Considering your dietary requirements

Current fads about our lifestyles make us watch very carefully what we eat. We are advised to eat five a day, avoid carbs and fats as well as what we call junk food.

However, in reality there is no such things as junk food, simply a collection of calories, carbohydrates, fats and various other chemical groups.

It is just that with our current lifestyles we find that we demand our diet to change so we don’t all end up obese. Human nature seems to be that we are genetically inclined to over eat. In the olden days that wasn’t an issue because we worked so much that the calories consumed were burnt just in everyday living. Digging the soil and planting your food used quite a lot of calories. There were very few fat people back in the old days. Just the squire and his family, the serfs were whippet like. Now of course almost everyone in our country has more than enough to eat. More and more of us are overweight.

So, what does that mean to us in prepping?

Well, it means that after an event we will be heading back to the days where we will be expending a lot of calories just to create our food and live. This will help us get rid of excess fat and we will have to make sure we consume forbidden foods such as carbohydrates and fats. Pasta, potatoes and fats will be your friends and you will burn off any access you have now. That is why these items are in our prepping shopping list.

This shopping list though does create an issue for many of us as after an event we don’t see ourselves going straight into farming or living in the wilds, we see ourselves as keeping our heads down and waiting until people have left or died and we can come out. Our energy requirements will be minimal and our exercise almost non existent. We will need to ensure that we are more careful what we eat and we set up some sort of exercise regime. One where we can balance the food intake, our energy expenditure and our requirements to keep quiet. The current issue we have today and most of us don’t handle it at all well.

It means we will have to watch what we eat very carefully still and ensure we don’t eat the wrong things. We should ensure that we have the foodstuffs in to allow that if we are planning to keep our heads down. So having the facility to store these foods may be a requirement that you need to consider as well as the requirement to exercise. After an event we cannot allow ourselves to stay where we are we must improve and that includes our fitness levels or we simply will not survive. After all we don’t want to disappear to ensure our safety and then come out too fat to move and .

I have a mini gym set up at home comprising several machines. I still remember my exercise regime. Which doesn’t actually need any of those machines ironically. It wasn’t based around building muscle but more in just keeping fit and healthy, that old 80/20 rule we keep going on about.

So no one size fits all again. Pasta and spuds if you are out farming, a lettuce leaf and a tomato if you are bunkering in. As many of us are we must make sure we have enough of each type of food for our needs. Revisit your shopping list and remember for the outdoor life there is no such thing as junk food and for indoor living, almost everything is.