Video Two: Food, Part One, Determining your daily Calories and Menu

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This video is the first of two parts covering how to establish a proper diet by creating a healthy menu of a reasonable weight that is thick with calories and nutrition. The first thing to do is to establish your daily set meals.

The Daily Set Meals

In my case I plan on four daily set meals, consisting of Breakfast, Lunch #1, Lunch #2, and Dinner.

Typically, breakfast is four ounces of a rich granola with powdered milk, dried fruit, and a big cup of hot coffee and chocolate. Granola is typically 100 calories per ounce, the powdered milk 100 calories per ounce, with cocoa powder at 100 calories per ounce when including the added sugar and powdered milk.

Breakfast generally ranges between 5 and 700 calories

Lunch One generally consists of an ounce of cheddar cheese (8 oz provides five good lunches) sliced onto high grain crackers, such as triscut., both of which are around 120 calories per ounce. Three ounces of crackers with 1.5 ounces of cheddar cheese equals is around 620 calories.

Lunch Two is composed of a boiled ramen noodle package. One package weighs around 3 ounces and brings 360 calories, depending on the brand.

Dinner is composed of one Mountain House or some such freeze dried dinner for two. The least calories I will accept from such  a dinner is 575, and they max out at around 640.

The sum total of calories from our set meals is around 2155 calories.

This leaves 845 calories per day we must get from our snack selection to reach our goal of 3000 calories per day.

The next video is Food #2, the third in the series, which will cover the selection and measurement of snack calories to bring our daily total to 3000 calories.

Now remember this rule of thumb: If your average calories per ounce is 100, 16 ounces of food equals 1600 calories. Therefore 2 pounds of food will bring you 3200 calories.

Now you can figure your food weight or calorie consumption for any amount of days by multiplying the amount of backpacking days by the two pounds.

 For more information on Food, Check Out AnalyticalSurvival's introduction to backcountry food.

Comments, Questions, or Suggestions and Additions are welcome. Hit the Comments link below.