Meals 24 and 25: Am I really still doing this?

Yes... I really am still doing this. Right now, there are only three meals I find remotely edible: barley vegetable, western noodle and potato bakon. The rest I'd just like to forget about. Today I ate barley vegetable. I've worked out a system where I just eat 2.5 servings for a meal. That is still only 200-400 calories, so I of course eat other things. After each meal I must brush my teeth. The reason being because some of the left over soup package mix sticks to my teeth and leaves a very gritty feeling. Imagine eating a sandcastle for dinner and that's roughly how it feels for my poor teeth after any of these meals. I suppose I didn't really notice that effect the first few times since I mixed rice in with the emergency rations.

I also went grocery shopping today and decided to look at the nutritional content of some burritos I used to eat: 300 calories per burrito. I remember I would eat 4 of those for a meal plus sour cream. I really want to appologize to my body for all the crap I made it process. No wonder my appendix ruptured last fall. It was tired of all the abuse.

Meal 23: Oatmeal, Holidays, Candy

Click the title for the podcast.

Meal 22: Calorie Counter

I've haven't eaten meal 22 yet. I don't want to actually. I know that corn chowder is what I have in the refrigerator and my body says meh to that. I'll probably suck it up and heat up a bowl of the awful stuff.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I've become one of those people who counts calories in everything. I finally bothered to look up the caloric and fat content of McDonalds foods and it's rather horrifying. A double cheeseburger is roughly 500 calories. Considering that I used to eat two double cheeseburgers and an order of fries on a quasi-regular basis in college scares me. Throw in a drink to the mix and I've just gorged myself on a 1500 calorie meal. That's 3/4 of my daily caloric intake.

The problem doesn't stop at the fast food counter. I took a gander at a Chef Boyardee can of ravioli and noticed that a single can had 500 calories as well. All in all, there's a very simple reason America has an obesity problem, all of our foods are stuffed with empty calories. It's something that I've heard time and time again from many sources, but until I acutally took the time to analzye the nutrional value/non-value myself, I guess I didn't really notice it.

The frozen food section is pretty much impossible to shop in anymore. Anything from a can is a damned death trap as well. Anne Marie told me that now I know what women face all the time. Honestly, I kind of wish I had taken the blue pill. Ignorance is bliss after all. Well, I suppose the alternative is to increase my physical activity to match a 4000 calorie a day diet. I've started to become more active as the summer unfolds, but I'm a long way off from 4000 a day.

Meal 21: To be determined

Click on the title to hear the podcast.

Another podcast. When I say that vegetarians are pretentious, I mainly mean the ones who are only vegetarians so they can say they are vegetarians.

Meal 20: Late Night Podcast

To hear the podcast, click on the title of this post.

Ok, so I pulled out the mic and decided to podcast today's post. It's nothing fantastic and you'll have to ignore every time I aspirate a sound. (It means I put out a puff of air when I say words like penguin.) Most everyone does it in their speech, but I'm still trying to figure out how not to do it or not have it show up on the audio recording. Perhaps holding a piece of paper would work or being further away from the mic.

Meal 19: Western Noodle

Western Noodle, chicken noodle. Nothing new under the sun. Today I ate Western Noodle soup for lunch along with an avocado. I know, it's an odd pairing, but a 90 calorie lunch just isn't going to cut it. After reading some of the horrible effects of drinking just beer for a week, I don't think I'll ever be trying that. I may try to fast for three days and see if I attain enlightenment. The longest period I can remember not eating was when I had my appendix taken out. I went a little more than 48 hours without having anything to eat. That experience knocked me down in weight by about 20 pounds.

Maybe this year I'll also try following the dietary restrictions of Ramadan along with my students. My Muslim students looked tired during that time. I never really knew how appropriate it was to ask how the fasting was going. I mean, is it a polite inquiry? Sometimes my students would tell me about the dinner they ate after sundown and it sounded amazing.

Were I not teaching, I'd like to travel around the world eating strange and exotic foods. I could be one of those snarky hosts on the TLC or discovery channel or food network. Too bad I mainly have a face for podcasting/radio.

Hmm, is it ironic that I'm eating Western Noodle and talking about Muslim holidays?

