How many calories???

[kayak karl]

i've loss too much weight since i started. 230#-200#. how many calories should i be eating and what is a good DAILY menu of this. i've started eating 5 times a day. 7-10-12-2-6. this helps as i can't eat that much in one sitting, even after 50 days on trail. like i said, an idea of a DAILY menu would be greatly appreciated. i only COOK dinner at this point. THANK YOU

[Egads]

i've loss too much weight since i started. 230#-200#. how many calories should i be eating and what is a good DAILY menu of this. i've started eating 5 times a day. 7-10-12-2-6. this helps as i can't eat that much in one sitting, even after 50 days on trail. like i said, an idea of a DAILY menu would be greatly appreciated. i only COOK dinner at this point. THANK YOU

How many hours per day are you hiking & how fast?

Base 2000-3000 cal per day
hiking ~500 cal per hour x 10-12 hrs / day = 5000-6000 cal
Total = 7000 - 9,000 cal per day

[kayak karl]

How many hours per day are you hiking & how fast?

Base 2000-3000 cal per day
hiking ~500 cal per hour x 10-12 hrs / day = 5000-6000 cal
Total = 7000 - 9,000 cal per day
8 hours - 15 miles. how can i carry that many calories?? am i carrying the wrong foods??

[ChinMusic]

At 200-230 pounds he is burning WAY more than 500 calories per hour. A 225 person walking without any pack on a flat sidewalk will burn an additional 525 calories per hour, if walking at a 3.5 mph pace (a normal speed). That is just walking and not backpacking.

I figure he is closer to 700 calories per hour and maybe more. I am 225 myself and wear a heart rate monitor. My burn rate is estimated at over 700/hr while backpacking.

[Egads]

8 hours - 15 miles. how can i carry that many calories?? am i carrying the wrong foods??

Karl, maybe some of the thru hikers can share their diet. I'm just a section hiker, but I usually eat 1 probar (380 cal) every 5 miles hiked & then eat about 600-800 cal at dinner.

Yes, I lose weight when I hike, but that's a good thing for me:D

[fiddlehead]

Try adding a lb. of butter or olive oil to your diet every week. That will help.

[kayak karl]

Try adding a lb. of butter or olive oil to your diet every week. That will help.
thanks. i already started putting 1 oz. of olive oil in my tuna at lunch and sides at dinner. keeps me regular too:)

[sarbar]

I was just going to add upping your fat consumption. Try to add in whenever you can :) Nut butters work well also - a lot of calories and easy to eat.
As well, add in nuts to your meals if you can eat them.
Olive oil in everything - winter is hard on the body!

[budforester]

Maybe a dollop of peanut butter mixed into your bedtime cup of cocoa... I like that at cold lunchtimes, too.

[Marta]

Cold weather really burns up the calories. Your weight loss may slow as the weather warms up.

Peanut butter with a spoon is good. (According the the jar I just looked at, a pound of Jiff Extra Crunchy has about 2700 calories in it.) Summer sausage, one per day. A king-sized Snickers has something like 750 calories. Add four or five of those to your diet every day.

[Skidsteer]

Honeybuns for breakfast!

Dadgum you're a big guy to only weigh 200#. Eat, eat eat!

[Spirit Walker]

As Marta said, when it warms up, you won't be burning as many calories. Most hikers find that after a while the metabolism will slow down on its own. It's like being on a diet - starvation mode sets in and the metabolism slows down.

In the meantime - add fats like margarine or olive oil, cheese, nuts, nut butters, chocolate. Dried fruit is not bulky but has lots of calories. Eat cookies at lunch and dinner.

Our usual day is cereal with dried milk and dried fruit for breakfast, granola bars or pop tarts for snack, sandwiches with meat or cheese for lunch with cookies and dried fruit, chocolate or gorp mid-afternoon, then liptons with protein (spam, sausage, tuna or salmon) and cookies for dinner. My husband can't eat nuts, so we don't generally buy them, but on my own I would eat gorp or peanut butter for my main snack.

