Food!

As you may have noticed from my previous posts, I enjoy food.  With all the hiking, I got away from my usual low carb eating ways and gave myself free license to go hog wild the past several months.  Can't do that!  My blood sugar suffers, my energy lags, and my butt gets bigger.  Hiking with the healthy ladies a few weeks ago snapped me back to reality.  I'll be researching like crazy in the next few weeks trying to figure out some good backpacking alternatives to Mountain House freeze dried meals, Clif bars, and the usual carb laden backwoods fare.  I'll be busting out the dehydrator and testing things out.  I think my dehydrator is in a box somewhere in the garage so if I can't find it, I'll just buy a new one.

Let me say a few things about being low carb.  This is not Atkins!  This way of eating is not for everyone. Many people I talk to don't agree with this approach but I happen to have diabetes and low carb really does help the blood sugar so that's why I do it.  If it weren't for the pesky "D", I would not choose to eat this way (as evidenced from all the cheeseburgers and ice cream I've inhaled the past few months!).  When I say low carb, I don't mean that I eat just meat.  I eat lots of protein, lots of vegetables, and lots of good fat.  I somewhat restrict fruit unless I'm doing lots of exercise and basically cut out any processed starch.  I do eat sweet potatoes.  This gives me between 100 and 150 g of carbs per day.  So enough for good energy but not ketosis.  I'm not interested in ketosis.  Compare this with the average american diet of 300-600 g of carbs per day and you can see the difference. 

The problem I will have is going to be the backpacking days where I hike for 7 hours or more with a 30 pound backpack.  Will this way of eating sustain that type of activity?  I don't know.  I know I was able to do it when I was a runner but backpacking is a totally different animal.  So I will be doing lots of field tests and experimenting.  I have my permit for Mt. San Jacinto in August so I'll have some food options tried out and tested by then.

I'm doing Full Moon Iron Mountain on Sunday so that will be my first hike over an hour being back into the low carb state.  We'll see if energy is okay or not. 

I'll keep you posted....