It’s Day 7 and the hungers have hit hard. Earlier in the week I thought it was smooth sailing, that this year was so much easier than last year. However since Day 5 arrived, it’s been a slow, steady decline in energy and fortitude.

If one was fasting or not taking in any sugars, with the body starved of glucose, they would enter a state of ketosis fairly quickly, within a few days. At this time the switch is made from burning readily available glucose (sugar), to using stored fat. While there’s a lot of debate around nutritional ketosis, burning fats to fuel the brain and body is very efficient and can be quite energising. Just to be clear, to enter that state you’d need to be eating less that 0.5g of sugar each day – regardless of source (including fruit!).

By comparison, on the refugee diet, we’re getting simple sugars the form of white rice and processed flour. Anyone eating this diet is getting so little nutrition (no Vitamin C at all), is extremely low on calories, but yet never enters ketosis. At the same time there’s not enough protein to be sustaining. My calculations put us at approximately 5g of sugar per day (1/5th the maximum recommended intake for women – 1/7th for men). Eating refugee rations puts you on the roller coaster of a high-glycemic diet while at the same time providing a low quality vegetable oil as the only fat (300ml for the week). This means a lot of meals are fried, contributing to the inflammation and general malaise already caused by the quality and quantity of food.

To put this in context, compare the 5g of sugar intake per day on a refugee ration diet to the average Australian daily intake of 60g.

…Neither is a good idea.

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics

How people could possibly raise families on this type of diet is totally beyond imagination. I cannot begin to think what it must be like for parent to watch their children grow up under the duress of a refugee camp, to not have enough to eat, to get sick, to have limited resources (including energy!) to learn. This week has been such a reminder of just how truly fortunate we are to have a safe place to sleep and enough to eat. Scraping the plate for every last grain of rice, weighing each meal out careful to ensure supplies last, the limitations of energy makes me realise just how abundant we.

Thank you all for donating so generously to this cause. We’ve now raised over $1900 and will have our page open for further donations over the coming weeks.

Tomorrow we will break our rationing with pancakes! Time to to sleep so morning comes quickly!