Best snacks to keep energy up on long walks

Why little and often beats one big lunch

Most people who run out of steam on a long walk do it for one simple reason: they waited too long to eat. You set off after breakfast, feel fine for two hours, push on up a steep pull in the Lakes or along a breezy stretch of the Pembrokeshire coast, and then suddenly your legs turn to jelly and every step feels like wading through treacle. That is not weakness. It is your body running out of readily available fuel.

The fix is to treat eating as part of the walk rather than an event. Aim for a small amount of carbohydrate roughly every 45 to 60 minutes, working up to around 40–60g of carbs per hour on a big day with plenty of ascent. A handful of something, eaten while you keep moving, is far more effective than a huge sandwich demolished in one go at a summit cairn. Big meals send blood to your stomach for digestion, which is the last thing you want when you still have 400 metres of descent ahead of you.

Practically, that means packing snacks you can eat one-handed, with gloves on, without stopping. If it needs unwrapping, cutting or assembling, you will skip it.

Oats: the steady backbone of any rucksack

Oats are the hill walker's best friend because they release energy slowly and sit comfortably in the stomach. A bowl of porridge before you leave the house sets you up for the first couple of hours better than almost anything else. If you are driving to the start, a tub of overnight oats made with milk or yoghurt travels well and can be eaten in the car park.

On the hill itself, flapjack is the classic for good reason. A homemade tray bake — roughly 250g oats, 150g butter, 100g golden syrup, 100g soft brown sugar, baked until golden — cuts into squares that survive being squashed at the bottom of a rucksack. Wrap each piece in greaseproof paper so you can peel and eat without faffing.

• Oatcakes — light, robust, and excellent with cheese or peanut butter
• Flapjack squares — cut small, roughly 4cm, so one is a single mouthful
• Oat and banana muffins — good for the first few hours of a cold morning

Shop-bought cereal bars work too, but check the label: some are little more than confectionery with a wholesome-looking wrapper.

Nuts and seeds for the slow burn

Nuts bring fat and protein to the party, which slows the release of the sugars alongside them and keeps you feeling satisfied rather than jittery. A homemade mix is far cheaper and better than anything in a packet. Try roughly equal parts almonds, cashews, walnuts and pumpkin seeds, with a few salted peanuts thrown in — the salt genuinely helps when you have been sweating under a waterproof.

Two warnings from experience. First, nuts go rock hard in the cold, so keep your day's portion in an inside chest pocket rather than an outer one. Second, they are easy to overdo. A large handful is plenty; a whole bag will sit heavily and make you thirsty.

Dried fruit and quick sugar for the steep bits

When you are ten minutes from the top of a stiff climb, you want something that hits quickly. Dried fruit does this beautifully — dates, apricots, raisins and figs are all dense, light and easy to chew. Medjool dates are practically a performance food: soft, sweet, and packed with potassium.

For genuine emergencies, keep a small bag of jelly babies, fruit pastilles or wine gums in your pocket. They are pure fast sugar and will get you up the last pull or down the last kilometre. Do not rely on them all day, though. Too much concentrated sweetness, especially alongside a lot of fibre from dried fruit, can leave you with a churning stomach on a long descent. Alternate sweet snacks with something savoury.

Sandwiches and savoury stops

At some point on a long day you will want real food, and a sandwich still takes some beating. Wholemeal bread with a decent filling — mature cheddar, ham, hummus, tinned salmon, or peanut butter and banana — gives you carbs, protein and fat in one package. Cut it into quarters and wrap tightly; a squashed sandwich is a sad thing to meet at a windy col.

• Cheese and oatcakes — slow, savoury, and satisfying in the cold
• A pork pie or sausage roll — heavy but brilliant on a freezing ridge
• Boiled eggs or a scotch egg — protein that keeps hunger away for hours
• A flask of soup — worth its weight on a winter walk in the Cairngorms

Savoury food resets your palate when you have eaten nothing but sweet things for four hours, and it often makes the difference between a happy finish and a miserable one.

Packing and eating it sensibly

Split your food into two stashes: one in an accessible top pocket or chest pouch for the day's eating, and the rest buried in the rucksack. That way you are not rummaging with cold hands every hour. Everything should go inside a waterproof bag, because a sodden flapjack is not appealing at any altitude.

Prepare snacks at home — cut, wrap, portion. Bag up individual servings so you can grab one without thinking. On a very cold day, keep the next hour's food next to your body so it stays soft enough to chew.

Finally, eat before you are hungry and drink before you are thirsty. By the time you feel exhausted on the hill, you are already behind. Keep topping up, keep the portions small, and take every scrap of litter home with you — apple cores and banana skins included.