Consider the humble Pop-Tart. It is a food designed to be cooked in a toaster but is almost always eaten raw, so to speak, especially by the type of person likely to be reading this. Protected from nature in waterproof Mylar sheath, still edible even when it has been pulverized into a crumbly mess of sugary goo and frosting, delicious at any time of day, the Pop-Tart has a lot going for it as hiking food.
As far as I’m concerned, Pop-Tarts innovation (and, indeed, human cultural innovation) peaked with s’mores flavor. I’ll die on this switchback-less hill, despite what you say about the classic goodness of blueberry flavor. As for those of you who enjoy un-iced Pop-Tarts, well, I can do nothing for you. You are a lost cause.
I bring this up because Pop-Tarts, Nutella, Top Ramen, and Fig Newtons once made up roughly 90% of my caloric intake on long-distance hikes. Lately, I’ve been thinking about those good old days with a mix of nostalgia and horror.
I have a few excuses for my old diet. I was in my mid-20s, single, and living in an area of the country that wouldn’t embrace farm-to-table eating for another five years. I hadn’t read any Michael Pollan. I was also quite poor, and eating healthy can be expensive, especially while backpacking, and double-especially while on a thru-hike.
But excuses only go so far, and the truth is I love junk food. Even when I wasn’t hiking, salads tended to be decorative items at fancy restaurants, not something I actually, you know, ate. From time to time I encountered celery and carrots swimming in a sea of grease and buffalo sauce beneath a layer of chicken wings. If I crunched a few of them after dipping them in blue cheese, I considered it a major health victory.
As you probably know, it is entirely possible to walk 2,000 miles or more on the diet of a recently divorced middle-aged car salesman. You’ll probably even lose some weight in the process. And indeed, this exactly what happened to me. But losing weight is not the same thing as being healthy, and it’s certainly not the same thing as fueling your body effectively. As my energetic off-the-lot 20-year-old body transitioned into a hard-used 30-year-old body with higher-than-average mileage, it became apparent to me that maybe I’d be a better athlete if I started putting premium unleaded in the tank instead of frosted chemicals.
Bacon Days
My first experiment was with high-fat/low-carb eating. I went Keto in my daily life and carried it over into my long-distance endurance activities and had an absolute blast. For one thing, if you have to cut Pop-Tarts out of your life, you can do worse (enjoyment-wise) than replacing them with pork. From an ounce-counting perspective, it’s pretty efficient to fuel long trips with cheese, olive oil, and bacon–and satisfying to boot. And the much-lauded anti-bonking properties of Keto seemed to work for me. Not only did I shed about 20 pounds from my perpetually chubby 5-foot, 6-inch frame, but I found myself knocking out huge mile days with little to no drop in energy between meals and snacks.
But all good things, especially bacon-related things, must come to an end. I have enough heart disease in my family to cause a riot at a cardiologist convention, and after my father suffered a major heart attack in his mid-50s I went to get some bloodwork. The results revealed what anyone with even a passing familiarity with kale already knows—you can’t transition from a diet of pizza rolls and Hot Pockets to a diet of bacon and bulletproof coffee without some negative consequences, no matter what the scale says.
My doctor, a pragmatic and not-easily-shocked woman, said that she’d “…never seen someone of your age and activity level with numbers this bad. Your resting heart rate is 50 beats-per-minute but you have the triglycerides of an 80-year-old obese man at high risk of a cardiac event.”
That’s not the kind of thing you can come home and tell your wife and still expect there to be butter in the fridge the next morning, and so my short-lived but delicious experiment with fat-fueled athleticism came to an abrupt end. I’d have to be a vegetarian moving forward—and not even the fun kind that lives solely on chips, Oreos, and moral superiority. For the sake of my ticker, I’d have to eat vegetables.
The Tyranny of Beans
So I shifted my hiking diet (and normal diet) once again. Where once there were Fig Newtons, now there was black bean paste. Where once there was Top Ramen, now there were lentils and quinoa. Where once there was Nutella, now there were energy bars made of dates, cashews, and seemingly, sawdust. I told myself that mountain goats eat plants too, and I learned to make a damn good butternut squash soup.
I don’t find a vegetable-centric eating strategy as effective from a non-bonking , body-fat burning, mile-crushing standpoint as Keto. And to me at least it can be vastly more boring and less satisfying than either junk food or healthy but high-fat options while on trail.
But it does have the benefit of not turning my blood into buttery sludge, and my colon wakes me up every morning at 5 a.m. on-the-dot for a sunrise poop sesh, so I’m always getting in early miles. My bloodwork looks great, and the three most important women in my life (wife, mother, and cardiologist, in that order) are all happy. If black beans, Swiss chard, and steel-cut oats are the cross I have to bear to ensure 50 more years of living, so be it. I find the sunrises and the company generally worthwhile.
And I mostly don’t miss my old junk food habits while solo backpacking. If you open your food bag at the end of a long day on the trail, and all you see is some version of freeze-dried legumes, you might be slightly disappointed but by god you will eat those legumes. Most of the time.
We’re living in somewhat of a packaged backpacking meal renaissance, and small cottage companies are releasing tasty and healthy options all the time (I like Outdoor Herbivore). But I’ve come across some real duds. One kale and lentil soup meal (from a brand I won’t name here) was so unpalatable that I couldn’t choke it down even after a 36-mile day on the trail. On that occasion, I lay in my tent and cursed my cardiologist with the creativity and vitriol available only to the chronically Pop-Tart-less, and I think I can be forgiven for that.
The only other time I struggle is around other hikers. On a recent trip to the Smokies, I watched with barely disguised lust for 7 days as my hiking partner Nick consumed 5,000 calories-a-day of whatever he felt like eating, including, I kid you not, powdered instant cheesecake.
A Murder Deferred
I’d used spreadsheets and algorithms to calculate my body fat percentage, daily energy miles, calories per ounce of food, and nutritional needs and ended up with an efficient, light, nutritionally balanced, utterly boring meal plan. I considered a little light murder somewhere around day 5 as Nick slurped down his second helping of cheesecake while I spooned another under-salted portion of lentils down my gullet. He offered me a spare Honey Stinger waffle moments later, an act of generosity that unbeknownst to him saved his life. The sugar flooded into my brain and convinced me that leaving his wife and children bereft for the sake of his cheesecake wouldn’t be very nice. At the very least it would be hard to explain at the funeral.
But as the Buddhists say, there is a middle path, in this case, one between murdering my best friend for his dessert and slowly murdering myself with cholesterol and sugar. My experience in the Smokies changed my strategy a final time. I’m now convinced that I can and should mostly hike on heart-healthy, high-fiber, nutritionally dense, slow-burning carbs with plenty of lean protein, but still partake in the occasional Pop-Tart and Snickers bar. I do not turn up my nose at trail-magic offerings of soda and ice cream, and I can and will kill a large pepperoni pizza on a town day—after eating a salad and a few oranges.
There’s a nice parallel here to backpacking gear–a lot of people flirt with the extreme ends of ultralight, minimalist philosophy before ultimately realizing they have more fun with a few luxury items in their pack. The same goes for training and body image. A reasonable, sustainable routine is probably better in the long-term than either gluttonous sloth or 5-hour days at the gym.
The middle path rarely has the moral purity or satisfying abandon of the extremes, but it has the advantage of being sustainable and satisfying in roughly equal measure. And so I always toss a few boxes of S’mores Pop-Tarts into my pack when I head for the woods, knowing that they will be a delightful addition to my fuel rather than the entirety of that fuel. And if a jar of Nutella happens to fall into my pack on the way out the door, well—accidents happen.
