So the reason I ran back to REI this morning is because of Andrew. Ben and I were still a little worried about him and his food consumption. We had to substitute a lot of foods for him because of the high calorie, high protein foods they were providing them on the trek through the mountain trails. They do not substitute there. We had to provide his substitutions, pack them up by meal, by day. That is a lot of things with NUTS in them. Since nuts give Andrew bad migraines, we had to go through all of the ingredients and cut all those items out and substitute items in that were not laced with nuts.
This is a big job. It is not as easy as it looks. These are high calorie meals. They are consuming 3000 calories per day on the trails and a lot of the nut things are protein intensive like protein bars. So in cutting those things out I was cutting not only good healthy fats from the nuts but also protein. I did just fine substituting back in the calories for the items back in prepackaged foods, but we were low on protein. Protein is hard because a lot of items that are high in protein that are light and trail ready are also laced with a lot of other things that will also cause migraines. It is counter intuitive.
A couple of days ago, however, I managed to find these Buffalo Jerky bars – Tanka Bars – at REI that were low calorie, not filled with all the typical garbage that jerky has, and high protein relatively speaking. We were fine on calories, we just needed protein. So this morning when Ben and I were having this same thought that our really skinny Andrew did not have any muscle mass to burn off and I said I was worried about his protein consumption. I was sent back to REI to buy a bunch of the Buffalo Jerky bars to put in his various meal substitution bags to help supplement what he had. He would be fine with the carbohydrates and even fats, but at least with the 14 buffalo jerky bars he would have a bit more protein as well.
I should add that this was not cheap. They were $3.00 per bar. I bought $15 of them (his brother got one of them to take as a road snack) so they did give me a small discount to drop the price of each bar to $2.70 each, but that is the price I am sometimes willing to pay to keep a child healthy. After what we had to jump through to get his lungs healthy to get him on this trip, I do not need him feeling weak on the trip or getting sick while he is out there. I am just glad that I found these Buffalo Jerky bars actually.
I bought 3 of them originally when I first saw them, to try them. Jerky triggers my headaches because of all the extra junk and preservatives that they add to it so I wanted to try them personally. I did just fine. This was a good thing. I know that I can put these in 72-hour emergency kits and we will be fine. I also know that I can grab them on the go without worry.
Now to find a cheaper source…
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