Today was Day 4 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.
Day 4 saw my pep diminish and the hunger more pangy. The weight-loss component is beginning to bite. No health worries, no faintness, dizziness or any other symptoms. Instead of the vim, I plowed along in a routinized manner. The food again tasted like real food, but I discovered something about the distribution.
Today's Meals
As with Day 2, a packet of scrambled eggs with ham and green pepper.
Reconstituting took 1 cup of boiled water, which left about three spoonfuls of excess fluid. The eggs and the ham were small cubes,
but the egg cubes broke apart easily. As per usual, it tasted like real food.
Dinner was a packet of the notorious macaroni and cheese:
As many cooks know, macaroni is a bit of a challenge to cook properly. If the timing's off, or if the heat isn't distributed right, you wind up with crunchy or soggy - sometimes both. The macaroni in this packet was a bit on the crunchy side, but only a bit. The sauce was thick and salty: unlike the other types, this packet had a lot of salt.
I mentioned distribution above. After a quick check, there were six varieties of dinners - and about 40% of them were mac and cheese. A bit disproportionate.
Effects, So Far:
As said above, my pep was gone today. It looks like the energy I had during the first three days was in part due to an adrenaline jag.
It was replaced by routinization. Today was a physical day for me, as I had to shovel a lot of at-times heavy snow, and the hungries started up late morning. I found that it was easier to stick to a routine as I went through my day, even if the routine entailed shoveling. I'm actually a veteran dieter, albeit of the yo-yo type, and I've seen this phenomenon before: sticking to a routine makes the diet easier, or less difficult.
[This might be due to self-discipline: as some of you may have seen, I forgot to take a pic of the reconstituted dinner before eating it.]
Speaking of dieting:
The weight's still dropping a bit. But as veteran dieters know, it's only a matter of time before I get blocked by one of those infamous plateaus.
Conclusion For Day 4
To an extent, yesterday's mystery has been solved. My boost of energy did come from the novelty of this diet, which upped my adrenaline. Today was different: the first day that I had to concentrate a bit on enduring. Nothing to worry about health-wise, thankfully.
Still plowing forward. Thanks for reading.
And feel free to comment below!
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10