Today was Day 19 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.
Although it took a stretch of insomnia last night, I've managed to shake off the slump. It may have been seasonal, or stress due to me breaking away from the diet and then going back on, but I can rule out health effects from the diet itself. A big help was getting out and going to a meetup - which proved to have a really pleasant surprise. Overall, it looks like I got a case of the "February blahs" and needed new activities to shake myself out of it.
Today's Meals
The breakfast was the Scrambled Eggs with Ham and Peppers:
Confirming that yesterday's crunchy berries was an outlier, this one reconstituted normally after I followed the instructions.
Oddly enough, I ate it at 3 AM. Not being able to sleep, I front-loaded it into my stomach as a post-midnight snack. It did the trick. Up at a little after 11 AM, and a normal schedule.
The dinner was Rice and Chicken, one of the more common varieties:
As per all the dinners, two cups of boiling water, stirrings and less than ten minutes wait got it reconstituted:
The doughy consistency shows that the rice does absorb a lot of water. When you cook rice in a rice cooker, the water disappears in part because it's absorbed; only some boils off.
There weren't many chicken chunks, but the ones that were there were large. It was spicy, in part to cover up the salt.
Speaking of salt: the Nutrition Facts boxes for both, with the eggs on the left and rice on the right:
shows that both meals are on the high side for sodium content. Mid-high in calories, both comined had enough vitamin C to get by.
The nightly weighing shows:
that I've settled into another plateau. One that might last for a few more days.
Effects, So Far:
The plateauing combined with a recovery does add to the trade off narrative: no loss without discomfort. As already noted, I did bounce back to about normal; the only oddity was pushing forward the breakfast as a go-to-sleep snack. Since the troughing was both temporary and correlates well with other explanations, it seems that the diet itself isn't strict or restricted enough to cause any major upset.
Conclusion
The quality of the food itself was back to normal, suggesting that yesterday's observations were outliers. My weight is more-or-less steady, energy is coming back, and it does look like new activities - getting out and about, as we Canadians say - does diminish going-to-ground.
In the wee hours of the morning, I was tempted to eat more than just the eggs packet. What retained me in part was this series: in a way, it's making me accountable for any lapses.
So.......
Thanks for reading.
And feel free to comment below!
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Day 26