duane, you said: "How do other readers here manage to carry less weighty foods without feeling like your starving all the time from the lack of bulk? Or should I just deal with the starving feeling in order to reduce my food weight?"

An 'avergage' male needs about 2500 Cal/day. If you have an inactive job (like reading BPL forums all day) you need sth like 250 ~ 500 Cal/day less, if you have a very active job (construction worker) you need sth like 250 ~ 500 Cal/day more.

A year ago i was working a busy job and did fitness every day, I ate about 3000+ Cal/day (though i didn't actually count) and ate a lot of proteine since this is required to gain muscle tisue. I drank one (sometimes two) proteine shakes per day. The best thing about these shakes (besides that i think they taste good) is that they make you feel full. One of these would count as one of my six to seven meals per day.

I than changed to an inactive job, and stopped with fitness and consequently dropped my caloric intake to a 2000+ Cal/day level (still not counting). I have remained at a healthy 72 kg of body weight (BMI = 22,9) and a fetpercentage of 12%, even dropping a little in fatpercentage.

My point is that your body gets used to how much you eat. If your problem is that on trail you don't get enough 'bulk' of food it might (i repeat might) be that in your everyday live you eat (way) too much. If in your everyday live you don't eat in unhealthy bulk proportions, but eat small portions devided over six meals, you'll likely feel full when eating on the trail.

Caloric proportions per meal in your everyday live should be about between 2000/6 = ~333 Cal/meal and 3000/6 = 500 Cal/meal. A quick google search to put that into perspective: A tuna deli sandwich (6 oz serving at Subway) will give you 325 Cal, 3 oz of Cashew nuts will give you ~490 Cal/serving.

The down side of the proteine shakes is that I relly do need to use my blender to mix it with milk. So i can't drink them on trail, otherwise i would. There are however also prteine bars available which als give you a full feeling.

Eins

[paul johnson]

Eins, you're absolutely right. I need to put the thinking cap on more. There's usually an alternative way of doing things that's as good or nearly as good. Thanks for replying.

[mark henley]

I can get by with 2000 cals per day for a long weekend. For a week, I push it up to 1.4 to 1.5 pounds per day, but might only carry 1.25 if I can fish where I'm going. For multiple weeks …. well, I'm sure I would need to carry up to 2 lbs per day just to get the caloric intake I would need.

Now … I have a buddy who has to carry 1.5 lbs of food minimum or he's licking the bottom of his ziplocks to get more calories for even an overnighter.

I lift weights at least 3 days a week and have a serving of muscle milk at least once a day. The protein shake does fill you up and can really make a difference when you are trying to eat 6 or 7 times a day to gain muscle mass. I've never carried protein mix on the trail, but it is a VERY interesting concept. I'll give it a try on my next outing next month and report back on this thread.

Mark

[Einstein X]

Just speculating about your budy here, Mark, but is he also into bodybuilding?

In periods when i'm really pushing it hard with fitness (one day lifting weights, next day doing cardio excersics, total of six training days per week, rest on sunday, HIT method, training all muscle groups each lifting weights day) I simply can't eat enough on a cardio day. This day my body is building muscle tisue and I simpy can't eat enough to feel full.

If your budy is the same and if he's interested in saving weight on the food he carries on that weekend hike, I'd propose him to not train in the week prior the hike, so his body rest and doesn't require so much fuel. I think he could than get by with eating less food in a day.

But, returning to my first statement, i'm just speculating about your budy.

Eins

[James Pitts]

I'll add to the discussion something that I don't recall reading about. While in food a gram is a gram and a calorie is a calorie different foods do have different "satiety value" or "satiety response". It's a term I only heard about a few years ago while talking to a friend of mine who is a nurse. Satiety response is a measure of how satisfying foods are when we eat them… how well did the food satisfy your hunger. I think it's a neat concept because it takes all the complex issues of foods, such as the blend of nutrients they contain, and renders them down to a "hunger satisfaction" index. I am sure if one Googled around one could find an index of these values but my point is that different foods satisfy hunger to a different degree. There are diets out there that focus on including foods that have high satiety values. I think diet foods like the Slim-Fast shakes and snacks are designed to have a high satiety value so people won't be as hungry cutting calories. I guess what this says to me is that the food/hunger topic is a two-sided discussion with food on one side and the physiology/psychology of what triggers hunger on the other. I would think that if you were packing 1.25 lbs of food per day, didn't mind losing weight, and didn't want to feel hungry than a way to go would be to lean towards foods that have a high "satiety response". Frankly, I don't know what these foods are so I'll probably do some digging about.

[Sarah Kirkconnell]

Well, I can say from my own experience that if I eat on the trail what I eat at home, I get full (I eat Donkey Fodder, ie: shredded wheat, with fruit every morning). It is a high fiber meal, so it fills me up. Now, if I were to eat regular cereal, I am hungry in an hour!
My trick is to eat the highest fiber meals I can find, and I eat less ;-)

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