Today was Day 10 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.

It's a milestone day, in that I've stuck to it for 10 days. The novelty of it has worn off, and my energy has gone to ground. Still, the hunger has been manageable and if anything I've been drinking a wee bit less coffee than normal. I've settled into night-owl mode, but have not experienced any dizziness, faintness, sign of vitamin deficiency or any symptom suggesting malady. Fortunately, I've even been spared the flu; oddly, I've been spared from the February blahs.

Today's Meals

I flipped back to the Granola with Milk and Blueberries:

As per usual, it reconstituted with a half cup of cold water; it had some excess fluid that was stained with blueberries:

The granola and blueberries tasted as they should, and the fluid tasted like blueberry juice. The milk part was understated.

Dinner was Rice and Chicken:

Like all the other dinners, it took two cups of boiled water, two rounds of stirring and about eight minutes of waiting until it was ready:

The rice takes a lot of water to reconstitute. The meal was the consistency of dough, and there was no fluid. It tasted spicy but not that salty. Most of the chicken chunks were dark meat.

By request of @funbobby51 , I cut out and took a pic of the Nutrition Facts boxes for each meal. The granola breakfast is on the left and the rice dinner is on the right:

I'm glad he put me up to it. The box for the rice, the one on the right, says the values are for half a packet; they have to be doubled for the whole thing. When that doubling's taken into account, I'm on less of a crash diet than I thought.

Effects, So Far:

In a word, normalizing. My earlier pep is gone and I'm sifting to night-owl mode, both of which are normal for me. Evidently, the novelty wearing off has also worn away my vim.

That said, I'm pretty much at normal for me; I'm not below normal.

The weight loss is beginning to show. Whenever I balloon up, I buy used cheap uniform pants (Dickey's, Cintas) and keep my old clothes. It's a reminder that I'd better get around to dieting some day. Before I started this one, it took a real effort to squeeze into my old pants; as of now, less so.

This is consistent with what the scale shows:

I can say that I lost ten pounds in ten days.

It would be foolish to expect the same rate to hold for the next twenty days - I know this from disillusioning experience- but this month's diet should shed somewhere around twenty pounds. That's not bad.

Conclusion For Day 10

On this, the tenth day, my earlier vim is gone but that energy has not been replaced by depression or sluggishness. The "SHTF Diet" is working as a regular diet. That's good news in itself.

Note: I'll be attending the "Steemit Meetup Toronto" tomorrow night.
Maybe I'll see you there!
Since it starts at 9 PM, I'll post tomorrow's installment as per normal.

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
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16