Protein is your best friend
Nutrition is an extremely important component to staying healthy and staying fit. Unfortunately nutrition is one of the more difficult things to manage when you spend a lot of time in the field. While larger field stations have large enough food budgets and facilities to ensure a stable and balanced diet for their residents, most projects are smaller operations with more modest budgets and less electricity (meaning likely no refrigerators).
For those of us who work in the tropics especially, our diets are almost entirely comprised of rice and beans or (often fried) tofu. This can happen due to simple limitations in availability and storage when working at remote locations, and translates to months and months of a high carb, high fat diet with very little protein.
Field work itself already consists of long and physically demanding days that are difficult enough to recover from with this type of diet. When you add exercise on top of this, you run the risk of putting yourself in a caloric deficit, and sending your body into a catabolic state where your muscles start to atrophy. Both of your authors have experienced rapid weight loss and prolonged fatigue from the combination of poor nutrition and too much physical activity. So for all of you out there in the field, we recommend two things. Make sure you get enough calories, and bring a few supplements with you to the field.
Protein is your best friend in the field! Both of us have found that bringing protein powder to the field has made the biggest difference in preventing both fatigue and the muscle wasting. We have tried sleeping more, taking rest days, drinking coffee, and eating more, but nothing has worked quite as well as getting that missing protein back into our diets. If it is possible to get enough protein from meat, fish, or some other whole food then by all means do so. If your site is like ours however, where you have no refrigerator to keep meat and your supply of beans or soy products have to last until your next shipment, then protein powder is the easiest thing to augment your diet.
For those of you who can get to and from a town regularly, check to see if any of the local vendors sell protein powder. If they do, great! Stock up! If you are too far from any town or the local town simply doesn’t sell protein powder, then we recommend you bring a small supply from home at the start of your field season. We are aware and sympathetic to the fact that you are limited in how much stuff you can travel with and that baggage fees are getting more and more expensive, which is why we have a few recommendations (keep in mind we are not sponsored by or profiting from any of these companies, we simply like their products).
Recently, certain sport nutrition companies have been producing concentrated protein powders (they call them bioactive) that are easy for your body to absorb, and come in much smaller containers with more servings. One that we are really fond of is Man Sports Pure PF3. It comes in an extremely small container that is easy to pack, comes with twice the number of servings than a regular protein powder, and we have definitely noticed that recovery is quicker when incorporating PF3 into the diet. With one serving a day post workout one container lasts about two months! The only drawback is that it is a little more expensive than other protein powders.
If you prefer a more conventional protein, then we recommend Muscletech’s Platinum ISO-Whey. The container is still large and can be difficult to pack, but it is a weigh isolate which is easily absorbed and great for anyone who is sensitive to dairy. I generally transfer the protein into plastic bags to avoid the large container and save space in my luggage. This protein is easy to find and comes with about two months worth of servings at one serving a day post workout, also twice as much protein than usual for the same size container!
If you are not limited by how much luggage you can bring, and are not concerned with price or size of the container, then we definitely recommend Trutien by Body Nutrition. Trutein is a great balanced protein powder that actually reports the composition of their blend, and has some of the best flavors we have ever tried in a protein powder. They sell two container sizes, one with 30 servings and one with 60.
Other (optional) supplements that are great to have if you can find them/afford them/fit them in your luggage are vitamin D3, B complex, and general multivitamins. If you work in an open sunny area, then you don’t need D3, but if you work in dark heavily shaded areas like under dense jungle canopies, then D3 is very important because it has been shown to regulate your serotonin levels and can also help with fatigue. There are other researchers at camp who are not fitness fanatics but have also experienced extreme and long term fatigue have found that they felt much better after taking our advice and incorporating these vitamin supplements into their diet.
But if you had to limit yourself to one supplement to bring with you to the field, then remember, protein in your best friend!
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