Do you expect to live as well during a crisis as you do now? Some may believe they can, because they have never had to survive a crisis, and by the way, they have stuff as they call it, in which to survive.
Survival is hard work, and regardless of your preparations, life will be different and more difficult during a calamity, probably more difficult than you ever could imagine. There is simply no way around this fact. This is something you have to prepare for mentally, as well as, gathering the needed essentials.
If you browse the Internet looking for survival supplies, some retailers will try to convince you that their backpacks practically pack and carry themselves. Their solar gadgets can charge up any device and their emergency stoves can replace your cook stove, and those porta-potties are better than your very own throne in the home. All these items are handy and even necessary in some cases, but keep it in perspective. A bicycle is transportation but it is not the same as driving to town in a motor vehicle. It will be more difficult.
Some survival experts will have you believe that if you have this or that item then a crisis is merely a bump in the road, nothing to see here, because you have certain gadgets and gizmos.
A crisis of any magnitude will be more than a bump. A major crisis will be a crater in the middle of the road, one that will swallow you up if you are not ready. Every day of the crisis, you will either be too hot, too cold, dirty, and gritty and your eyes will feel as if they are filled with sand.
Foods will not taste as good, and you will have a harder time sleeping at night, your nerves will be frayed and you will have less patience to deal with even the most minor of problems. You will not have any energy the first few days because you are loaded up on carbohydrates and you did not go out and work them off with physical activity.
Some people may envision hunting trips and fishing expeditions to supplement their food supply when the SHTF. They see themselves trekking into the wilds during the crisis. Once it strikes however, hunting and fishing is not on the mind, because once called upon to perform potentially life saving survival tasks some people will lose their confidence. Those YouTube videos now seem silly and not all that informative. Some will have a real fear that they are not up to the tasks now, whereas just a few days ago, before the crisis they believed they were. Reality has a way of messing up a perfectly good crisis.
Order it, store it and wait for a crisis. Certain items are needed, and they do work for the most part, but they do not replace what you have now, they are only substitutes, and in some cases not very good ones. Some items may become your only way to survive the crisis, but life will still not be the same.
Food is on everyone’s mind, and it should be, because without it life ceases, but do not deceive yourself into thinking food preparation will be as easy as it is now. If you store what you eat, and eat what you store, then you have some idea of what your diet will be during a crisis and you will know how to prepare some of your meals for the most part. Cooking and baking from scratch is hard work however, and without microwaves, accurate ovens and stovetop burners it is even more difficult.
Canned and dehydrated/freeze dried foods along with Meals Ready to Eat do not of course require much preparation, and for short periods these are ideal because life is in disarray, and you need foods that are easy to prepare. However, stockpiles run low and you may have to begin cooking from scratch. You may need to bake breads, deserts, prepare dried beans, rice, and pastas and make your own sauces from canned tomatoes and you need to know how to make gravies and know how to spice up foods.
Venison does not prepare itself, so if you can acquire fresh meat or even fish it has to be processed and the meat preserved immediately. Once smoked, dried or canned then you need to know how to prepare it for a meal.
Water will be a problem and some of you will be woefully unprepared for the actual amount you really need. You have probably read in some survival manual that the average person needs one gallon of water per day. The one-gallon amount is just for hydration and that may even be a conservative amount if the weather is hot and you sweat a lot. The one gallon a day per person does not include enough for bathing, laundry, cooking and general area sanitation.
According to the USGS the average person, (one-person) uses between 80 and 100 gallons of water a day in the United States. People use water for showers/baths, cooking, cleaning, dishwashing, toilet flushes, and laundry everyday typically.
You of course cannot realistically stock pile 100 gallons per person daily for any extended period, but this means you have to make a conscious effort to conserve water. This may be difficult when you are used to letting the water run while brushing your teeth and taking 30-minute showers, and tossing just one pair of pants in the washing machine to wash, wasting a tub full of water on one item (USGS, 2014).
A crisis is not an adventure and a small percentage of people out there prepare for one as if they are going on a camping holiday. Some people believe they can let things slide during a crisis, things they would not normally consider such as not paying attention to sanitation and the type and amount of foods they consume. During a crisis is when you have to focus more closely on what you eat and on personal grooming and overall sanitation.
You probably will not lose weight in the early days of the crisis and may even gain weight, because of the types of foods that you stockpiled are not typically, what nutrition experts would call healthy foods. They are heavy in calories, fats, sugars and sodium.
The theory is that physical activity will increase during a crisis so survival foods such as MRE’s are heavy in carbohydrates and loaded with calories to give you more energy. However, some people will be secluded in their homes because of anxiety or even fear, so their activity level may actually decrease in the early days.
Surviving a crisis will not be what you imagine now. Some people will sit around their propane heaters all day or by open windows in the summer time waiting on something to happen, but this is not what they envisioned themselves doing during the disaster.
People will be responsible for his or her own survival and for their own comfort and for the most part for their own entertainment. Boredom will be a problem for some, because as stated earlier in the first few weeks if people have enough supplies some will tend to wait to see what happens and this means sitting around.
During a crisis, survival can be measured in minutes and hours. You do not know what will happen in the next hour. You have to be prepared mentally for the situation, and this may be the hardest of all preparations. You can only imagine how it will feel unless you have lived through a catastrophe. Your quality of living will decrease dramatically, and no amount of gadgets, gizmos and canned foods will change this.
USGS. (2014, June). Retrieved 2014, from http://water.usgs.gov/edu/qa-home-percapita.html