Today was Day 28 for my test of Mountain House food packets as emergency food, The Thirty Day SHTF Test Diet. Lots of preppers recommend storing food for a disaster; this series tests it out. As detailed earlier, this diet has turned into a weight-loss diet too.
It's down to two days to go. As per usual, I felt no health effects or noticed any sign of vitamin deficiency. Hunger pangs did kick in as of mid-afternoon and faded in and out in late afternoon. My split-shift sleeping has diminished to an early-night extended nap and a late-night main stretch. My weight dropped a bit.
Today's Meals
Continuing with the alternation between the two varieties of breakfast packets, this morning's was the Granola with Blueberries and Milk:
Half a cup of cold water and a good stirring, and it was ready:
But as I learned earlier, letting it sit for a few minutes makes sure that the blueberries are soft. As per the new normal, I ate it in the wee hours of the morning to send me to sleep.
The dinner was the Chicken Teriyaki with Rice:
As usual, two cups of water, three rounds of stirring, and less than ten minutes' wait time reconstituted it:
Once it was ready, the water coalesced into a thick sauce. As the label indicates, there was lots of rice. As has been the case for all these meals, it tasted the same as a frozen dinner cooked up. There weren't many veggies, but there was a fair bit of chicken.
The Nutrition Facts boxes, with the eggs breakfast's box on the left and the teriyaki dinner's on the right:
show that the teriyaki's calorie count was mid-range. Since the values for it are per half-pouch, they have to be doubled for the whole. With this adjustment, it clocks in at 760. Adding the granola's 520 and you've got a total of 1,280: about median. The combo was relatively low in sodium, but quite low in vitamin C. As I've found out this last four weeks, a low-C combo is more-or-less evened out by a higher one. My teeth haven't ached once. ;)
The scale shows a bit of a drop from yesterday:
further confirming that the former plateau I was stuck on has ended. Since there's only two days left, I'm guessing that the above value will equal the weighing on the final day.
Effects, So Far:
Although I have not been tied to my computer, I found today that I read more articles: both news/opinion and ones in my feed here at Steemit. This relative intensity, a mild answer to binge watching, seems to be tied to a pattern of routinization that I fall into when dieting. Although YMMV, I've found that sticking to a routine helps me persevere.
Although I haven't found any ill health while eating these packets, I should note that my stools have become less frequent and I have had two episodes of the runs; neither were serious. Enough said; ye hast been warned. (Hopefully, any real survival cache with these meals will include some bulk food that'll up the calories and add some, er, bulk.)
Other than the routinization, I'm pretty much normal. Just to let you know, night owling is not abnormal for me.
Conclusion
The weight drop was welcome, but today's value pretty much marks the end. That's nothing to be disappointed at: at the above-clocked number, I've lost more than twenty pounds. In so doing, I've gone from obese to borderline obese. My "fatty" pants now require a belt, and I find it noticeably less difficult to squeeze into my old-sized pants (which I kept.)
For a regular weight loss diet, that's not bad. Survival-wise, it's reassuring to learn over the last four weeks that I can tick along with nothing other than the Mountain House emergency food. In a disaster, that means (with a full 30-day box to start off with) that I could get by four weeks without having any other food. That's longer than the longest power outage in Canada that I've read of, and it's longer than any supply interruption in North America that I've read of. That's good!
Thanks for reading.
And feel free to comment below!
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