Noshing on the Go - Part 2: Nutrition or Convenience, Pick One.

A Quick Recap

In my last post on this topic, I talked about how I've had success eating macro-balanced meals. I closed out the post by noting that my process went off the rails when I stepped out of my kitchen. This post digs into why that is.

The Challenge

Imagine I'm heading out to play tourist for the day in nearby Washington, DC. Sure, there will be food options in the area, but the choices are often limited. What can I grab that will give me the benefits of the macro-balanced meals I've been eating at home?

The first option is to grab what's easy in our pantry, say a ziplock baggie of peanut butter-filled pretzels. On the surface, this is not only a convenient choice but also seems to meet my macros. Pretzels are made from wheat, which is a solid carbohydrate source, and nuts have a reputation for being a good source of protein and fat. Alas, digging into the numbers shows that this food is nowhere near my macro goals.

My current macro targets are 30 g of protein, 46 g of carbs, and 11 g of fat per meal. One serving of delicious PB pretzels has 17 g of carbs, 5 g of protein, and 6 g of fat. If I tried to meet my protein goal with this food, I'd end up with 6 servings. That would way overshoot the other targets.

This is the classic conundrum for macro-based meal planning; hitting one nutrient often overshoots others.

Let's pause here and state the obvious: bringing PB pretzels as my on-the-go 'meal' is a fine choice. I'd almost certainly supplement it in the field with ice cream and French fries. But still, as a thought exercise, let's imagine that I wanted an option that did meet my macro goals. What then? For the record, I'm still eating the ice cream and fries; that's non-negotiable.

Hittin My Macros

Let's imagine three different meals that I could take with me that do meet my nutritional targets.

Style	Meal
Classic	Tuna sandwich with cheddar cheese. Ziplock baggie of Chex mix.
Backpacking	Minute Rice, tuna, dehydrated veggies, Moon Cheese, bouillon.
Field-assembly	Tuna packet, Moon Cheese, bagel.

These meals all 'work' the same way: tuna brings most of the protein. Cheese, either fresh or dehydrated, brings most of the fat and some additional protein. And bread, rice, or a bagel bring the carbs.

The Classic and Backpacking meals don't seem like much of a fit for my day in DC. The field-assembly could work, but it's not nearly as convenient as a bag of PB pretzels. Let's explore why that is.

Stageability, Portability, and Consumability

Why these meals do and don't work seems to come down to three properties: stageability, portability, and consumability.

Stageability is how easily the meal, or better yet, a number of meals can be staged. The PB pretzels are perfect for this. When I'm ready to head out, I simply grab a handful, and I'm done. The backpacking meal is equally as stageable, as the shelf stable ingredients are easy to preportion. The field-assembly is also quite stageable, though something like a bagel won't stay fresh forever.

The classic sandwich is the least stageable, as you have to make it fresh every time.

Next up is portability. Here, the PB pretzels continue to shine, as you can toss a ziplock bag of them into your pocket or backpack and you're done. Initially, the backpacking meal seems highly portable. After all, it's used for backpacking. But when you consider that you need to carry a container, spoon, and possibly an extra bottle of water, one can see that it's actually not especially portable. The field assembly meal scores well in this area, requiring that you only bring along a fork for eating the tuna. The classic sandwich again lags behind, as it calls for carrying a cooler and ice pack to keep it fresh-ish.

Portability can be sneaky. For example, what's left after the meal is done also impacts portability. This racks up strikes against both the backpacking and classic style meals. The former calls for you to either clean out, or carry around a dirty container, and the latter calls for you to continue to schlep a cooler and ice pack even though the food is now done.

Another way portability can come into play is the risk of shelf-stable food, like chocolate, melting. A seemingly highly portable Clif Builder Bar becomes a sloppy mess once it's been sitting in a hot backpack or car for too long.

The last criterion is consumability. Finally, the classic sandwich shines. Take it out, eat it and you're done. The PB pretzels are still more consumable, as they have the ability to snack on a few at a time, say while moving from one monument or museum to another. The field-assembly meal isn't as convenient as the classic sandwich to eat, but if you're stopping for a sit-down meal and have a flat surface to use, it's easy enough to put together.

It's the backpacking-style meal here that lags in this category. It calls for both sufficient water and soak time before the meal can be eaten. With planning, much of this can be mitigated: you could start the soaking process before heading into a museum, and the food could be ready by the time you're done looking at the exhibits. So the backpacking meal isn't a total deal breaker.

And the winner is: there is no winner.

Thinking through each of these meal styles, one can see how each brings some advantages. PB pretzels are stageable, portable, and consumable, yet they don't hit my nutrition goals. The other meal options hit the nutrition goals, but none hit that ideal combination of stageable, portable, and consumable.

