Our diet was difficult to come up with. We had to decide on how much food we wanted to carry, calorie intakes, and nutritional integrities of certain snake foods. Of course, we aren't going to know what foods work best until our trip is under way.
Based on postal drop locations, and the ability to carry a decent amount of weight in food, Adam and I decided to carry two weeks of basic food essentials. This means that we should have just enough food to provide us the energy we need for the 20 mile a day average. When we reach towns off the trail, I am sure we will be indulging in diners and other types of foods.
Below is a list of the items for each of our daily food essentials that we will be carrying in two week increments. (So as we travel, our bags will become significantly lighter) As we go, this list is sure to change, as we find what works best, and as we get sick of certain things.
Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner
Snacks
***Post Hike Update***
When we started our trip we immediately realized that we packed entirely way too much food supplies. Two weeks of food is a lot of weight. On the AT it is unnecessary. Throughout the entire trip there were very few points that we couldn't supply at least every fourth day. Of course our mileage was above average, but even at a slow pace there are still towns that you can hit for a re-supply every few days. The only exception is the 100 mile wilderness, but even there you can get supplies shipped in, or you can hike to a grocery store several miles down on a campground road. So when it comes down to the issue of how much to carry, I would advise a thru hiker to pack between 4-7 days of food, depending on your pace. It will save you more time and energy going into town to re-supply then carrying over a weeks worth of food.
Another issue is calorie intake. We thought from the start we could have issues with this, and we did. I lost 20 pounds in the first part of the trip. At Harpers Ferry I weighed 144 pounds from the 165 I weighed in at the start. And I didn't have much weight to lose. This is mostly because we burned a lot more calories than we ate. The diet listed above wasn't bad; we just needed to add more. So we ended up taking a lot of weight away by subtracting the days we carried, and we added a bit weight back by carrying more for each day. Things that we added were Instant Mash Potatoes. Hungry Jack and Idahoan both make different varieties of instant mash potatoes, and we never really got sick of them. Splitting one packet at dinner, along with the freeze dried, really filled us up much better. We ended up adding more peanuts and candies to our diets. We realized that peanuts and sugars gave us great boosts of energy. In the end I was always carrying extra snickers bars, and sometimes even a jar of peanut butter.
The best thing to take away from this section is to carry fewer days of food at any one time, but make those days heavy in calories, proteins, and sugars. I also took multivitamins and calcium throughout the trip, and never had any issues with sickness.