[pct-l] high fat food; pants

[Diane at Santa Barbara Hikes dot com]

I have no disagreement with all the nutrition discussed here. The  
trouble is, it won't matter out there to the vast majority of you.  
You'll be so hungry you could eat anything, and you will.

Some highlights (lowlights) from my own experience:

Hummus and crackers make an excellent lunch. A little olive oil in  
the hummus gives you good calories. A little hummus goes a long way,  
so it's light and you can stock up and bounce it ahead to keep  
yourself stocked. I always had ample energy for most of the afternoon  
after a good lunch of this stuff.

But, when it ran out, candy. Yep. For over a month I ate candy for  
lunch.

Why? First it was mosquitoes. It's likely you won't experience the  
mosquitoes that I did because I was in Oregon in July and you'll  
probably be there in August. But with all those mosquitoes, I could  
not sit down and stir up my hummus and then eat it. I could not sit  
down. I had to pace around while I ate. It was easier to eat  
something portable. So all the candy I would bring for dessert  
starting becoming my main meal. I could pop peanut M&Ms down the  
trail under my headnet. M&Ms didn't melt, either. And they didn't  
require me to seek out scarce water, which how it gets once more in  
Oregon. Cookies worked out well, too. Since I loathed to stop and  
rummage around in my pack, giving the bugs ample time to bite my butt  
cheeks through my pants, I stopped eating peanut butter, too. Lunch  
went in my pockets before I left my tent in the morning, and the  
easiest thing to put in my pockets were cookies and candy. I also  
carried one packet of instant pudding each segment. If I was lucky  
enough to find cold water in a relatively mosquito-free area to make  
it, it would be my last resort toward unquenchable hunger. Sometimes  
nothing I ate would stop the growling. Nothing but a pudding bomb in  
my stomach.

Breakfast started slipping from its more nutritionally lofty perch  
toward Fig Newtons and various kinds of bars. Mostly this is because  
I started getting tired of the things I ate. Also, in Oregon the  
water was too warm for cold cereal and milk. It was really hard to  
choke that down.

Dinner stayed as good as I could do. But I fail to see how any of the  
dehydrated things I cooked could be as nutritious as a real dinner.  
It's full of chemicals and it's very scary to think that a lot of it  
was stuff normal people make for dinner every day. I did my best to  
add real cheese (as real as that stuff in single serving plastic  
wrappers can be) and once in a while I carted around a head of  
broccoli or a giant leaf of chard. A drop in the bucket.

In town though. Oh the miracle of refrigeration! Yogurt never tasted  
so good. Breakfast was full of protein and fat. Stacks of pancakes  
with omelets on the side. Four halves of English muffin each with its  
own egg, plus all the sides, and oh what the heck, how about an ice  
cream sundae for dessert. And the all-I-can-eat breakfast buffets  
where I did indeed eat all that I could.

I spent a full zero day in Ashland. First I craved fat so I ate  
bagels and cream cheese and giant muffins with hunks of cold butter  
added to them. I did the whole pint of ice cream thing, too, which  
was rare for me. Then I started craving protein so I went out for  
Indian food and got some kind of platter of dead animals and ate the  
entire thing. Then, finally, I craved fresh food and got some kind of  
salad-type meal.

But it was back to cookies, candy, bars, pudding and macaroni and  
cheese once I hit the trail again. This went on through the  
mosquitoes and then into the rain, as the rain also made me not want  
to stop and sit down to mix up some hummus or rummage around in my pack.

It was awful but it was the only way I could survive out there.  
Oddly, it didn't seem to matter. It still boggles my mind that I  
could eat so poorly and still churn out a daily marathon. I crossed  
the Canadian border after months of junk food, feeling invincible and  
strong. I am completely baffled.

Thank goodness it doesn't last forever. You can fix your diet once  
again when you get home.