Hello everyone - I was reading the recent post from the runner about low carb and her sport with great interest. I'm hoping that people here can offer me some suggestions. Here's my situation: I've been doing low carb for a few months now. Lost a lot of fat and am feeling energetic & great. - - I like to do lots of hiking (backpacking into wilderness areas, off-tail) and plan to do Search & Rescue work. My pack weight is typically about 45-50 lbs, but could sometimes get up to about 100 lbs for a short time/distance. I carry some muscle on my body which can come in handy for the SAR work. - - My question is, do I add carbs to my diet when doing these activities ? How much ? Backpack food is typically loaded with carbs. (Looking at a package of freeze dried Mountain House Chicken Teriyaki w/ Rice - I see that it has 70 gms of carbs in one serving.) I've got some dehydrated commercial camp food & some military MREs and all of them have far more carbs than I've been eating. I have a more muscular build, - definitely not like that of a long distance runner. I also lift weights. (Not sure if this makes any difference in terms of nutritional recommendations or not.) I'm guessing my field food requirements would be closer to that of a soldier or wilderness firefighter ? Any suggestions that you can offer would be appreciated. Thanks, - -

Some of the weight lifters have reported they do better with a higher carb rate. Others are doing just great on a nearly zero carb diet. I think this is just one of those individual things. Try going without increasing your carb level and see how you feel.

It is pretty easy to make your own "backpack food" without going carb crazy. Nuts are your friend You may also want to look up pemmican recipes. Not the Pemmican BRAND, but the actuall low carb pemmican that used to be made by native Americans. Approx 80% fat and 20% lean meat.

the recipes I've seen use approx. 50/50 meat and fat.

how to make pemmican

http://www.breadandmoney.com/docs/pemmican2006.html

Just what I need: another one of those crazy kitchen projects! And then, I can just see myself, wondering what to have for lunch: hmmm, tuna salad on lettuce? or, how about a nice ball of pemmican? Still, good to have on hand in case of emergency; it has a very long shelf life. Or for backpacking.

If you decide to make it, let us know how it turns out!

Fat contains twice the calories as carbs. But that's for pure carbs such as sugar or starch. So, you could cut the weight by half (or more if you cut out fiber as well) by packing fat instead of carbs. Or, double the calories.

Yay for pemmican.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. - And please keep 'em coming! I came across a suggestion to make some 'ghee', which is clarified butter & does not require refrigeration. It can be added to other main dish camp foods to increase fat/energy content (and improves taste as a bonus.) I'll also have to see about making some pemmican. Looks like I may not be limited to just eating jerky !
It'll be interesting to see body response to these activities on lower carbs and how increasing them a bit might impact performance. (I also read/heard somewhere that protein requires more water than carbs for digestion. This may be a consideration in certain outdoor & survival scenarios. Regards, - -

I don't know where you read this but I disagree with that. Protein doesn't need extra water to be metabolized. At least not like glucose needs it to be stored as glycogen. Glycogen needs about 4 times its weight in water for storage. The point is that carbs requires water for storage while protein doesn't. Incidentally, during the first week of induction for the Atkins diet, we lose this water weight as we deplete the glycogen stored in our body. This amounts to between 5 and 7lbs.

Carbohydrates drive insulin drives fat accumulation.

Insulin is a storage hormone. As we eat carbs, we release insulin in the bloodstream to cover the rise in blood sugar. At least that's the conventional idea behind insulin. The fact is insulin's primary role is to store nutrients by taking them from the bloodstream and pushing them into fat cells and any other cell that can take them. As it does this, it literally empties the blood of nutrients doing two things: It makes us hungry, it makes us less active.

It makes us hungry because cells don't have the nutrients they need from the blood so they send the hunger signal until we eat some more and fill the blood with more nutrients. It makes us less active for the same reason and until we eat more and fill the blood with more nutrients, cells will slow down their rate of fuel utilization.

At least that's how I see it.

I say just keep eating like you have the last few months and see what happens. Take your own food with you if you can. You're going to get tired either way at some point. Your conditioning is going to be important and excessive muscle mass is going to work against you.

I have no trouble moving big weights around while low carb dieting. But that's in a weight room with barbells and dumbbells. OTOH, if I was doing search and rescue work in the field, I'd probably opt for the carbs. For peak power and performance there is no substitute for fully-compensated glycogen stores.