I guess I'm a combination of 2 and 3 - everything is grocery store stuff except for fz dr dinners -  don't cook other than to boil water, so I don't have "ingredients" per se, but I put the entire day's food into one bread bag (works for two people), and number them, the idea being to have as much variety as I can get - so maybe day 2 and day 8 will be the same, but not day 2 and day 3 - and last day is on the bottom, first on top  (FILO as us countants like to call it)- I don't like to bother much with meals, so my method makes it pretty simple for me - grab today's food, take out the breakfast and lunch, and put the dinner back in the food bag for later. It does take a lot of planning and packing at home, but once its done, its done, and I don't have to bother at camp.  I often do long days, so quick and easy works best for me.

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More people should be concerned about their health and look for answers. Anything that will give people the tools is welcome news from me.

Obesity has become an National epidemic, along with the diabetes and other serious health problems associated with it.

The current generation is the first one in our history that has a good shot of having a shorter lifespan than the one before it

At the same time health care costs are skyrocketing and were struggling to hold down costs without cutting quality of care.

75% of health problems are lifestyle related. You can pay " now", healthier, maybe more expensive food, and exercise time or pay " later, with hospital stays, expensive medicines and poor quality of life, and maybe diminished lifespan.

Even if you don't care about quality of life and living longer, just from a purely economic standpoint, it's cheaper to stay moderately healthy, than pay medical/rehab bills, and higher insurance premiums

My wife and I tend to do long trips, 20 to 30 days on the water.  At the same time we like to eat well, really well, so food prep and planning is an important part of our trip.  As we started getting into longer trips one of the first decisions we made was to get a dehydrator.  With that it is possible to prepare nutritious, gourmet quality meals while at the same time keeping weight and on the ground prep time to a minimum.  We typically package the ingredients for each dinner and pack them in the reverse order.  I’ve become huge into fishing so we count on augmenting our food supply with fresh fish – I typically figure half our dinners will be fish based but of course we carry back up just in case I get skunked.  Breakfasts are typically either home made granola, porridge (with lots of dried fruit and maple syrup) or pancakes (also with fruit and m.s.).  Maple syrup is weight but I’m definitely willing to carry it!  We typically don’t prepare lunch but just have snacks of nuts, dried fruit, chocolate, or pb&j rollups.  Given that we’re out for 3 weeks at a time, our packs are quite manageable to where we can easily double portage without busting our butts.  
Meal prep and planning is the point, before our trip, where me and my wife start getting into it together (I start planning our next trip pretty much from the moment the last one ends whereas my wife doesn’t give it much thought until we actually start talking about what we’re going to eat, usually 3 or 4 weeks before we take off.)  
Last year I lost about 15 lbs on our trip (I’m not overweight.)  I think that was due to 2 things.  The first is the level of activity.  Even when we’re not on the move everything in camping requires more effort.  Even getting in and out of our camp chairs takes more.  There is a lot of getting up, sitting down and moving around that I don’t really notice when I’m doing it but when I think about it, it certainly adds up to an active day (and I’m a guy who’s used to working out 2 hours a day in the gym anyway.)  The other thing is that I’m so busy living – you know, fishing, setting up camp, going for a paddle, whatever – that I’m not thinking so much about eating between meals.  Often, at home, I eat because I’m bored or I need something to make me feel better over the course of a work day.  I rarely eat between meals because I’m actually hungry.  When I’m camping, I’m so busy living, really participating in my life, that, outside of mealtime, eating just isn’t on my mind.

This may sound pretty basic to some, but to a beginners I think the following comments will be helpful.  How do you know how much food to bring.  Before you leave write a menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner for each day.  If you plan on instant oatmeal for breakfast, figure out how many packets each person will eat and for how many days.  I figure 3 packs per person per breakfast.  If you are having pancakes again calculate how many pancakes each person will eat.  Multiple by the number of people and how many meals you plan on eating pancakes.  We generally eat sandwiches for lunch.  Often summer sausage and cheese.  I figure three slices of bread per person.  One slice of cheese per sandwich and one inch of sausage per sandwich.  One inch of sausage is 4 slices one quarter inch thick.  If you bring summer sausage, buy small sausage so you don't have to worry about spoilage once you open the package.  We figure on fish one meal a day and a package of pasta which you can buy at any grocery store.  Just read the package for serving size.  Our primary vice is bringing cookies.  Again count how many cookies you want to eat per day and multiple by the number of days.  I once suggested to my son that we could reduce weight if we didn't bring cookies.  He thought that was a bad idea.

My basic point is use a pencil and paper and calculate how much to bring.

Snow_Dog wrote on Mar 1^st, 2011 at 4:48am:


Re refined sugar: Yes, brown sugar is just white sugar with molasses added back in to make it look healthier.

But there is another sugar available on the market, "raw" or unrefined. If this is really what it claims to be, I would steer clear of it with a 10-foot pole. All sugar refineries and shipping terminals are infested with rats, and any unrefined sugar product would almost certainly be loaded with rat urine, rat feces, etc. Stick with "white death", in either its colored or all-natural original form.

I have to take issue with your demonizing of carbs though. While a full day's canoeing might not average out at the same cardio level as heavy portaging or marathoning, it's still (for me) elevated-heart-rate exercise, and you can't fuel that on fats alone.

Maybe a review of exercise physiology is a good place to start. (All my info is from the 2002 edition of Tim Noakes's "Lore of Running".) Some of this duplicates Kerry's post, but please bear with me.

Food is broken down in the stomach and small intestine into sugars and amino acids, which are absorbed into the bloodstream through the intestinal walls. The non-glucose sugars are converted to glucose in the liver, and some of the glucose remains stored in the liver as glycogen (basically a bunch of glucose molecules stuck together.) The rest of the glucose is released back into the bloodstream where it can be used as fuel by the brain, kidney, red blood cells, and muscles. Muscles also use some of this blood glucose to maintain their own glycogen stores. The amino acids get stored in body fat as triglycerides (fat molecules), which are broken down and re-released into the blood as needed.

