How Much Food to Bring Backpacking? (with Calculator)

Figuring out how much food to bring on backpacking trips used to be really stressful for me. I would “eyeball” the amounts when packing food. Since I was scared that I’d end up hungry, I’d inevitably bring too much food – meaning my pack was way heavier than it should have been and I also ended up with a lot of wasted food.

Now, I carefully calculate how much food to bring backpacking.  It takes a lot of work at the beginning, but it is worth it because my pack doesn’t get weighed down by “just in case” food and I don’t have to worry about being hungry.

The Quick Answer:

Most people need about 16-25 calories per pound of their bodyweight when backpacking (or about 2,500 to 3,500 calories per day for a healthy adult). This usually translates into about 1.5 to 2.5 lbs of food per day. However, the amount can vary drastically depending on your body, the difficulty of the hike, pack weight, and calorie density of the food you pack.

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How Much Food to Bring Backpacking

There are two methods commonly used to figure out how much food to bring on a backpacking trip: pounds per day or tallying up calories.  The first method is much easier but the second method is more accurate.

Method 1: Pounds of Food Per Day When Backpacking

The most common recommendation for how much food to bring backpacking uses “pounds of food per day”. Recommendations vary but are usually 1.5 to 2.5lbs of food per day.

While this method makes packing easy, it can be highly inaccurate.

For starters, the “pounds of food per day” method doens’t calculate in your individual calorie needs.  As a 105lb woman, I definitely don’t require as much food as my 170lb male hiking partner!

Further, the method doesn’t factor in caloric-density.

How Caloric Density Affects Pounds of Food Per Day Needed

Let’s say you estimate you need 2lbs of food per day on your trip.  As the examples show, the foods you choose could result in a very different amount of calories.

• Uncooked macaroni = 106 calories/ounce. Two lbs of macaroni would provide 3,392 calories.
• Bread = 75 calories/ounce. Two lbs of bread would provide 2,400 calories.
• Starkist tuna in oil (pouch) = 58 calories/ounce. Two lbs of tuna would provide 1,856 calories.
• A fresh apple = 15 calories/ounce. Two lbs of apples would provide just 480 calories!

Obviously you wouldn’t be eating just one food during a backpacking trip.  However, these examples show how the caloric density of the foods you choose affects how many calories you ultimately end up eating on your trip — and thus whether you end up hungry or not.

If you do use the pounds of food per day method…

• Aim for foods with at least 110 calories per ounce. This will give you 3,520 calories/day in 2lbs.
• If you are thru-hiking and need to be ultralight, then aim for 150 calories per ounce.  This will give you 3,500 calories/day in 1.43lbs.

Also Read: Most calorie-dense foods for backpacking

Method 2: Tallying Up Daily Calories

A better way of figuring out how much food to bring is to calculate your daily calorie needs.  Then you tally up the calories in all the foods you brought.

It is definitely a bit of a pain to do this.  You’ll probably need to make a spreadsheet.  And, if you are making your own meals, you’ll have to use a scale and weigh every single ingredient.

However, the payoff is that you get exactly the amount of food you need without any waste or worry that you will end up hungry.

Here’s a spreadsheet I used to tally up calories in backpacking food for a two-day trip with two people. It breaks down to 3,500 calories per day, per person.

But that leads us to the quesiton of…

How Many Calories Do You Need While Backpacking?

An easy  method of calculating how many calories to bring backpacking is to go by your bodyweight. Backpacker gives these guidelines:

• Less active/rest days: 5-15 calories per pound of bodyweight
• Moderately active (60 minutes of easy hiking without pack): 16-20 calories per pound of bodyweight
• Very active (60-120 minutes of hiking on elevated terrain with a pack): 21-25 calories per pound of bodyweight
• Extremely active (long day of hiking with a pack): 25-30 calories per pound of bodyweight

Children calorie requirements are calculated a bit differently. According to this table and these average weights, children need around 30-40 calories per pound of bodyweight.  (5)

For most backpacking trips which involve carrying a pack plus a bit of difficult terrain, it breaks down to this:

Backpacking Calorie Calculator

If you want a much more detailed analysis of how many calories to bring backpacking, you can use this calculator below.

How This Backpacking Food Calculator Works

This backpacking calorie calculator use the “Pandolf model.” It comes from a 1976 military study in which a researcher was tasked with figuring out how many calories soldiers burned when walking with their heavy packs on.

While the calculator is fairly good at giving you a ballpark amount of calories you’ll need, it can also be very inaccurate. The reason is because the calculator doesn’t factor in things like:

• What your actual basal metabolic rate is
• Muscle vs. fat you have on your body
• Hiking speed
• Terrain difficulty
• Whether you are male/female
• How long you are sleeping
• Outside temperature and weather

Any of these variables can completely change how many calories you need per day. (1, 2, 3, 4)

Also keep in mind that there are some issues with counting calories.  As I talk about in this post about backpacking nutrition, calories do not always equal energy. For example, peanuts are very high-calorie but (as you can see in your poop), a lot of those calories are never absorbed by the body. Despite this, calorie counting is still the best way to figure out how much food you need to bring backpacking.

How Pack Weight Affects Calorie Needs

If you play around with the backpacking calorie calculator, you can see that your pack weight has a huge effect on how many calories you need while backpacking.

For example:

• A 150lb hiker going 3mph on a 1% slope will burn about 274 calories per hour without a pack.
• The same hiker with a 40lb pack would burn about 334 calories per hour.

That’s why going lightweight is so important when backpacking.  Ironically, the more food weight you carry, the more food you will need to eat – thus making it even more important to choose calorie-dense foods and plan meals well.

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Below are pictures of some of the lightweight, calorie-dense recipes included in the book. 

From left to right: Blueberry chia oatmeal, pear cardamom ginger oatmeal, red pepper crackers with hummus, beetroot “salami”, mashed potatoes with white bean gravy, & pasta with buttery white bean sauce

How many calories do you bring per day backpacking? And how do you calculate it? Let us know in the comments!