Lessons learned

• my mental arithmetic is not good as it used to be. I realized that part of it is that I'm trying to take shortcuts, like breaking 190 * 3.5 into 3*200-3*10 + 0.5*200-0.5*10. I'd be easier for me to the think through the multiplication flat out
• in general, it would be a hassle to eat exactly the same number of calories per day. But given food's importance in such a scenario, I'm sure it would become second nature to continously track available calories and consumption rate. It certainly wouldn't be as handy as having a spreadsheet
• my tolerance for the taste of canned foods is generally pretty high
• my tolerance for sodium, not so much. I would feel weird after eating some of the salt-heavy stuff. If the Apocalypse really did go down, I would never get spam or any kind of prepared meat for protein. Even the straight beans had added salt
• the variety I had was pretty good. I can't say exactly how it would extrapolate to the long-term, having the same 10 or so options ad infinitum
• I really missed not knowing what I was going to eat on weekends and popping into random shops to get a snack
• I noticed I would stop on food commercials when trying to skip through ads on TV
• I really missed planning meals in minute detail, working out every dish I wanted. If it was takeout, I'd work out when I wanted to be home, when to place the order, and when to bike over to get it
• Limiting your calories definitely makes you lose weight. That was not my main goal here, but I liked it nonetheless. I view the healthiness of this endeavor as on the same level as those two profs who dieted on McDonald's
• The exposure to food all around me made the whole experience feel more like observing the Sabbath than being in the wastelands. There's an abundance of things that you choose to forego for your own reasons. There is no real psychological break from the availability of food. One Saturday, I saw an Orthodox or stricter couple walking down the sidewalk. The man would check out cars parked on the street occasionally. I guess he was a car guy. He just wouldn't let himself be in one on the Sabbath.

A long time ago, I did a fast just to see what that felt like. I had a diet Gatorade in the morning, a caffeine-free diet Coke in the afternoon, and water the rest of the time. I lasted 72 hours. By the end, I was either imagining food smells everywhere or actually being acutely sensitive to food aroma. I would be sitting at my gym trying to work out while being bombarded with real/imaginary Wendy's #6 wafting down the stairs from the street. The Wendy's was really there, but who knows if I could actually smell that food? 

In this month, I've never gotten to that level of intense hunger. Normal food was all around me. I even ate it a couple of times. Why did I set these rules on myself? I guess just to see if  I could make myself do it. I wouldn't say it was about discipline. It was just about accepting.
I think back to what my mom's college classmate told me about growing up in the Cultural Revolution, in those most destitute times. She said it was never that hard to get through it, because there was no other choice. That's a really remarkable attitude to have.