MY THRU HIKE

BACK

• Recipes

• Resource Links

When thru-hiking, you can expend up to 7000 calories a day, average is 3000-5000 calories. These numbers are not exact in any way. The U.S. Military (Thanks guys!!!) considers 3600 calories a day plenty for a soldier of 5′ 10″ 180 lbs, under a full days combat conditions. Based on Steve Creek’s Calorie Calculator, as a 6 ft man that weighs 200 lbs. I require 3410 calories a day under an active lifestyle. I don’t weight 200 lbs, I weight 220 lbs. To maintain my weight I would need to consume 3750 calories. Always remember that your needs will be slightly different than everyone else. Don’t be stuck on the numbers to much. They must be used as a guideline only! After all, our metabolisms burn different stuff better or worse than others and faster or slower than others.

The calories spent by a person are different based on how fast you hike, how tall you are, how fast your natural resting metabolism is, how much weight you carry (Both on your body and pack), how much sleep you had the night before, and much, much more.
As a thru-hiker, you must build a diet. This diet will be the majority of what will keep you alive for the next six months. It must keep you healthy and bonk free. This requires the menu to provide the calories, nutrition, and tastes that you need and will eat. This menu must also be balanced. Meaning that you have protein, Carbohydrates, and fats. You must get all three. Without one, the other two are not processed properly. If you do not eat carbohydrates you cannot store water properly. If you do not eat proteins the carbohydrates will be processed to fast and cause a roller coaster effect in your blood (ie: hyperactive and full of life one minute, exhausted and depressed the next). With out fats, your joints wear down and begin to grind. PAIN!!!!! Worse you will have to double up the carbs and proteins you eat. Fats have at least twice the calories per ounce than the other two food groups.
Now you could only take mars bars and summer sausage. They would provide you the calories you need and then some, plus they have carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. But after a couple of months you would be heading to the hospital via a life flight off the trail. You body would loose its ability to process the calories due to insufficient nutrition. You would be eating like a pig and still would not receive the nutrition you need to fuel your cells. This leads to what athletes call the “bonk”. Your body literally trys to turn off due to a lack of fuel in the cells at the molecular level. This only occurs after all stores of any kind are used up. Those stores are, in order of use, carbs in the muscles, fat in the skin, protein that makes up the muscles, and the calcium in your bones. You get to the calcium and you are already in trouble.
The body must have fat, muscle, and bone to function. The minimum fat a person can have safely is 5%. Any less and you will find yourself in serious trouble. In fact the 5% is actually too close in some expert opinions. some long distance hikers have gone to taking their body fat into account when trying to save weight in food stores. Don’t try to play with this too much if you are proper weight.

Your body burns calories to provide motion, thought, cooling, heating, focus, pretty much everything that you and I take for granted every day. The average man weighing about 200 lbs will need just under or at 2000 calories a day for him to sit on the couch and watch TV comfortably. An average woman weighing 130 lbs would need right at or just under 1200 calories (this does not include times of menstruation when it goes slightly up for a few days).
Any activity above that and your caloric intake must go up. Walking twenty miles a day, on varying terrain, is a major increase in caloric consumption. The body is built to adapt to that burn. Your metabolism will sky rocket and you will gain what some call “The hiker’s hunger”. This is a condition where your body is craving so many calories that you cannot physically eat enough in a single meal to fill your stomach. Thru-hikers regularly eat a pint of any flavor ice cream and are still hungry. Better yet they don’t gain a pound! (I’m not advocating thru-hiking as a diet. Most women gain scale weight, not size much, due to muscle tone and building. Men drop size but gain it all back plus more after the hike.)
My mother and I are type II diabetics. We are on meds but not injections. Our pancreases are weak. They have not given up yet. This does cause us to worry more about food than most people. Our bodies are dumb. They do not communicate hunger properly or reliably. Our bodies are sensitive to the balance of fat, carbs, and protien. Add to this the fact that a “bonk” condition could put us six feet under. You can see why we are very concerned about our diet and menu decisions.

We are looking into everything from quality of food, to transport. We will be weighing the pros and cons of raw food, dehydrated food, and everything in between. We want the calories, the nutrition, and the flavor. But we must make sure we have it in balance with our bodies needs. The list of pages here will provide you will all of what we learn. Let me know if you like it and what you need to see. We’ll add information and answer any questions you have with reliable sources!

BACK