Meal 18: Soup Silt and Beer Diet

Western Noodle again. It's more or less like eating chicken noodle soup. The disturbing part with eating any of these meals has to do with the sediment of soup mix that is left in the pot after you're done eating. It's got the consistency of sand and I imagine the same health benefits. Of course, by not eating it, I probably lose out on a few calories. Every calories counts!

I've thought off another interesting experiment. I wonder what it would be like to try to live on beer and lager for an entire week. Now, I know that probably isn't very healthy, but one pint of Guinness has more calories in it then a serving of any of the meals I eat. My body would probably hold up just fine in the long run, but I'm sure the short term effects would be pretty harsh. I know in the ye olden days that beer was the beverage of choice because water would spoil. If it's good enough for the Monks, the Pilgrims, and Kings, then it's good enough for me. If I blogged about the event, I doubt I'd have a very lucid record. I'm sure it would be highly entertaining to read though.

Meal 17:

Another post-apocalyptic journal entry to break up the monotony.

May 13, 2023


Summer approaches. The lurchers are much more active. Hard to predict their movements in the summer. They're erratic and out at all hours of the night. Can't afford to sleep on the ground any more. Must take shelter in abandoned cars and trees.

I saw a dog today. Didn't look like he had turned yet. A rare thing these days. Thought about shooting it. Decided to save the ammo for things that might eat me. Plus Bill always sighted my rifle for me. You would think I could do it myself, but I hate the horrid gun.

Haven't had meat in over two months so that tempted me a little. I couldn't tell you what animal it was I ate last. The dog was pitiful, missing an ear and limping in pain, a dead giveaway that it wasn't feral. Lurching animals or people don't feel pain. If you have the time, one shot is all you need to kill them. Their blood doesn't clot well, so they bleed out pretty quick. But blood attracts them in hordes. Best to just run away. Always best to run away. They don't run of course. Shuffle shuffle, the lurcher shuffle.

Tried eating one of the rations dry. Nearly chocked and my stomach is rolling in knots. I need to find a car to lie down in. One day the lurchers will learn how to open doors and then I'll be screwed. Until then, cars are always safe.

Dead.

That's about all I can say for sure about it.

I'm taking the long road to Kansas City.

Meal 16: Nothing to it

Potato soup and deviled eggs. Nothing exciting for dinner, but I'm full. One of the nice things about this diet is that I don't really have to think much about what I'm going to cook. I boil water, drop the soup mix in and in 25 minutes I'm getting my sodium overload. I refuse to believe that these meals were designed as anything but a sodium delivery system. The calories are just an unintended side effect of the process.

This morning I ate oatmeal again. I tried eating it with sugar but I find myself preferring a spicier start. It got to that point where I knew I wasn't full yet, but my stomach balked at eating more. It reminded of watching babies eat food from jars. Eventually they get to a point where you spoon a glob of mashed green beans into their mouth and they just spit it out all over their chin and bib. However, you know that they aren't really full because it's only the third bite. That's kind of what I was feeling like this morning while eating oatmeal. I like it, but a huge bowl of it causes the stomach to say "no more!"

Let's call this an Easter Egg post. I'm not going to link it on anything except for maybe twitter. I don't feel as if it's really up to my normal writing standards. Then again, I'm writing about eating food out of a damn bucket for weeks on end so I don't know if I really have any room to talk about standards.

Meal 15: No Whey No How

I finally took the plunge and drank a small glass of whey milk. It's not terrible and in a pinch I'd probably drink it, but it's not the milk I'm used to drinking. I figure if I'm going to suffer through the bucket of food, then I shouldn't have to suffer through fake milk. It's hard to describe whey milk. It's somewhat sweet and has a very distinct smell. I think it might be ok in cereal but on its on, I'll pass. A million times pass. I'll go ahead and keep the extra whey milk, but I don't plan on drinking it as part of this continued adventure.



Tonight I settled on potato bakon soup. It's my favorite meal from the pack and I added some broccoli, croutons, and cheddar cheese. It tastes pretty good when it's all tarted up like that. The added food does a nice job of bolstering my calorie and nutritional needs for the day. I really should just call this experiment, the soup experiment since that's my primary source of nourishment.

