Re: [pct-l] calorie deprevation

While I have not completed one of the long trails, my section hikes let me know
I needed to carry three pounds/5000+ calories a day after the first week to ten
days of hiking.  I found that this first break in period I pretty much
maintained weight even though I wasn't all that hungry and didn't eat an
inordinate amount.

After that, 5000 calories wasn't enough and I lost a couple pounds a week.  I
remember learning to dislike oatmeal as I shoved it into my mouth and forced
myself to chew because I knew in two hours I'd be ravenous.  I was up to almost
a quart for breakfast.  I still have bodily memory of the minor gagging each
swallow would invoke.  I ate it because the 11 AM blues would hit earlier if I
buried the last bit.

My worst moments during solo hikes were around 11AM.  These were the times when
I'd not forced myself to nibble trailmix, when I forwent drinking water when I
wasn't thirsty, and when it was hot.   I'd think about my dead dog, or my aging
parents, or loves lost, and this cosmic intersection of forces would literally
force a moaning, wrenched sob from the depths of my lonely soul.  It was not
uncommon to walk down the trail with tears coursing down my cheeks.   I learned
to avoid this emotional pit by eating and drinking constantly, and noticing how
beautiful the world is.  Just as the lows were intense, so were the highs.  Food
and drink supported the highs.  Their absence supported the lows.

I remember lying in my sleeping bag scooping out the last little bits of granola
from the trailmix baggy, which I grew to dislike and no longer put in trailmix,
because dinner, eaten only a couple hours earlier, was no longer filling.  I
felt an almost rational sense of determination to eat everything; almost
rational because after those first two weeks the idea of food always had a
frantic edge to it.  I still flash back to burying a quarter of a dinner 100
yards from camp at irish lake in oregon and wishing I hadn't as I lay in the
sleeping bag slightly edgy with impending, not real, hunger.  I knew I'd be
hungry if I didn't fall asleep soon.  The joys of solo hiking...

This summer, planning for 20 days on the CDT, I doubled the amount of parmesian
for dinners, remembering how good it tasted, how well it integrated pasta or
rice or potatoe flakes and dehydrated soup, split pea or curried lentil in
particular.  There is too much of a good thing.  An ounce and a half of
parmesian is plenty for one person.

Jeffrey Olson
Laramie Wyoming, where there's a foot of snow on the ground and its 19 degrees
and -3 with the windchill at 10PM...






* From the PCT-L |  Need help? http://www.backcountry.net/faq.html  *

==============================================================================
To:            <PCT-L@backcountry.net>