[Spirit Walker]

Final point - stuff yourself in town. On the CDT Jim lost 55 lbs. He looked like a concentration camp victim by the time we were halfway through. He started really eating in town - half gallons of ice cream, lots of fries, lots of chocolate milk. He actually started to dread towns - but it worked, he gained back some of the weight he had lost.

[Marta]

As Ginny mentioned, cheese is also excellent, for the calcium as well as the fat. Cheddar cheese has 110 calories/ounce. Good stuff!

[garlic08]

What Spirit Walker said, both times. Mainly, substitute fat for carbs. I made it last year with a cookless diet, with lots of cheese and peanut butter, very little sugar. Tortillas for bread, high in shortening or lard. I had very little to loose, but I lost a few pounds in the South, gained it back again in the mid-Atlantic, lost it again in the North. Best of luck.

[4eyedbuzzard]

Not unusual to lose a lot of weight on a thru-hike. Not just fat, but also lean muscle as well, especially upper body muscle for men. And the more muscular you are, likely the more you'll lose. Your body is adapting to what you're doing, which doesn't require a lot of upper body exertion, therefore you lose muscle mass in areas that aren't being used. You're also devoting a lot of your protein intake(which probably isn't enough) to muscle repair, as hiking is quite strenuous on lower body muscles. At this point all you're likely working is legs, lungs, and heart. You don't see many large marathon runners. And even though they are quite strong leg wise from an endurance standpoint, they don't have "sprinters legs" or large upper bodies.

Karen Lutz, who is with ATC, studied thru-hikers, took surveys, etc, and did a master's thesis on this years ago. Her conclusion: Most women lost weight while gaining some muscle mass, most men lost weight and lost muscle mass. She also concluded that for most thru-hikers it's almost impossible to carry enough food, and the proper types to maintain body weight(even "ideal" weight) on a thru-hike given the caloric demands. You'll likely come to some equilibrium point, but it may be well below the weight you would like to maintain. Eat all the calories you can both in towns and on the trail and good luck on your hike.

[Pedaling Fool]

i've loss too much weight since i started. 230#-200#. how many calories should i be eating and what is a good DAILY menu of this. i've started eating 5 times a day. 7-10-12-2-6. this helps as i can't eat that much in one sitting, even after 50 days on trail. like i said, an idea of a DAILY menu would be greatly appreciated. i only COOK dinner at this point. THANK YOU
Are you saying you lost 30lbs? I lost 50lbs in 50 days then I settled out. Can't really give you any advice, other than what's already been given. I used a lot of oil in my dinners and ate massive amounts in town.

You're pretty far north this time of year. How many people are you hiking with this time of year?

[SGT Rock]

I ate like a sumbitch and still lost a lot of weight.

Breakfast:
2 packages of grits with 1/2 ounce of olive oil
3 Granola Bars
2 cups coffee
handful of gorp or two

Lunch
Hot soup
Bread
Cheese
Sausage
More gorp
Some more olive oil
Drink mix

Dinner
Package of meat
Liptons
Bread
Pudding
Tea
Another 1/2 ounce of olive oil

Snacks
More gorp
Jerky
about 4 candy bars a day

Towns - whatever I could get.

[Live the Journey]

It may not be quite what your looking for, but the ultra runners that I know eat LOTS of bars. ProBars, Stinger Bars and some of the new Power Bars have 20-30+ grams of Protein per bar. (I really like the stinger bars, esp. the PB and chocolate flavor)
You could add lots and lots of food to your diet, but that also means lots and lots of food in your pack. For size and weight you'd be hard pressed to find a more concentrated nutrition source...
Good luck and hopefully some warmer weather will help!

[bigcranky]

8 hours - 15 miles. how can i carry that many calories??

Karl:

You can't. Every study I've read about male thru-hikers concludes that you just can't carry enough calories. If you carry more food, you end up burning *even more* calories just carrying that extra weight.

