The Thirty Day SHTF Test Diet: Day 9

Today was Day 9 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.

Because I attended the Decentral 4th Anniversary Meetup last night and blogged about it afterwards, I shifted more into night-owl mode. As a result, I ate the breakfast much later in the day than usual. Even though there was only an seven-hour gap between the breakfast and the dinner, instead of the usual nine or ten, the "hungries" were stronger today than yesterday. This suggests that my feelings of hunger had been suppressed by routinization.

Today's Meals

Since Mountain House only supplied two varieties of breakfast packets, I flopped back to the scrambled eggs with ham and green pepper:

It took one cup of boiled water, two stirrings and a reconstitute time of less than ten minutes to get it ready:

It tasted like all the others, although it did have a bit more of excess fluid than the others. Lately, I've been wondering what it would taste like if it were reconstituted with cold water, as would be necessary if boiled water couldn't be had.

The dinner was yet another packet of macaroni and cheese:

As per usual, it took two cups of boiling water, two stirrings, and about eight minutes of sitting before it was ready. But rather than show you the standard pic of it after it was ready, I'd like to share you what it looks like before the water's added:

Looks like a party snack, doesn't it?

As a wee bit of a test, I shorted the reconstituting time a bit. Unsurprisingly, the noodles were a bit on the crunchy side - but only a bit.

Effects, So Far:

Staying up extra-late last night and waking up late this morning threw me off the routine. Interestingly, my feelings of hunger became stronger. It seems that a diet is made less difficult by sticking to a routine in which you become inured to the calorie cut.

I might be making things a little harder on myself by eating the breakfast more than an hour after I got up and rolling. Of the three days I did so, two of them saw me feeling hunger and more tired in late afternoon.

One heartening side effect is my weight:

I seem to have surmounted the plateau and am back to losing a little.

Conclusion For Day 9

Although I'm still free from any symptom or sign of malady, and my energy level is still good, today was a bit of a low day. This could be due to not-so-good luck, but it seems to correlate with me changing my schedule around. It seems that hunkering down, schedule-wise, makes it easier to bear a burden.

Thanks for reading.

And feel free to comment below!

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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