Food and pack weight
TRIPS uses your food and pack assumptions together because carried weight is a major part of route difficulty.
In many trips, the route feels hardest early when food weight is highest, then gets easier as carried weight declines.
Food consumption rate
Food consumption rate is how much food you expect to consume per day.
TRIPS uses it to estimate starting food weight and day-by-day pack change across the trip.
Use a value that reflects the trip you are actually planning, not an idealized nutrition target from a different context.
Food density
Food density describes how many calories are packed into a given amount of food weight.
In practical terms:
- lower-density food means more carried weight for the same energy
- higher-density food means less carried weight for the same energy
Practical advice
- Use your real trip menu if you have one.
- If not, use a reasonable estimate based on the foods you actually carry.
- Revisit the input if the projected starting food weight looks obviously wrong.
A common signal to watch
If your plan looks surprisingly hard on early days, heavy starting pack and food weight may be part of the reason.