The Thirty Day SHTF Test Diet: Day 22

Today was Day 22 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.

In preparation for a snowstorm that didn't come, I called it a night early and saw my sleep broken up into two shifts. After a bout of graveyard-shift Internetting, I went back to sleep and then carried on. The hungries got intense in late afternoon, despite the fact that I haven't lost weight today.

Today's Meals

Because of that graveyard-shift, I again had to frontload the breakfast into a wee-hours snack. Alternating as usual, I picked the Granola with Milk and Blueberries:

One advantage of this meal is that it's quick to prepare. Since it only requires a half cup of cold water and some stirring, it reconstitutes quickly:

As with the Scrambled Eggs and Ham, the Granola was enough to send me to sleep. As per usual, the berries were soft and the granola was moist. Eating it directly out of the packet eases the process of getting the blueberry- and milk-flavoured excess fluid into the gullet. :)

The dinner was Chicken Teriyaki with Rice:

After the usual two cups of boiling water, stirrings and less than ten minutes' wait, it was ready:

Unlike the Rice and Chicken packet, this one does not turn semi-solid. That's prolly because there's less rice in this one than in the other one.

It tasted like a cooked frozen dinner. The chicken chunks were large, and only one of them had a bit of gristle. The sauce was sweet, as should be with chicken teriyaki.

The Nutrition Facts boxes for both, with the breakfast on the left and dinner on the right:

shows that the chicken teryiyaki is a bit on the low side given its sweetness. (Just to remind, the values for the box on the right are per half-packet: to get the full packet's, double them. The ones for the box on the left are per full packet.) Both of them are on the low side with respect to vitamin C and sodium.

As noted above, my weight didn't change:

If anything, it snuck up a bit.

Effects, So Far:

Maybe it was karmic. Not long after I brought up a correlation between some suffering and weight loss, the correlation broke down. Yesterday, I saw a slight drop without any real discomfort. Today, I had the hungries without any loss. This breakdown does show it's risky to tie diet self-discipline to results (the scale) or a correlation. The only way to see it through is plain endurance topped with hope that it'll turn out.

My graveyard-shifting is technically sleep disruption but it's benign. No matter how late, the Internet always has something to do. Moreover, the current split-sleep has not cut into a reasonably normal day like the split-sleep I endured in late February.

Conclusion

The point about not depending on the scale or a correlation bears repeating. I remember a TV ad that tapped into the opposite: it showed a cartoon woman grinding her teeth through a "brand X" diet program only to get mad after three days when she found that she had gained a couple of pounds. That commercial illustrates the hazard of hooking your willpower to the numbers that show on the scale: there's too much disappointment in store.

The meals were good as usual; other than that split-sleep effect, I've had no symptoms or signs that I've pushed myself to eat too little. I should note that I've shown no sign of vitamin C deficiency - eg., the achy gums that come with scurvy - despite the sometimes-low numbers. These packets are emergency food; my more than three weeks' experience eating them alone shows that they alone will get a body by in an emergency.

Thanks for reading.

And feel free to comment below!

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