For breakfast I had a nice big bowl of oatmeal. Honestly, it surprises me that this survival pack doesn't include oatmeal as one of the meals. It's cheap and nutritional. It also cooks in under a minute. I would recommend oatmeal as part of any camping list or survival kit. Since I'm kind of strange (or haven't you noticed?) I like to add a dash of hot sauce to my oatmeal. Oatmeal is rather bland by itself and hot sauce varies the dish. I'm really trying to eat breakfast on a more regular basis. It's simply healthier for me and there's no excuse to ignore the most important meal of the day simply because I'm lazy.

Meal 11, 12, 13, 14: AKA Crash DIEt

So Saturday and Sunday I committed myself to only eating food from the bucket. I may have cheated and had a cookie but that was it. Instead of eating a single serving, I tend to eat 2.5 servings a meal. In doing this, I am not getting enough calories with this diet. Trying to eat only food from the bucket on an extended basis would be insane. On Friday night I weighed 149 pounds. Today, I weigh 144 pounds. That's a swing of 5 pounds. Some of that has to be water weight, but I'm still not sure how I lost that much weight in one weekend. Of course, yesterday and today I probably averaged 800 calories a day. Right now I'm starving. Then again, I've been hungry all weekend. For some reason, I've been watching cooking shows online. Zero calories!

Since starting this crazy experiment, I've been checking the nutritional levels at the grocery store and pretty much all of the soups have comparable calorie and sodium levels. In fact, any food that's been processed at all tends to have high sodium levels. It's made me very leery about buying anything packaged and processed. My meat intake is also extremely low. The only meat I have in my apartment right now would be the eggs in the refrigerator.

So very hungry. I'm thinking about going to McDonalds or some other awful restaurant to feel full again.

Meal 10: End of the World and Lentil Soup

Ok, here's something completely different. Instead of reflecting on what I ate, I wrote a short diary imagining a scenario where I'd have to eat these rations for real. I may do this from time to time depending on the response. (Oh, I ate lentil soup as well. Very bland.)


May 9th, 2023


Lurchers ate Bill. I suppose that is worth mentioning.

Not much else to say about the incident. When you've seen one man devoured alive, you've seen them all. The lurchers got spooked and left mid meal. No idea why and I didn't bother climbing down from the water tower to ask. I took Bill's Geiger Counter watch but half the time it doesn't work. At least, I hope it's not working. If it is, then I stepped into a world of radiation.

Not very hungry, but am forcing self to eat. We came across a mess of emergency rations from a basement we mined out. Nothing left of the house, but the foundation was still intact. Water purifiers, a dollhouse, and a bucket of dehydrated food in foil pouches for our efforts.

The food is a few years past expiration, but still edible. I don't like dehydrated food. It takes too long to cook. I rather risk the stomach rollers and eat from a tin, but tins are hard to find. Most tins are spoiled too. Sometimes you find a tin and it's dog food. You eat it anyway, because it's food. Dried food is safer to eat, but dangerous to cook. I will never be a chef. Fear and food are too closely linked in the brain. Risky having a fire going for too long. It attracts the lurchers and other scavengers. Only start fire in the middle of the day. Fires at night are suicide. To cook, I get the fire going and bury the coals in a hole, then drop a jimmy-rigged tin of dehydrated food mixed with water. After an hour, I come back and eat. Sometimes the charcoal falls into the tin, but that's ok. Bill said charcoal absorbs radiation and poison. It may also improve the flavor.

Sigh. I hate this food. Maybe I'll find twinkie sticks tomorrow. The map tells me that there used to be a small town in this area. Small towns are best. The big towns are either bombed out or picked over. Lurchers hide in the medium sized towns. Small towns are nice and spaced out and you'll never be cornered by a lurcher. Too slow lurchy McGee!

I thought about shooting myself today, but possibility of twinkie sticks keeps me going. Stupid Bill had to get eaten. Stupid, lucky Bill. I hate him. Then lurchers ate him. Ha Ha Ha. I am so damn poetic.

Meal 9: Corn Chowder AKA Buckshot Soup

The corn chowder (chow-duh) can best be described as buckshot soup. Don't get me wrong, it tastes pretty good, but trying to eat the kernels of corn is reminiscent of biting down on a shotgun shell. If you do manage to chew the kernel at all, it wrecks your enamel and gums up your teeth. It's all the fun of a Butterfingers without the great taste and hypertension.