I'm just a section hiker, too, but on my last long section I was absolutely famished on the third day. I will echo the other posters, to say that you:

1. need to maximize the number of calories per ounce of food carried:

Cashews, other whole nuts: 160+ calories per ounce

Peanut butter: 167 calories per ounce

Olive Oil: 242 calories per ounce

Butter: 204 cal/oz

Check the labels of various bars and granolas and snack mixes -- you'll find they are barely 100 cal/oz. A whole packet of Tuna has less than 200 calories. (Though the protein is very useful, so keep eating it.)

and, 2. Make up for it in town. Eat high-fat, high-calorie meals in every town stop. This is food you don't have to carry! If the Companion says there's a small grocery .5 off the trail, walk over and eat a huge lunch. Have a pint of B+J with it. Again, it's calories you don't have to carry.

Food ideas I used on my last section that were easy to eat and high calorie:

Peanut butter, honey, and chocolate chips wrapped in a tortilla. I ate this at least twice a day as a snack. Tastier than Pop Tarts and much higher cal/oz ratio.

High-calorie tuna wrap: 5oz packet of tuna, 5 mayo packets, 3-4 slices American cheese, large tortilla.

Breakfast: carry a bottle of liquid margarine and squirt large quantities in your oatmeal. Makes it taste better, too! Add nuts and dried fruit for protein and flavor.

But really, in the final analysis, what's happening to you is normal, and the only way to mitigate it is to eat more food that you don't have to carry. So enjoy those XL pizzas in town....

Good luck and Happy Trails.

[Tilly]

I am reading an NOLS book about this subject. They emphasize lots of fats, of course, but one thing I found interesting is they they look at the timing of what you eat.

There's a long chapter on carbs, regarding that your body likes to burn carbs first, then fat/muscle. I guess the theory is that if you eat mainly carbs all day, that fuel will be readily available and then your body can burn that and leave your fat/muscle reserves alone. Then at night or during a long lunch break you can load up on fats (and carbs again) to replenish calorically.

[c.coyle]

i've loss too much weight since i started. 230#-200#. how many calories should i be eating and what is a good DAILY menu of this. i've started eating 5 times a day. 7-10-12-2-6. this helps as i can't eat that much in one sitting, even after 50 days on trail. like i said, an idea of a DAILY menu would be greatly appreciated. i only COOK dinner at this point. THANK YOU

This interests me because I'm in the midst of losing 20# over 1 year. I use some software that sets my calorie level, and I scrupulously log everything I eat, plus my exercise.

A rule of thumb I've seen is 15 to 16 calories per pound of bodyweight, daily, just to maintain your weight, without exercising. So, a 200# person needs 3200 calories per day to stay even, before any hiking! If you're burning 150 calories per hour hiking (I think that's a very conservative average for that weight, factoring in hills), and average 6 hours hiking per day, you'd need an average of 4100 calories per day to stay even!

I've never been out more than 6 days straight, and my appetite always goes away by day 3. Does anybody manage to maintain their weight over a thru hike?

[The Weasel]

i've loss too much weight since i started. 230#-200#. how many calories should i be eating and what is a good DAILY menu of this. i've started eating 5 times a day. 7-10-12-2-6. this helps as i can't eat that much in one sitting, even after 50 days on trail. like i said, an idea of a DAILY menu would be greatly appreciated. i only COOK dinner at this point. THANK YOU

To determine your calorie need, do the following: Weigh yourself on Day 1. Get your food for 7 days and determine total calorie load for all of it either by package info or by weighing w/o packaging carbs separate from fats, then converting to grams (carbs are 4 cal/gram, fats 9 cal/gram). This gives you direct calorie intake. Hydrate yourself reasonably and then weigh yourself. Hike 7 days, then come off trail and rehydrate and weigh for weight loss. Multiple pounds lost by 3500, which is roughly the number of calories of 1 lb of body fat. This will be indirect calorie intake. Add the two numbers together, divide by 7 (for days of hiking). That gives you your daily calorie need.

TW