AVOID My Biggest Backpacking Food Mistake!

hey what's up obi tribe thanks for joining me on the channel today today we're going to be covering something super important something that i've spent years dialing in and figuring out for myself it's the biggest mistake i've ever made and it's something that you are definitely going to want to hear so if you want to know what this changes that i did to my backpacking food stay tuned but before we dive into that if you're new to this channel we're outdoor vitals we're an ultralight backpacking gear company we love what we do i love what i do but we're super excited to be here on video too on youtube to be able to share with you tips and tricks and different things that are gonna help you get out on the trail more comfortably more confidently hopefully both of those are going to lead to just more frequently if you're interested in that make sure you subscribe to this channel make sure you click the bell notification now let's dive right in so before i explain to you what my biggest tip is for backpacking food we do need to cover one thing i'm sure all of you guys have seen one of these it's a nice noisy cliff bar the first thing i wanted to just touch on with this is talking about calories per ounce on the back of every package you're going to see that most items say grams like 68 grams is what this one says just as a quick rule of thumb this isn't actually exactly accurate it's about 28 grams the rule of thumb estimate that 30 grams equals 1 ounce so this one says that it is 68 grams 250 calories if we divide that in half that's what 34 grams and we divide the calories in half that's 125. so this is less than 125 calories per ounce i think i did that right so this is less than 125 calories per ounce which is not that impressive but you need to be able to understand that in order for the next parts of this to make sense so i'm sure tons of you have heard from other people oh get really high caloric food get really high calorie pronounced foods such as something like almond butter almond butter is something that is super calorie per ounce efficient it's 190 calories so let's just estimate this is 180 calories per ounce that's extreme we just looked at the clif bar and it's under 125. so obviously these seem like the best choice to take backpacking so take a ton of these right get a ton of trail mix and almond butter and nuts and cashews and it's gonna be phenomenal you're gonna feel great when you get to the top not been the case i can't tell you how many times that i am halfway up the mountain and i'm feeling like garbage and so i have learned something over my time in the field that i think everyone should know so what i think everyone should understand is they need to understand a little bit about themselves for me i kind of have broken this down because sometimes i'll do a little bit of like intermittent fasting what i'll do is i'll eat my dinner and then i'll i won't eat the rest the night i won't eat breakfast i'll go to the gym and then i'll try not to eat till lunch and when i do that it it changes my body i need to say right here i guess i probably should have said this at the beginning but i am not a healthcare professional i'm not a dietitian i really shouldn't be speaking about this but if you want to listen you can continue to listen anyways what i have seen is that when i do stuff like that it's almost easier for my body to start burning the fat or go into ketosis or whatever you want to call it there's times when i'm doing very good at that there's other times when i'm eating when i'm eating more frequently maybe i'm snacking my body is used to having continual calories in my system to burn for energy what i've seen is then as i go out on the trail coming from these different spots i have to tailor my diet you see earlier this summer we went out on a backpacking trip and on this backpacking trip we were climbing i think it was about 3 500 feet in elevation in the single day actually in a few hours it was just a lot of elevation and i was feeling great we started up the trail i'm kicking butt doing great doing great doing great well we get up to about 3 200 maybe 3 300 feet of the elevation climb we were so close to the top and i hit a wall and i mean i hit a wall like i felt like crap heads started hurting i had no energy my feet just felt like they were stopping working i just knew something was wrong so i stopped for a second and i pulled out some food i think it was some of these i pulled out some fruit snacks i pulled out some other quick sugars i sat there for about 10 minutes and i eat those i felt like a million bucks and i kept going got to the top we stopped we had lunch i got time to rejuvenate and take some more food in and i felt good i hiked the rest of the day we had like 10 more miles that day and i felt great but in that moment when i hit that wall it was so significant i felt like i could not go on what it was is i had not been training my body to burn fat so if your body is not trained to burn fats you shouldn't be taking only fats on a trip or you shouldn't be skipping you know going eating this meal and then nothing and then this meal and then nothing and then this meal you need to be very aware of how frequently you should be eating and what type of calories you should be eating all right so i've grabbed a couple food items and i've put them into three categories right here number one i've got over here basically sugars i've got um dried apples right here i've got gummies essentially uh fruit snacks those are like the sugar category to me now these quick sugars are gonna be something you can put in your system it's gonna digest super fast and turn into energy really really quick in the middle here i've got the more common thing which is going to be something more like some proteins but a lot of carbohydrates fibers um and a little bit of protein now this metal stuff to me is kind of the filler it's the it's the more