Since starting this diet, I've been craving things I don't normally crave. Surprisingly, salt is not one of them. Until I added the black beans into the diet, I had nightly cravings for protein, usually in the form of peanut butter. To remedy this, I would take the minimalist PB and J sandwich approach and just eat a large spoonful of peanut butter. That actually seemed to work pretty well. Another thing I've noticed is that my normally dormant sweet tooth is aching after every meal. The meals themselves are pretty bland which could explain why I'm craving all those processed sugars.

Since today's my birthday, there's not much chance that I'll be eating anything from the bucket. Full disclosure, I had the corn chowder as a snack last night. Since there are only 160 calories in a serving, it didn't seem like that big of a deal. Tomorrow I'll start eating strictly from the bucket. No outside food. I plan to do this for the entire weekend and may carry it on for a few days over the week. The most difficult part will be stopping myself from snacking. I'm not a huge impulse shopper when it comes to food, but if the snacks are present, I will eat them. I'll still be drinking whatever I deem fit, so orange juice and milk are still on the table.

The emergency bucket comes with whey milk so I might try some of that. I'm actually most frightened by the prospect of drinking the milk than I am of anything else from the bucket. I'm a 2% milk guy and I can taste the difference between whole, 2%, and 1% pretty easily. Anything less than 2% tastes like water; anything more tastes like a melted stick of butter. I've never been a fan of soy milk or goats milks so I don't have high hopes for whey milk.

I may be whey over my head at this point.

Two things

This weekend I'll only eat food from the bucket, no supplements. God help me. My friends are trying to kill me.

Secondly: Really, the hadron collider is going to cause the end of the world? I won't even be able to use the emergency bucket if that's how the world ends.

Meal 8: Avocado Heaven

Dinner is a repeat from yesterday with the exception of adding some guacamole to the mix. Part of any emergency supply kit should be a least 10 avocados. I eat maybe two of them a week. I may have an avocado addiction.The health benefits of avocados are surprisingly numerous. In fact, it's rare that something this good for you, tastes so good as well. While avocados are loaded with fat, it's the good kind. They also lower cholesterol and are a good source of vitamin C, potassium, and folate.

I have to say that the black beans are actually more enjoyable to eat than the emergency ration. It's a simple taste, but a not a bad one. This seems to support the idea of creating and storing my own emergency supply of food. The most important thing for any good emergency supply kit would be having a good deal of spice to keep the food from being too bland. That seems to be the one thing that most of these emergency supply kits are missing, which is odd because it's not like spices would take much room.

Rice, grains, and beans are staples of most cultures, but they don't have too much flavor on their own. It's only in more industrialized nations that we feel the need to flavor our food by over-processing it until it's hardly recognizable. Most of the health benefits get lost as a result, but they do taste good. Perhaps going back to simple foods with simple spices is a better dietary strategy. It's certainly healthier.

I am no longer so enamored with eating all these meals from the bucket; however, I still find the concept intriguing and it's fun to create meals under certain restrictions. It's like Iron Chef, with the key ingredient being salt, or NaCl.



What? How did these get in the emergency bucket? Nom nom nom.

Really?

Please tell me that the five votes for Hadron Collider are all ironic.

Meal 7: Back to Action

You know, it's somewhat hard to go back to a diet of emergency rations after a glorious day of Chipotle. Such is the life of a food adventurer. As you can tell from the picture, I'm eating the Western Stew/rice and black beans. The black beans actually taste somewhat sweet. I was a little surprised by that. Apparently, I could live for a long time on simply brown rice and black beans even if the actual emergency rations have almost no nutritional value. In fact, I' d say the rations have negative nutritional value given the amount of sodium.

Luckily the black bean is there to step in. The black bean is the rockstar of the food world according to many sources who have almost a fetish like appreciation for this little legume. Black beans are an excellent source of fiber, lower cholesterol, lowers the risk of a heart attack, add protein, and can even wash your car! I may have to add some hot sauce to kick up the flavor next time.

I still have another few meals to go for the Western Stew. It's probably not a good sign that I'm bored with it and I've only eaten it twice. I found myself taking a small portion of the Western Stew/Rice simply because I wasn't excited about eating it. If I'm not losing weight from the low calorie meals, I'll probably lose weight from the low taste meals. There's more than one road to malnutrition.

