Plan Your Menu by Calorie Count
Before delving into the matter of caloric nutrition, I’d like to remind you that getting enough water is more important than getting enough food. On the average, it takes ten times longer to die of starvation than it does to die from dehydration. When engaging in heavy exercise at high altitude you should drink at least 1 gallon (4 liters) of water per day. You can become dehydrated without experiencing thirst, and dehydration is the leading cause of altitude sickness. If you don’t get enough water your appetite will be poor, and you’ll lose muscle mass if you don’t eat enough. I once lost 8 pounds of muscle mass on a two week backpacking trip because I forgot to drink a gallon of water a day.
Plan your meals carefully by calorie count before the trip, as this is the only way to assure that you bring neither too little nor too much food. How much food should you bring? Several of the backpacking books in my personal collection recommend that during spring, summer, and fall a 160-pound man consume 4000 calories per day while in the wilderness. For snow camping, this recommendation increases to 6000 calories per day. If you’re going backpacking in extreme heat or cold, you should check out NUTRITIONAL GUIDANCE for Military Operations in Temperate and Extreme Environments.
Even with heavy exercise and cool autumn weather, I’m unable to eat more than 3000 calories per day. At this rate of caloric intake, I neither gain nor lose weight. Although the backpacking books recommend 800 calories for breakfast, my early morning appetite hits the wall at about 500 calories. On the other hand, it takes at least 1200 calories to satisfy me at dinner time. You’ll need to be aware of your own appetite patterns in order to plan a menu that meets your own unique needs.
Refer to the nutritional labels on the food you intend to bring on your trip in order to know how much fat, carbohydrate, and protein you’ll be getting. You would be well advised to avoid foods that contain partially hydrogenated oils, as these are bad for your health in any amount whatsoever. Unfortunately, partially hydrogenated soybean oil is nearly ubiquitous in processed supermarket food, and is present in some of the foods I recommend on these pages. Fortunately, General Mills/Betty Crocker is in the process of reformulating their products with more healthful oils.
If you have food items such as fresh vegetables that come without nutritional labels, the USDA has an online database that can answer your questions. The USDA also has a download page where you can get the searchable database for offline use. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Palm OS. I make extensive use of this database when planning food for backpacking trips. This database lists the nutritional values of several portion sizes of each item and allows you enter multiples of these portion sizes, making it easy to assess the values for any amount of the ingredient called for in any recipe.
Carbohydrates and protein both provide 4 calories per gram, while fat provides 9 calories per gram. The amount of carbohydrates stated on labels includes fiber, and fiber has no calories. Therefore, you must subtract the fiber content from the total carbohydrates before calculating calories. 50–55% of your calories should come from carbohydrates, 15–20% from protein, and 30% from fat.
This is quite a bit more dietary fat than the U.S. Surgeon General recommends, but under the conditions you’ll encounter while backpacking, you’ll need this much fat in order to stay warm. At least this is my opinion, which is based on personal experience. Most old-time backpackers agree that you need extra fat in the wilderness. However, in Nutritional Advice for Military Operations in a High-Altitude Environment the U.S. Army says that fat intake should be restricted to 15% of calories consumed at high altitude, because digesting fat requires more oxygen than digesting carbohydrates.
If you know how to use a computer spreadsheet I strongly recommend using this tool for calorie tracking. (If you’ve got a spreadsheet, but don’t know how to use it, perhaps now is the time to learn—your program should come with an interactive tutorial.) Below is a diagram of how the spreadsheet should be set up. Cells G9, C11, D11, and E11 should be set to display in percent format. Use this illustration as a starting point, you’ll need to add more rows to the spreadsheet in order to accommodate a reasonably diverse menu or a complex recipe. Your computer spreadsheet can also generate a pie chart from cells C8 through E9 in the diagram. This chart can even track percentages of the total for you, giving a clear statement of the caloric balance between fat, carbohydrates, and protein in your diet.
This spreadsheet is available for download in Excel for Windows. I used this spreadsheet and the USDA database to make the caloric calculations for the recipes provided on these pages. Please bear in mind that this spreadsheet design is copyrighted and may not be resold for profit.