Fresh air and increased activity can boost your appetite when you're camping. If you're watching your weight, you may want to pack a selection of low-fat foods for your excursion. The American Heart Association, or AHA, recommends that you get 25 to 35 percent of your daily calories from fat, mostly from plant-based foods such as fish, nuts or unsaturated vegetable oils. An assortment of low-fat foods that are rich in complex carbohydrates, lean proteins and heart-healthy fats will meet your nutritional needs and give you extra energy for outdoor activities.
Planning Your Trip
Your selection of foods may depend on your mode of transportation and your source of water and heat. If you're traveling by car or RV to your camping site, you can bring a cooler to store eggs, nonfat milk and yogurt, and perishable fruits and vegetables. Consider the supply of fresh water and the cooking facilities you'll have available when planning the meals you'll prepare on your trip. If you're backpacking, you may be carrying most of your supplies. The weight of your food can make a difference in how far you hike and how much energy you have at the end of the day.
Portable Meals and Snacks
Trail mix, bottled water and dehydrated or freeze-dried foods weigh less than canned products. You can control the fat content in your trail mix by preparing your own blend at home using pretzels or whole-grain cereal, dried raisins, dried cranberries and almonds. Mozzarella cheese sticks and peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches give you quick energy and protein. Dried soup or pasta mixes that can be reconstituted with fresh water provide portable, lightweight sources of nutrition. Some sporting-goods stores sell low-fat, freeze-dried meals that weigh little and slide easily into a backpack. One serving of a commercial brand of freeze-dried spaghetti with meat sauce has 270 calories, 7 g of fat, 39 g of carbohydrates and 14 g of protein.
Energy Sources
If you spend your day hiking, backpacking or mountain biking, you'll need complex carbohydrates to fuel your activities. Low-fat sources of complex carbohydrates include whole-wheat or buckwheat flour, whole-grain bagels, oatmeal, reduced-fat granola and trail mix, canned beans, apples and bananas, carrots and cauliflower, dried fruit and nuts. Nuts and natural, nonhydrogenated peanut or almond butter also provide protein and plant-based fat. When you're making pancakes, omelets or other outdoor meals that call for eggs, remove one yolk to reduce fat and cholesterol.
Low-fat Protein
Eggs, nonfat milk or yogurt, mozzarella cheese, chicken, fresh or canned fish, lean hamburger or canned beans offer protein for your outdoor meals. With 239 calories, 12 g of protein, 54 g of complex carbohydrates and only 1 g of fat, one cup of plain or vegetarian baked beans meets your requirements for both protein and carbohydrates in a single serving, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA.
Catch of the Day
If fishing is on the agenda for your camping trip, you may be able to catch your source of protein for dinner. Bread fresh fish fillets in flour or cornmeal, then fry in a skillet coated with olive oil or nonstick cooking spray. One cooked rainbow trout fillet has 214 calories, 33 g of protein and 8 g of total fat, according to the USDA. The omega-3 fatty acids in trout and other fish protect the health of your heart by lowering your triglycerides and preventing atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, according to the AHA.
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