On a side note, pay no attention to that chair in the background with the galaxy pattern. I would love to say that I had that as a child and simply couldn't part with it, but that would be an awful lie and we all know what happens to liars. (They go to hell, but not before the best ones become President.) No, the goofy looking chair is an F and F I bought my freshman year of college. Long story short, the residential director (read: awful hag) took away our lounge furniture and then proceeded to ban us from the lounge because we were too noisy. To combat our lounge ban, we hung out in the hallways. They eventually realized the futility of their choice and allowed us back into the lounge, but they kept the lounge chairs and furniture for another month. The galaxy chair was my defiant solution. I liken my resistance to Ghandi or maybe Malcom X. In the face of adversity, I would not stand idly by and be oppressed.

This tangent on the chair has nothing to do with the bucket challenge, but I thought I'd explain my garish choice of seating.

Meal C: Chipotle and Gruel

This is obviously not a meal that came from the bucket. If it were, I'd have so many buckets, they'd stack to the ceiling. I'd be able to build a fort out of them. No, the reason I ate the massive burrito has to do with the fact that today is teacher appreciation day and Chipotle is giving out free burritos. I can't really pass on the free food. As such, the emergency rations and black beans get to hang out in the refrigerator for another day.

Oddly enough, the burrito is actually chock full of good survival food: pinto beans and tons of rice. Cooked on their own, it's a cheap meal that's easy to store. The tortilla shell is actually pretty easy to make if you wanted to have the whole enchilada (or burrito). I spent two obsessive weeks teaching myself how to make and cook tortillas. I wanted to really master the skill before I moved on. Honestly, it's not worth the effort to make your own tortillas but they do taste better.

One of my coworkers asked me how eating the gruel was coming along. I think that the emergency ration meals are better than gruel, but maybe I'll use some of the pancake mix to make a modified version of it. Basic gruel consists of:

2 teaspoons flour
1 teaspoon of salt
Combine flour and salt with water at separate times to make a paste. Then add to a cup of boiling water.

You can add onion for flavor and use other various grains or nuts (oatmeal, cornmeal, rice, pine nuts,) instead of flour. Grinding up acorns is also a possibility. When I do make gruel, I'll be sure to post the pictures. In 7th grade, I was a workhouse boy in the play Oliver Twist, so I have a long and storied history with gruel.

Please sir, I want some more.

Meal 6: Emergency Starter Meals?

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm not really living off these emergency rations. I'm using them as a side dish or as a base to my meals. As Michael has pointed out, there is simply no way that I could survive on just the contents of the package alone. Well, I suppose I could, but it wouldn't be pretty. In the spirit of the challenge, I've amassed a large collection of dried food to boost my meals. Black beans, red beans, split peas, black eyed peas, great northern beans, white rice, and brown rice. These are all food items that wouldn't perish were my heat and electricity knocked out. Even better, the sodium level for those food items are all low too.

I've surfed the internet for other emergency food rations and found that the full calorie meals are also likely to kill you with their fat content and sodium levels. Sure they meet the caloric demands better, but I wouldn't suggest using them as your main source of emergency food. For one, they're bulky, heavy and expensive. I could pack all the above food items in a backpack and be set for a month.

MREs seem to be better suited for combat situations where you have a main base of operations but don't have the time to build a fire and cook your food. MREs are meant to be eaten on the go. You don't carry a ton of them with you. On average, an MRE has a whopping 1,200 calories per meal and aren't meant to be eaten for more than 21 days. The theory being that logistically speaking, a dedicated food operation should be constructed by then.

As such, a long term survival plan should not rely on MREs. Still, fighting zombies, roving biker gangs or raiders has got to be hard on the body. If put in that situation and MREs are available, I'd chow down. The average solider uses around 4200 calories a day. Survival situations require large energy demands. When you add cold into the mix, your calorie demands skyrocket even further. The worst thing that can happen is that you enter a negative calorie cycle while you're fighting the last vestiges of humanity for control of the non-irradiated water supply. Interestingly enough, I'm learning a lot more about survival strategies due to this experiment and have concluded that my bucket of food is a poor choice. In my current situation where I can easily supplement, it's not half bad. It's more a battle against boredom than anything. I'm still curious to see this thing to the end.


Dinner tonight was western stew. I mixed it with some white rice and I put a pot of black beans to simmer for tomorrow. It tastes ok, but I certainly wouldn't order it on purpose.



