#Food calories counter calculator how to#

That’s why going lightweight is so important when backpacking. The same hiker with a 40lb pack would burn about 334 calories per hour.A 150lb hiker going 3mph on a 1% slope will burn about 274 calories per hour without a pack.If you play around with the backpacking calorie calculator, you can see that your pack weight has a huge effect on how many calories you need while backpacking. For example, peanuts are very high-calorie but (as you can see in your poop), a lot of those calories are never absorbed by the body. Despite this, calorie counting is still the best way to figure out how much food you need to bring backpacking. As I talk about in this post about backpacking nutrition, calories do not always equal energy. ( 1, 2, 3, 4)Īlso keep in mind that there are some issues with counting calories. What your actual basal metabolic rate isĪny of these variables can completely change how many calories you need per day.

The reason is because the calculator doesn’t factor in things like: While the calculator is fairly good at giving you a ballpark amount of calories you’ll need, it can also be very inaccurate. This backpacking calorie calculator use the “Pandolf model.” It comes from a 1976 military study in which a researcher was tasked with figuring out how many calories soldiers burned when walking with their heavy packs on. How This Backpacking Food Calculator Works

#Food calories counter calculator how to#

The book contains over 50 healthy, ultralight backpacking recipes plus tons of info on backpacking nutrition and how to plan meals. However, calorie requirements and amount of food needed can vary drastically depending on the difficulty of the hike, pack weight, and calorie density of the food you pack. This usually translates into about 2lbs of food per day. Most people need about 21-25 calories per pound of their bodyweight when backpacking (or about 3,500 calories per day for a healthy man). It does take some time to calculate calories and make a meal plan but it’s well worth it to keep my pack light. Now, I use this system for calculating how much food to bring.

I would try to eyeball amounts and inevitably bring too much food, meaning my pack was way heavier than it should have been. Figuring out how much food to bring on backpacking trips used to be really stressful for me.