I finished this thought exercise with no clear solution. And then I remembered this video by FandabiDozi and I thought: hmmm, maybe he's on to something? Let's explore why in the next post.

Noshing on the Go - Part 1: Experimenting with Macros

I love a good nutrition-based self-experiment. Sure, most of them turn out like my spirulina trial: superfood promises followed by awful taste and zero noticeable impact on my health. But still, every once in a while, I find a winner, and I always learn something along the way (like: Lord help us if spirulina is the food of the future).

My most recent food-based experiment has been to strive to eat 5 macro-balanced meals a day. Macro, in this context, refers to the macronutrients protein, carbohydrates, and fat. The idea is that each of these components plays an important role in the body, so having a sufficient quantity of each is optimal. Sounds promising, right? These experiments always do.

There are a number of strategies for determining your macro targets, and I opted to go with the relatively simple ratio approach. Given my total caloric intake, I designated 30% protein, 45% carbs, and 25% fat.

Knowing my overall calorie goal of 2050 kcal, and a bit of simple math, allowed me to come up with both daily and meal-based goals in grams:

Component	Percent	Calories	Calories / Gram	Grams / Day	Meals / Day	Grams / Meal
Protein	30%	615 kcal	4 kcal/g	153 g	5	30 g
Carbohydrates	45%	923 kcal	4 kcal/g	230 g	5	46 g
Fat	25%	513 kcal	9 kcal/g	57 g	5	11 g

The above math says that in a given day, I'm shooting to eat 153 grams of protein, 230 grams of carbs, and 57 grams of fat.

I found the last column, however, to be a game-changer. Trying to consume, say, 57 g of fat in a day was a maddening puzzle to figure out. But, 11 g in a single meal was straightforward. It also means that if when I eat a non-optimal meal (which happens all the time), I can pick back up with optimal ones without missing a beat.

For a week, I struggled to find five meals a day that hit these targets. The challenge was that my go-to foods weren't anywhere near these ratios. Fortunately, I work from home and have access to a full kitchen, so had plenty of opportunities to get creative. I was already in the habit of using Cronometer App to track calories, so using it to track macros was an easy habit to adopt.

To my surprise, the annoyance of assembling meals was offset by how effective the meals themselves were. By effective, I mean they left me feeling energized and full until the next meal. It wasn't just Internet promises; I felt like I could actually feel a difference. I'm sure some of this was the placebo effect, but at the end of the week I felt more than motivated enough to push on.

According to basic nutrition science, none of what I felt was a surprise: carbs are a primary fuel for the body and fat and protein both play important roles in making you feel full. I'd just proven out what's considered nutrition 101.

While this approach worked well when I had access to a full kitchen, I noticed that it fell apart the minute I was eating on the go. I'm not referring here to eating out, per se, as in this context you have far less control of your options. I'm talking about traveling, sightseeing, or even running a few back-to-back errands. In this context, I can bring any food I want with me, and yet, it wasn't obvious what to grab.

Of course, this doesn't really matter. First of all, life is too short and the body is too sophisticated to be a slave to macros. And second of all, one's macros aren't static. If I'm out for a day of hiking, then trying to consume the same nutrition as I do for a day in front of a screen would be ridiculous.

Still, as a problem solver at heart, I couldn't resist thinking about how I might solve this macros-on-the-go food challenge. Let's dig into that in our next post!

Bonus: A Backcountry Case for Macros

While preparing this post, I came across this podcast episode talking about backcountry nutrition planning, specifically for multi-day hunting trips. In the world of backpacking, food is: (1) considered a heavy resource, and (2) there's often an emphasis on choosing fat over other macronutrients because fat provides over double the amount of energy (kcal) when compared to carbs and protein.

For example, 100 grams of jelly beans provide you with 375 kcals of energy. That sounds pretty good. That is, until you consider that for the same weight, 100 grams of olive oil provides you with 884 kcals. In this context, jelly beans are 'heavy' and olive oil is 'light' (learn way more on this topic, here), and you're a fool for not bringing anything but a flask of olive oil on your next trip.

The guest on the podcast, Kyle Kamp, steps back from this fat-is-king mindset and instead focuses on—you guessed it—balancing your macros. One of his key points is that each macronutrient has an essential job, and focusing only on total calories can result in deficits you can feel on the trail.

To build on our example, protein is critical for muscle repair and recovery. If you get to the end of a hard day of hiking and only have olive oil on hand, then you have no protein source to meet this need. You're going to suffer.

It's a fascinating discussion that puts macros front and center. Give it a listen.