Today was Day 21 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.
Three weeks in; three full weeks. In what might be an unconscious habit, I got hit by insomnia again after attending another meetup. That could be my unconscious' way of telling me that I should blog about the next one right after I come home. :)
Again, I had to sate my insomnia by front-loading a breakfast; that saw me to sleep. Despite a late start, I stayed steady during the day. Activity does help, even if it involves hauling around somewhat heavy boxes.
Today's Meals
As mentioned above, I had the Scrambled Eggs with Ham and Peppers as a post-midnight snack instead of breakfast:
In the dead of night, with one cup of boiled water, a few stirrings and the usual eight minute wait time:
it reconstituted like the others. There wasn't any item that was dry or crunchy, and the excess fluid once again tasted like egg soup.
Dinner was a somewhat crumpled packet of the good ol' macaroni and cheese:
As with all dinners, two cups of boiled water, stirrings and reconstitution time of less than ten minutes got it ready:
As a note of trivia, the mac and cheese packets are the biggest in volume. When I cut it open at the suggested line, I came close to cutting into a noodle.
It reconstituted well, with only one or two noodles that were a little tough. The cheese does coat the spoon, but easily washes off with water.
The Nutrition Facts boxes, with the one for the egg breakfast on the left and mac-and-cheese dinner on the right:
show that the calories count for this combination is on the high side for these meals. Close to 1,500 calories. Since the area's slated for snow overnight, I'll need them. :)
The nightly check-in with the scale:
shows that I've lost a wee bit of weight. This was not accompanied by a return of the blahs, so it does look like last week's troughing was seasonal.
Effects, So Far:
As just noted, I had a day where my weight dropped and suffering was absent. I wasn't whacked during the day, nor was I paying especial attention to a growling belly. Leaving aside early spring, new activities do help. Attending the Blockchain Law & Regulations meetup last night did help with today, despite the after-meetup insomnia. So did reorganizing my dwelling by moving some hardly-used stuff to a self-storage facility.
There's a chicken-and-egg dilemma with this. Namely, did I perk up through exerting myself, or did I exert myself as a result of (partially) perking up? To be honest, I can't say.
As an aside, skipping breakfast after frontloading it as an after-midnight insomnia cure doesn't seem to have dragged me down.
Conclusion
Although the novelty of this diet has long worn off, along with the pep that the novelty brought, any episodes of lethargy have also worn off. Twenty-one days is the "habit threshold," the stretch of time it takes to turn a new routine into a new habit. Me ticking along normally could be the result of reaching that threshold.
I've broken the "no suffering, no weight loss" correlation, by dropping a little poundage over a day when I wasn't dragged down. Could be good luck...we'll see.
Thanks for reading.
And feel free to comment below!
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