Food for Thought

For this trip I wanted to sample a range of our freeze dried foods so that I can review them on-line, so these meals formed the basis of my food for the six days, normally I'd take about half or less freeze dried meals and make up the rest with supermarket offerings. There's no doubt that freeze dried meals are very weight efficient but in many cases they don't taste as good as the heavier alternatives, so a 50/50 ratio is my compromise.

I arrived in Crianlarich late in the day so I booked a hotel with breakfast for the night before the walk, and I wouldn't need an evening meal on the last day because I'd be in Fort William. Therefore I was packing 5 breakfasts, 5 evening meals and 6 lunches.

All the food goes into a Granite Gear Medium Air Zipsack (52g), except for the food I'd eat on the trail during the day. Before we surge into the detail a broad outline of my daily diet would be:

• Breakfast: Porridge or scrambled egg with coffee
• Lunch: Muesli, Trail Mix (nuts and dried fruit), Energy/Trail bar, Boiled sweets, Cheese, Fruitcake
• Evening Meal: Cup a soup, Freeze dried meal (or similar from supermarket), plus Energy/Trail bar followed by coffee

Didn't take a dessert for main meal - but could have had custard with dried fruit.

Total weight using freeze dried meals would be around 650grams per day, this is very low and reflects the extensive use of freeze dried meals. During the walk I lost about half a stone in weight - sad to say I could easily lose this - if you are starting lean you would probably need to bulk this up further, typically you would need 8-900grams of food per day in this case.

My diet was around 2500 calories per day, which is above the normal recommendation but if you are walking all day you need more than this - hence the reason I lost weight.