So we have three potential sources of energy in the body: muscle glycogen stores, liver glycogen stores (which are used as needed to maintain blood glucose levels), and body fat. All physical exercise is done by muscles, and the muscles have separate metabolic pathways to use each of the three sources. (Muscles can also break down protein for energy, but we will ignore that since it is at most only a small contributor, and not something you want to happen anyway.)

If you want your body to efficiently crank out a full day's worth of high powered canoe strokes, you will want to do two things. First, your muscles need to be fed with enough total fuel from the three sources to meet their needs (Doh!). Second, you need to maintain a certain minimum blood sugar level. I'll get back to blood sugar later.

Muscle glycogen storage typically ranges from 3 times to 8 times the size of liver glycogen storage, so we'll deal with that first. It makes sense to start the day with "full" muscle glycogen stores, and that's reasonably easy. Just make sure to eat a good high-carb meal the night before a trip and each night during the trip to top up. No fancy carbo-loading program needed! You can't restock muscle glycogen from eating fat.

As mentioned, liver glycogen stores are relatively small, not much more than needed to keep the brain and other critical systems supplied with glucose on a day-to-day basis. Still, there's enough there to make a difference in exercise performance.

You always start the day with full storage (liver glycogen stores fill up preferentially to muscle glycogen), so there's no micromanaging to be done on liver glycogen. But you can avoid running out of liver glycogen (and going hypoglycemic) as the day progresses by regular ingestion of carbs. So long as you keep active, any easily-digested carbs are ok: sports drinks, fruit, candy, doesn't matter much. Since you're only trying to compensate for liver glycogen depletion (muscle glycogen use is not affected), you can't pig out. If 100 g carb per hour is a ballpark number for high-intensity exercise, maybe 50 g for typical canoeing might be a reasonable maximum? If you feel hungry, I think you should eat.

Our last energy source is fat. Even those of us who are very lean (like me, in my dreams) have more than enough stored fat to last us through a long canoe trip. So we want to get as much energy as we can from body fat, relative to the other two sources. A couple of things do help though: canoeing at a moderate exercise level for a longer time will burn more fat than covering the same distance in a hell-bent-for-leather sprint. The longer you exercise, proportionally more fat gets burned (maybe no extended breaks is good?). Adrenaline seems to help fat-burning vs carb-burning (maybe discussing politics or religion while paddling is not so bad?). Above all, increased overall fitness helps you burn more fat relative to carbs. Adding fat to your canoe diet won't save liver or muscle glycogen, but it might protect valuable body fat, if that's your goal.

Our bodies have a "central governor" which keeps all three energy-delivery pathways functioning well under normal circumstances. As muscles use glucose in the blood, the liver breaks down its own glycogen faster to compensate. As muscle glycogen levels drop, your brain compensates by using fewer muscle fibres (you get tired and slow down). As you exercise, the internal fat-burning system slowly ramps up. But eating more fat won't help delay the onset of fatigue.

You don't want to mess with this system. Starting off a paddling day easy and ramping up the intensity over the first 10 or 15 minutes will make it easy for your energy systems to settle into a groove you can hold for the rest of the day.

But before you even get into your canoe, you want to make sure you haven't already screwed up by allowing your blood insulin levels to get elevated: that's another way your body works to maintain  ... umm ... an even keel.

When a high-carb meal is eaten, the glucose levels in the blood increase (this might take 30-60 minutes or so), which causes an increase in the hormone insulin in the blood. Insulin works to take those elevated blood glucose back down by stimulating the storage of glucose as liver glycogen. When you start exercising, your muscles start to use up the glucose in the blood, but your liver is also using it up, and in the worst case your blood sugar levels plummet and you have an "insulin crash". At the very least, your muscles are not getting any boost from liver glycogen, and your performance is sluggish.

A high insulin level does reduce the ability of the body to break down fat molecules (but not the ability of muscles to use the produced fatty acids afaik.) I can't see this as being a major issue, since high insulin should at most be a short-term thing if you're exercising.

Way back earlier in the thread, mt asked about a teaspoon of sugar on morning oatmeal. Personally, I can't see one teaspoon (4.2 g) as being a big deal. Still, I'm not sure what the best strategy is for canoe trip breakfasting. Nutrition research is a minefield of bad science, poor experimental controls (much unavoidable), too many special interests, and a ton of theory being presented as fact. But here is my take - I'd be interested in others opinions.

Whole grains and non-sweet fruits (dried apples, etc) will probably cause less of a blood sugar spike than high-glycemic index carbs (bread, pancakes, raisins, potatoes (yes), anything sugary). Fats are good for mitigating the sugar spike, though (so nuts are a good breakfast item, and if you have to have pancakes, load them up with butter). Ideally you want to leave a couple of hours between breakfast and heading out ("Can't leave yet - gotta fish for an hour 'til my insulin levels settle down"). Or start off early but slowly, and enjoy the dead stillness of the early dawn in BW/Q at an appropriately laid-back pace? Or (like me) eat a small breakfast and head out right away to depress those insulin levels and use up as much glucose as possible as it's being released? But a high-fat breakfast that sits like a lump in my stomach? Not for me. (Some people seem to be much more sensitive to the effects of exercising too soon after eating carbs than others.)

At the end of the day, if I get hit by an unexpected headwind or am forced to canoe an extra few km's to a campsite, I want my system to still be firing on all cylinders. I don't want to be making dumb decisions because my brain is starved of glucose. If you want to perform, you have to eat those carbs.