Yes, this looks completely unappetizing. Don't worry, I also had an apple and orange juice and milk with dinner tonight. I may have to try out the pancakes this weekend. I figure those can't be half bad.

Meal 5: Rationing?

It appears as though I will not get 275 meals out of this experiment. The portions are simply too small and I'm very much opposed to starving. Tonight I finished off the potato bakon soup which meant I only really got 2 meals out of it. That's a far cry from five. I may be able to cut some of the other meals with rice or various beans. I have very little meat on hand though. In fact, the only meat I do have is in the freezer.

To supplement dinner, I ate an apple, a toasted English muffin with Parmesan cheese, and a glass of milk. It was rather good. So far, I don't feel as if I'm really suffering through this experiment. The boredom of eating the same meal again and again will probably be the biggest challenge.

Now I just need to figure out what will be for dinner tomorrow.

Meal 4: Potato Bakon and Soup Markup

With a name like Potato Bakon, how could it not be anything but wonderful? Surprisingly this meal was quite good. My friend Nick even tasted some and commented that he wouldn't have known it was an emergency ration based simply on taste. I'd put the soup on par with Bear Creek Potato soup which makes me wonder what kind of tremendous markup some of those instant soups must have. In fact, I looked up the nutritional facts for Bear Creek Potato soup and found that it's actually less healthy and more expensive.

Bear Creek 50 cents a serving:

Nutrition Facts Serving Size: About 1 Cup Serving Per Container: About 8
Amount per Serving
Calories	150
Calories from Fat	35
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 4g	6%
Saturated Fat 1g	5%
Trans Fat 2g
Cholesterol 0mg	0%
Sodium 900mg	37%
Total Carb. 27g	9%
Dietary Fiber 1g	4%
Sugars 4g
Protein 2g

Emergency ration 30 cents a serving:



I'm somewhat inclined to write a letter to Bear Creek asking what's so great about their unhealthy and expensive soup? You'll notice that the emergency rations have less sodium and fat. My own potato soup is of course far superior but it takes a heck of a long time to make.

Meal 3: Peanutbutter Infusion

Brunch/lunch today. Cacciatore... again. Only another 22 meals of it. I'm trying to decide what the chunks of faux chicken are. It's not chicken because all the meals are vegetarian so I'm assuming it's soy. At least, I hope it's soy. Since I added rice to the meal, that adds about 200 calories to my diet. All told, that makes for a 360 calorie meal. If I'm not mistaken, that falls somewhat short of a 2000 calorie goal.

One of the things I've noticed is that I'm hungry again about 2 hours after eating. Both the math and stomach seem to indicate that I should be getting more calories. A large spoonful of peanutbutter actually does a pretty good job of quelling those hunger pains and it's also valuable protein.

Most people don't understand why I'm doing this. An acquaintance of mine commented , "If they have to ask, they wouldn't understand." I think that's a pretty accurate observation. I remember watching the interview of Mordicai Gerstein, the man who walked between the twin towers, and I don't think he ever gave a great reason for why he did what he was doing. It was there, it was a challenge and he called it the single greatest achievement ever. I'm not sure I would go that far, but I can understand the unexplained compulsion once an idea takes hold.

Meal 2: Reheated Re-hydrated Meals

If you think that these meals taste good the first time you boil them, just wait until you nuke them in the microwave. I made the mistake of cooking the entire contents of one of the packages which left me with a considerable amount of leftovers. There's still another 2-3 meals leftover that need to be eaten. The caccitore tasted a little bit better actually. I think allowing the water to soak into the noodles and vegetables overnight improved the quality, though not by much. I also peppered it with black pepper, another good tactic.

As I was eating tonight's dinner, I was drinking a soda. Pepsi released Pepsi throwback which uses sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. I wish they would continue to make this version. I'd buy it even at a marked up price. While drinking my sugar laced beverage, I realized that my Pepsi actually had more calories than the meal I was consuming. Now that is tremendously comforting to know I'm getting more calories from sugar water than from solidish food.

A lot of people are asking me why I'm doing this. I don't really have a good explanation for them. At least, when I try to articulate my reasons, it never really seems like anyone understands. Let's just say that it makes sense for me. If anything, it's providing a fount of inspiration for my writing. It can be hard to find a focus and purpose to write and my slow and eventual death via malnutrition seems like a good of subject matter.