calories count

CALORIES COUNT

Food dominates human history, human anthropology and human dynamics ( to include human evolution, but every time I bring that up I open up the whole religious can of worms and I don’t oppose religious folks or their views but rather organized religion and its harmful tendencies, but yet even entering the discussion in the first place is wearying so just forget I mentioned evolution ).  Food First should be your prepping paradigm.  The only thing you can do with extra bullets is to be the last one in the stewpot.  Not that it hurts to have those extra, just that you need food first.  And the first food you need is calories.  Years worth of calories.  Only then do you start approximating your daily diet.  Going into debt to buy a years supply of freeze dried food is beyond retarded.  Get five years of calories from grains, THEN start buying the meats and treats in freeze dried.  Vegetables should be from the garden, the wild and from sprouts, NOT freeze dried.  I don’t care what they claim as far as nutrient salvage, a processed food never equals a fresh one, and you need fresh produce. 

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And if a large portion of your expensive food storage program is wheat, and you should only be eating processed vegetables during the winter, why even bother buying a food storage package at all?  Just buy your wheat and meat separately ( trapping is a good strategy for meat, but you must keep in mind its limitations in terms of human population ).  We’ve covered all this before, and will again because there is so much harmful advice out there ( the Survival Acres and the Green Mountain dude out there can make survival farming work due to their locations and decades of investment, most others can’t following the conventional prepper advice ), but for now let’s table that as “repeat” and cover today’s super secret special subject.  Calories and performance.  It isn’t enough to just say, “1500 calories a day keeps your metabolic functions healthy and are just enough to keep the body from cannibalizing itself” and realize about the only thing you can do on a pound of wheat a day is pull guard duty. 

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You also need to realize how limiting that diet is.  I have a smidge of experience with this, what with my long distance bicycling, my old job at the food bank lifting thousands of pounds a day and my frugal grocery budget.  I was eating three to four thousand pounds a day for this kind of lifestyle.  A thousand in whole wheat, a thousand in meat from deli sandwiches at work, a thousand in sugar ( some days, I just went with appetite which was guided by calorie expenditure. When I didn’t crave extra I hadn’t done so much work ) and a grand in a meat and potato dinner.  I was, literally, tired of grubbing for constant calories, eating four or five times a day.  It really sucked.  Did those humpers at the Food Bank care?  Heck no, stand around chatting or sitting around growing their asses bitches have absolutely no clue the cost of physical labor all day ( on a happy note, they are in even more financial trouble than before, a board member even quoting “I don’t know how our doors are still open” even after a mine donated forty grand a few weeks ago ).

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Once I stopped working and “semi-retired” ( I’m writing four times as much and have less free time a day now, and couldn’t be happier-it just ain’t retirement ), my calorie needs shrank but so did my calories per dollar.  It is amazing the difference it makes when you don’t have a free source of dead animal flesh ( our benevolent and wise ruler had insisted I keep picking up the donation from the gas station deli but required  I throw it all away after a client or two complained about the soggy bread and bad taste of the sandwiches.  As if she should have cared.  But, I got my choice of meat patties every day and forced them down to have enough energy at work ).  Suddenly I went from working heavy labor every day to working very light tasks only.  It wasn’t just the calories themselves but the fact they were protein calories that was important.

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I thought I was going to be able to bike out to my B-POD four days a week and dig a new hole for a future improved hovel.  Hell no.  That didn’t last too many weeks before I got too weak to continue.  A diet of mostly starch and little meat is NOT conducive for heavy labor, not unless you have a suitable body type to allow that.  I don’t have enough fat and meat on my bones.  My metabolism is too fast ( even after slowing down a bit at middle age ).  I even tried JUST biking and no digging and even that extra 600 calories in exercise was too much.  I can bike around town forty-five minutes a day, five days a week, and do housework and some modest exercise ( thirty years after Basic Training, when I swore off doing any more push-ups except semi-annual testing and nevermore, I’m back to that dreaded and tortuous exercise ), cardio and staying active, but I can’t do heavy labor or expend too many calories in toto on my diet.  I’m not weeping too much over the change, but it does put an apocalypse life into perspective.  If you want to do more than sit around, plan on not just more calories but also meat.

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I pedal ONE day a week up to the B-POD, a single increased expenditure of calories and I’m ravenous for the day if not also the next one.  I crave far more than the 600 calories, almost as if I’ve thrown my body into a panic since I’m without a surplus.   A paddy farmer can survive on almost no meat.  That is labor that women and children can perform.  But if you are digging ditches and plowing fields and training to fight using more than firearms or carrying any weight, you’ll need meat.  And stocking isn’t but a modest solution.  It is short term and limited in amount, while still being costly.  Know what your body is capable of and beware exceeding that.

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