The Thirty Day SHTF Test Diet: Day 23

Today was Day 23 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.

One more week to go, and my weight is holding steady. Consistent with my new habit of sleeping twice and saying up for most of the overnight in between, I again ate the breakfast in the wee hours of the night. The hunger pangs were milder, suggesting that I'm getting used to the new routine. My weight has stayed more-or-less the same for the last several days, which shows that my body might have become used to the fewer calories.

Today's Meals

I frontloaded the breakfast once again. Today's was the Scrambled Eggs with Ham and Pepper:

One cup of boiled water, a few stirrings and less than ten minutes' wait overall and it was reconstituted:

This time around, there wasn't much fluid at the bottom of the packet. The food inside absorbed more of the water. This could have resulted from me letting it sit a bit before eating it.

The dinner was Rice and Chicken:

As with all the dinners, I boiled two cups of water, added it to the pouch, stirred, waited about four minutes, stirred again, waited five more minutes, and:

There's a lot of rice in the packet, and the rice absorbs a lot of water; that's why it comes out semi-solid. Maybe because I'm primed to look for it, the rice tasted salty instead of spicy. The chicken chunks were thin but long.

Despite the volume, the Nutrition Facts box for the rice shows that it's one of the lower-calorie dinners:

As per usual, the scrambled-egg breakfast's is on the left and the rice dinner's is on the right. The values for the dinner are per half packet, so they have to be multiplied by two for the full packet. In the rice's case, that makes for 820 calories. Add the eggs' 380 and you get a total of 1,200.

Both of them are high in sodium. The vitamin counts are low but, in my experience, tolerable.

As I said above, my weight is unchanged:

and that's been the case for the last several days, net. It's the longest-lasting plateau I've been stuck on.

Effects, So Far:

Yesterday, I noted that three weeks is the threshold for turning a routine into a new habit. That could be the case with this diet, but not in a hoped-for way. It seems that my body has become used to the lowered calories and is making a habit of slowing down my metabolism and burning fewer.

The hungries are still there, but less in extent. My habit of sleeping in two shifts in the night and early morning could be a result of that lowered metabolism.

If so, I'm reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Conclusion

My weight has stabilized at least for the moment. If this is in fact due to my body lowering my metabolism, then it's a net blessing that this diet has only a week to go. Although more onerous, diminishing returns make it tempting to suggest dieting in stages: go hard, ease up, go hard, ease up, to mimic a cycle of feast and famine rather than a straight line of famine.

As of the twenty-third day, I've had no health issues (except for the February blahs) and no sign of vitamin deficiency or symptoms of starvation like dizziness, faintness, and so on. It's a week early to say, but it does look like a body could live on these packets alone for a month - provided that said body has stores of reserve fat.

Thanks for reading.

And feel free to comment below!

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