Today was Day 2 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 explained at the start, I'll be eating two of the meal packets - one breakfast, one dinner - and reporting on how the meals go down and the effects.
Important Lesson
I owe thanks to @stevescoins for pointing something out that I didn't even think to check: the calorie count of these meals. Taken together, the two meals are well below a normal diet for anyone above a child. I've learned another lesson, though I could have avoided this one by foresight:
In addition to checking the preparation methods for your emergency food, check the calorie count for the suggested day's feeding. If it's well below the norm, you have to supplement your supplements with enough food to add those calories.
For this "Mountain House – 1-month Food Supply Pouch Kit", I could get the calorie count up to normal range by adding one MRE per day. A cheap alternative would be to store cheap staple food - rice, flour, basic pasta, ramen, beans, or suchlike - and use the Mountain House packs for variety.
That would make for a useful change in a second round. But for this 30 days, I'm sticking to the original plan even though it amounts to a crash diet. Strangely, it's been working out better than the diets I've been on before. As with yesterday, today's packets tasted like real food, there's no discernible effects on my health, and my energy level is good.
Today's Meals
The breakfast pack I chose was scrambled eggs with ham and green pepper.
It took a full cup of boiling water to reconstitute. Interestingly, the recommended water left a little excess fluid, which I supped like a soup from the packet.
This one tasted good. The eggs were fluffy and nothing was off. Because of the freeze-drying, the egg part reconsituted into little cubes.
For the dinner, I picked the turkey tetrazzini.
Preparing it required two cups of boiling water. As I noted yesterday, I'd have to secure an off-grid method of boiling water, and store up enough fuel (wood or propane) to keep doing so, as a hedge against the power going out.
This dinner was like a thick turkey soup:
It tasted like the real thing, though there seemed to be microscopic pieces of gristle in the meat; I couldn't tell for sure.
Effects, So Far:
Strangely, my energy level is still up; no sluggishness. This could be due to the placebo effect, or it could be excitement from a big change in habit. I did have those "hungries," but to a lesser extent than yesterday. The headache I experienced yesterday afternoon-evening didn't reappear today, though that could have resulted from me drinking a little more coffee than yesterday.
Odd. Given the calorie count, I'm effectively on a diet. But if anything, I'm a little peppier than I was when I was eating fully.
The diet part is beginning to show on the scale:
whose number does indicate I could lose a lot of weight anyway. :)
Conclusion For Day 2
Even though I knew today what I didn't know yesterday - that these packets have to be supplemented with caloric food to get the calorie count to normal - today was less difficult than yesterday. It's also less discomfiting than the real weight-loss diets I've been on.
Odd, and I can't explain why.