How much food - Appalachian Trail

imported
#1

i was just wondering if some of you could post how much food and what foods you eat for a day.
im just concerned about getting enough calories and nutrition

freak of nature

#2

Conventional wisdom is that a person hiking day in and day out needs 4000 calories per day. So, read the labels on packaging to figure that out. Backpacker food typically has 100 calories per ounce, or more.

Typical backpacker fair includes mac & cheese, Liptons, cheese, pita bread, peanut butter, granolas, oatmeals, GORP, etc. Lots of grains, lots of oils and fats, and nuts.

Cooking usually consists of heating 2 cups of water and mixing something in. Simple, nothing fancy.

Peaks

#3

you can not eat enough food period. I started adding packets of mayonnaise to mac n cheese, carrying cheddar sausages into the woods. By the northern sections I was eating three meals for b’fast, three lunches and three dinners. Learn the letters AYCE… hiker heaven.

aswah

#4

You can’t carry enough food (well, >>>I<<< can’t anyway) to satisfy your caloric needs after you’ve been on the Trail for awhile. So you do the best you can, and make up for it when you get to towns.

“Skyline”

#5

Tne natural tendancy is for the body to store nutrients in the body as fat. Look at all the obesity these days due to all the modern conveniences we have. Most people don’t have to really do hard physical labor to burn off those calories so they just store them up as fat. Hence the obesity epedemic.

On the trail, most folks lose weight and hence start having no stored fat surpluses, which is what the body naturally wants to do—store up that fat for the lean times----our bodies have adapted to do this over millions and millions of years. So when you lose weight, you eating kicks into overdrive to try to put the fat back on, to store it up.

So after you’ve been on the trail awhile, it is hard to eat enough. You will eat and eat and eat.

Trouble is slowing it down once you finish hiking. Also another problem is to continue hiking w/o losing too many pounds.

See you out there. :cheers

Maintain

#6

Most hikers we saw carried too much food early on. You don’t get a real appetite until you get into VA. I had trouble even wanting anything to eat in GA. And almost had to force feed Flame the first 3 weeks. There are plenty of places to get food if you do get hungry. I would suggest your normal diet (calories) in GA, then increase as you start the Smokies. Don’t forget, you should be snacking about every hour and a half to two hours all day, every day. My hunger started about half way through VA. After Harpers Ferry we carried Parkay with us all the time and added it to everything. By the end of the hike I was eating around 6,000 calories a day and still lost a lot of weight.

We liked the foil packed tuna and chicken. Flame would hard boil eggs when we were in a town and we ate them for a couple of days. Summer sausage, hard cheeses, Sardines, all added to the regular dry-add-water meals. One trick we learned was you can take whole wheat break and mash it down into about a third of its size and then peal off a couple of slices for your peanut butter lunches. We also carried a small jar of honey with us during the summer. We added gatoraid to our water (about half strength).

Take time to read some of the journals and you can get a better idea of the food needs. Hope this helps. Don’t worry about it, after a couple of weeks on the trail and you will figure it out. Have a great Hike!

Papa Smurf

#7

dont carry oatmeal! it’s a huge hassle and tastes like wallpaper paste after a week on trail! and on hot sunny days you wont want it anyway … .

so i offer this bit of trail wisdom: doughnuts. High in calories, light in weight, filling, and quite tasty. bought a box in just about every town

mindlessmariachi

#8

I was never an oatmeal eater in real life; but, found I loved it on the trail.

One cup of oatmeal, mixed with two cups of water, mixed with copious handfulls of raisins (two cups easy), with honey, started me off pretty much every morning. I found it, in the above form, filling, sweet enough to my heart’s desire, and satisying in everyway–those being, as to appetite, taste, nutritionally, psychologically and emotionally. Then, I often ate other food with it–bread and butter, bread and peanut butter, a cheese sandwich, whatever I had, whatever I wanted.

Later, I came to greatly enjoy dry milk, water, and sugar or honey mixed together, which is to say “shaken”, in a 1 quart nalgene bottle. In this way, I would have an instant 16 ounce milshake, which, on the trail, I found to be delicious and rewarding beyond compare. Then, I would immediately have another one. Maybe with a cheese sandwich. Or two. Or three.

Cheese and apples keep well on the trail. Big calories in cheese; sweetness and crunch in apples; eat both early out of town to reduce weight–and to indulge your appetite, as, having them, you’ll want nothing else.

And, nothing wrong with doughnuts, but you need, and will want, real food.

In fact, that would be my ultimate encouragement: eat real food. All you can carry. Don’t skimp.

Sincerely–Conan.

Conan

#9

Breakfast-coffee,poptarts or grapenuts or oatmeal,powdered milk.
Lunch–tortilla bread,cheddercheese,peanutbutter,tuna in a pouch and maybe another poptart
Dinner-- Liptons noodle dinner and pita or tortilla, pepperoni in the bag.
extras-3-4 snikers are twix a day. koolaid. jellybeans,gummybears are some favorite candy.
Bourban or rum
I would carry 3 to 5 days worth of food ( 2-3 lbs a day)because most times you can get to town.

Virginian

#10

Also Instant Breakfast worked for me for a while. Put it in your Nalgene with water and powdered milk. Shake it up!! Great. taste better than that liquid bass on SNL

Virginian