As a general rule, backpackers need 16 to 25 calories per pound of body weight when hiking. This breaks down to 2,500 to 3,500 calories of food per day for a healthy adult. However, depending on factors like temperature, pack weight, and hike difficulty, a backpacker might need fewer or more calories.
To get a more accurate calorie amount, the backpacking food calculator below provides an exact amount.
Also read: How much food to bring backpacking?
How This Backpacking Calorie 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
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