I’m trying a weird experiment. I’m getting a bunch of food, and I’m pledging to eat nothing but that food for the rest of the month (it’s February, so that’s four weeks).

Full Set of Items after Groceries

I call it the “Shipwreck Diet” the idea is that it’s like I was on a shipwreck, and this food was the only thing I could salvage. I got the idea while reading Devolution. In it, a bunch of people are cut off and surrounded by hungry bigfoot (it’s a fun book). The book gets pretty detailed about how they budget food while they’re stuck in place, and it seemed like an interesting challenge.

Some of this is that I want some chance to reset how I think about food. Food scarcity has been a basic fact for most people for the world’s history. I’m slowly dieting. I’m 200 pounds now, and I want to be 180. I keep getting down to that weight and then gaining it back in some years of stress eating. In this case, if I overeat one day, I feel the consequences in a really immediate way.

I’m really good at keeping to strict rules like this. I tend to be pretty successful at diets. My problem has been that I can’t bear to be under strict eating rules forever, and I don’t eat in a very healthy way when I don’t have rules.

So, I’m trying a base of 50,000 calories for the month. This comes out to about 1800 calories a day. I should be 4-8 pounds lighter at the end of the month.

If I was a better planner, I’d have a full meal plan, and I don’t. I have some general guidelines. I’m thinking of this as “fruit week”, “salad week”, “starch week” and “soup week”, because a lot of this food doesn’t stay good for four weeks.

The list

  • 10 cups rice
  • 8 cups chickpeas
  • 4 cups of lentils
  • 24 eggs
  • 28 Yukon Gold potatoes
  • 8 onions
  • 6 leeks
  • 8 bulbs of garlic
  • 2 head romaine lettuce
  • 30 carrots
  • 4 cups of mushrooms
  • 20 bananas
  • 12 apples
  • 30 clementines
  • 5 cups butter
  • 1 cup of mayonnaise
  • 1 cup of cream
  • half a cup of corn starch
  • 5 pounds of tofu
  • 2 pounds of cheddar cheese
  • 2 pounds of chopped frozen green chile
  • 4 cans of olives
  • 2 pounds of wasabi peas

You can see from the list that I’m a vegetarian, but not a vegan. This contains the ingredients for a lot of my favorite soups. I really like crisply tofu.

Not on the list

Spices

Soy sauce, salt, pepper, Orrington Farms Vegan Broth Base, hot sauce will all be in a lot of foods. They have negligible calories and last a long time, and I don’t want to deal with the record keeping.

Diet Soda

One vice at a time. I don’t want to list 50 liters of store brand diet cola.

What Could Go Wrong

Something could spoil. I love eggs. If those two dozen eggs break, I could survive, but it’d be hard. If the garlic goes bad, that’s probably the number one thing that’d make me give up the diet. I’m also worried I’ll end up with the wrong things. Maybe I’ll suddenly realize that I’ve eaten all the fiber in the first couple weeks, and I’ll spend the last two weeks hungry and constipated. Maybe I’ll pace myself badly and just be hungry. Maybe I’ll take all the easy things and spend the last week trying to figure out how to make a meal of corn starch and leeks.

I don’t completely know what I’m doing.

So that’s it

My plan is to write up an update every week, so I’ll let you know how things are at the end of fruit week.