neutral it's carbohydrates which is still going to be really quick to burn and turn into sugars in your body but hopefully depending on what you're getting it can be a longer lasting calorie in your system i'm going to keep you going longer so for me i like to have these for lunches and main meals and that helps me keep going on this side over here i've got what i would consider like the high fat high protein type item specifically though the higher fat concentrate is usually what's going to get you here such as in this almond butter now all of these things to me serve a purpose i've gone out on the trail and i've tried to eat a couple cups of trail mix or a couple cups of nuts and i get to i finish about one cup of it and i am just toast like i feel like i'm going to throw up i just can't consume anymore if i'm eating just this stuff i run out of energy sometimes and also this is again depending on what i've been doing recently with my diet so what i have personally learned with all of this is i need things out of each section and i use them accordingly so let's say it's nuts and things like this i'll usually eat these at meal time and give them a little bit more time to uh digest once those digest i'm gonna feel pretty good on the trail with those now if i was to go out on the trail and i didn't have any of these and i only had these two sections right here high fats and high carbohydrates sometimes i will hit a wall and i need something i'll have to stop and take in a cliff bar and let that digest a little bit to get some more calories going it's really good to have something like dried fruit on the trail in my opinion because anytime you do start to hit a wall if you start to feel that you can quickly recover with sugars but typically what's just really really important is to know for you for you personally what have you been doing are you snacking between meals i'm not judging you i snack between meals all the time i love food if you can't tell but i i it's important that you just evaluate what you're doing with your diet at any given point in time so if you've been snacking between meals if you've not been skipping any meals hardly ever you need to make sure you don't go hit the trail with nothing but cashews and almond butter you're gonna feel like crap so don't don't don't do this instead bring a balanced outlay make sure that you're packing things for snacks on the trail things that can break down really quickly in your system now i'm not saying you can't bring these i'm just saying don't only bring these all right so none of this is probably what you're thinking about when you're thinking about backpacking food you were probably thinking more freeze-dried meals so let's talk about that for just a second freeze-dried meals are also something that's really important again with such limited time that we get to get outside it's important to test some of this stuff beforehand now us ourselves we actually have mountain houses in the office and we have these which are peak refuel meals in the office eat both of them i mean buy some of both them eat them at your house and see how they make you feel and see if you think that you can handle one or the other on the trail for me this year i have been going all in on peak refuel they use a lot less fillers in this and so it actually takes a lot less water to hydrate them but you'll also see right here it's got 53 grams of protein they're just a very very like i finished the meal and i just feel good instead of kind of have my stomach churning and stuff and that's just for me personally lots of other people respond differently to the other meals out on the market but for me i've done really well with this because they just use a lot less fillers and again that the two side effects of that is one you don't have to use as much water to rehydrate them and two i feel better they definitely focus on things like trying to get more protein in there to rebuild those muscles on the trail and other things like that so if you like these you can go click the link i think it's going to be right up in here go click the link check out these see all the different flavors they've got a ton of different flavors and if you are a member remember you get 10 off of these and a dollar i believe per packet rebate so that's something that's interesting you sign up for the membership and if you sign up this month you're gonna get a free bonus anyways these are money and these are typically what i'm gonna bring once a day i'll eat one of these a day as a as a main course meal a lot of times i've been switching it to lunch because i'll eat dinner too late i don't like eating dinner so late and then i'll use things like a variety essentially of all of these one of each of these categories i'll have for another meal during the day anyways all right i hope that really helps you i hope that you don't listen to some of these people that are going to tell you exactly how to build your diet because guess what for you that diet may or may not work so test your stuff recognize where you are at with your diet and try to mimic that on the trail because if you go out on the trail and you are not following the same dive that your body's used to you're just not going to feel good especially if you're climbing a peak or doing some extreme physical exertion anyways i hope that's super informative for you if you have any questions make sure to comment down below we will respond to those comments give us a thumbs up on this video if you like it and we'll catch you on the next one

Channel: Outdoor Vitals

Views: 130,701

Keywords: Outdoor Vitals, backpacking, sleeping bags, ultralight, lightweight backpacking, backpacking gear, beginner backpacking tips, backpacking mistakes, backpacking tips, how to backpack, backpacking food, backpacking food ideas, backpacking food hacks, great backpacking food, backpacking meals

Id: cIrFl0YtQnI

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020