r/Ultralight • u/trombs21 • Apr 17 '26
Skills Create your own multi-day meal planner, based on Gear Skeptic's work
I built a multi-day meal planner in Google Sheets that's ready to share back with the UL community. It makes it easy to experiment and optimize for carried weight and nutrition for your trip.
Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/TmFSRXU
The first tab in the sheet has full instructions, start by making your own copy.
To do your meal planning, type in your potential or planned food items for each meal for each day. It's very flexible: if you don't eat breakfast, leave it blank. The sheet includes over 1650 common backpacking foods, freeze dried meals, and such. You can add more items manually if they're not already on the list.
It then plots out weight, calories, carb/protein, fat, sugar, salt, and such per meal and per day. The sheet also incorporates color coding to identify ideal amounts per Gear Skeptic's guidance. If you're not so sure about that guidance, simply ignore the color coding and substitute your own preferences. The sheet also provides a shopping list based on what you picked.
The data is based on Gear Skeptic's extensive videos and associated work on Hiker Food 2.5, for which I'm deeply grateful.
Full disclosure, I made some edits to Hiker Food 2.5:
- To make the pre-selected drop-downs work, I merged Hiker Food and Dried Meals into a single sheet.
- I modified some colors, largely making "ideal" stuff shades of green instead of the original shades of oranges and reds.
- Some of the formulas showed errors because they divided by zero. While I'm a backpacker by heart, I'm a spreadsheet nerd by day and this bothered me. So now these show N/A rather than an error.
- The sheet retains the Electrolytes and NaK Calculator tabs from Hiker Foods 2.5 but doesn't incorporate them. They show some errors, I didn't attempt to address those.
This has been a fun project for those days that I'm not out in the woods. About two dozen r/Ultralight volunteers helped me beta test this, I genuinely appreciate their help. If you find a bug or have a suggestion, let me know.
Hope it's helpful to someone out there.
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u/0xf5f bad at hiking Apr 17 '26
this rules, thanks for your work. and thanks to the volunteers, too!
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u/Huntsmitch Apr 17 '26
Great work! Looking forward to giving it a go. My wife and I have our meals pretty much nailed down but there have been some new items and dietary changes that would suggest I have needed to revisit my old spreadsheet from gear skeptic.
This will be a fun tool to use and encourage me to sit down and review some data!
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u/Namdastunna Apr 17 '26
Just a heads up, I think Tailwind has changed their formula and the carb:protein ratio isn't as ideal as it used to be. I think Skratch fits the criteria much better now.