Eating Well While Camping - Panergy

There is a lot of discussion out there about what to eat while you're out camping or hiking, or even just having yourself a picnic. Most of this discussion focuses on recipes over ideas. While having great recipes for the meals you want is important, having the right mindset when it comes to food will let you find those perfect recipes. So, we'll be addressing the right mindset to having when you're selecting and preparing your outdoor meals.

Avoid sugar. This is the biggest mistake I see people make and it's the biggest flaw in recipes I see. Sugar does give energy, but at a high cost. Sugar is very quickly processed, giving you energy just as quickly. But that falls off equally as quick, leaving you tired, crashing, and probably even with a headache.

Instead of sugar you want to be eating fats and calories. Fats are a good thing, all of the time, not just while you're hiking a mountain. Fats are needed for a person to survive, fats have gotten a bad rap. Yes, too many fats will cause you to gain weight. But fat is where your body gets good, healthy energy from. You want to be eating nice fatty foods.

Calories is probably the hardest thing to understand for a person. Most people don't know what a calorie actually is, most say it has to do with gaining or losing weight. A calorie is a unit of energy. A calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. When we eat calories, we are eating energy. This is the very first thing we start to burn off. Yes, if we burn less than we eat, the body will store these calories as fat for later use. But, when we are camping and hiking we want those calories, no, we NEED those calories. Trying to make low-cal foods, or buying foods from the grocery store will leave us full, but tired. Also, a lot of that low-cal stuff from the stores are pumped full of chemicals, which are so much worse for you than a couple extra calories.

Next, let's talk about the temperature of our food. Temperature can make a very big difference when we are hiking and camping out in the extremes. If we're out in the extreme colds, we have to work very hard to stay warm. We can give ourselves a heads-up with the foods we chose. Drinking and eating meals that are hot to begin with raises our core temperature at the very beginning. While we cannot rely on this heat to keep us warm forever, it does make sure we get warm earlier and easier, and as long as we're eating correctly we'll stay warm. This goes for staying cool, too. Eating cooler meals and drinks will help keep our core temperature down.

Water is another thing I want to talk about, I feel like a brief discussion is all we need. Drink water. I'm serious. That's it. Don't drink energy drinks. Don't drink coffee (it's delicious, I know). Just drink water. Water is amazing stuff, truly the best thing a person can do for themselves is to just drink water. This is even more important when hiking and camping; leave the soda at home, drink water.

Now, with these ideas for good eating, we can now find the right recipes for us. We don't need to worry about a lot of the concerns people have needlessly and sometimes dangerously connected with. We can form a good, varied, and fatty diet while out camping and hiking so we're sure to have energy to see and do everything we want.