My Atlantic nutrition strategy generally worked well. I bulked up before the row, ate well during the voyage, and felt hale and hearty when I reached Antigua.

But I also lost 30 pounds (good), which I then rapidly regained once I reached dry land (very bad). I am to row 3 stages of the Pacific over the coming 2 years, and I don't want to go in for this kind of yo-yo dieting again. So I am refining my nutrition strategy with the objectives of getting rid of these extra pounds once and for all, and then maintaining an even weight throughout the remaining stages of the Pacific row.

So this is how I worked out my nutrition strategy for Stage One.

First, I worked out how many calories I need to take with me.

I calculated my normal Resting Metabolic Rate on dry land by counting calories over a period of several months, measuring my weight, and adjusting the result depending on how many hours of exercise I had done each day (RMR being the number of calories I would burn if I did NO exercise in a day).

RMR = 1808 cals/day, or about 75 cals/hr

Then I worked out how many calories I burned at various heart rates (bpm), starting with generic estimates for calories burned per hour for running, rowing, etc., and adjusting them for my bodyweight, with further refinement based on my empirical observations.

At 105 bpm, I burn 165 cals/hr.

I am planning to row for 8 hours a day on the Pacific. (I rowed 12 hours a day on the Atlantic, but I will be spending a lot more time on data collection and posting website content this time around.)

So to calculate my calories:

(16 hrs x 75 cals) + (8 hrs x 165 cals) = 2968 cals/day

Weather permitting, it should take me no more than 100 days to complete each leg of the crossing, and there should be opportunities to restock after each stage. So for each of the 3 stages I will need:

100 x 3000 cals = 300,000 cals

Or a total of 900,000 calories to get me all the way across the Pacific.

I anticipate that my RMR on board a tippy rowboat will be higher than my RMR on dry land, and I hope that this will help shift the extra pounds. If this doesn't seem to be happening, I may need to reduce my food intake to lose weight.

The next question was what to eat?

My nutrition programme for the Atlantic generally worked very well, but I will be making a few minor modifications:

1. Although I loved my flapjacks and nut/seed/carob bars, they contained quite a lot of brown sugar. This was fine while I was on the ocean, burning over 3,000 calories a day, but my sugar addiction caused significant problems once I got back to dry land. It resulted not only in very rapid weight gain, but also in scary sugar cravings that left me shaking with the need for a cookie or other sugar fix. It took me 8 months to kick my sugar habit. So I will be taking no foods containing refined sugar this time around – my LaraBars contain only fruit, nuts and spices, with no added sugar.

2. I cannot get the same freeze-dried meals that I used last time – Drytech Real Meals – as they do not ship to the US. I have a few sachets left over, which I will use, but I have had to source an alternative. So this time I will use Natural High meals.

3. Commercial Freeze Dried, who supplied me with sachets of peas, sweetcorn, kidney beans, prawns, tuna, ham and chicken last time, also do not ship to the US. I am having a small number of sachets of vegetables shipped over, labelled as a "gift". They are!

4. I will be sprouting seeds again – mung beans and adzuki beans this time. This strategy seemed to work very well last time. Click here for more information about sprouted seeds.

So my shopping list for Stage One (San Francisco to Hawaii) reads like this:

75 Natural High Dinners (assorted)
200 packets of jerky
200 bags of mixed salted nuts
560 LaraBars
5 x 500g bags of freeze-dried prawns
10 x 300g bags of freeze-dried sweetcorn
10 x 300g bags of freeze-dried peas
10 x 300g bags of freeze-dried kidney beans
4kg of mung beans and adzuki beans for sprouting
4 x 1.6kg jars of Go Electrolyte
2 x 1.6kg jars of Rego Protein
USANA vitamin supplements

This adds up to about 76kg of food, compared with my starting-out bodyweight of 58kg (about 130lb).

This breaks down as follows:
35% fat
19% protein
48% carbohydrate
and an average 49g fibre a day.

Boy, that's a lot of fibre. Just as well I'll be on my own in the middle of an ocean.