The GI Diet Blog and Board

USA Network’s Burn Notice is a new series starting next week, and the question has been posed to me: How would you survive? If you had no resources or money, where would you sleep? How would you eat?

This question is a rather timely. I just got off the phone from my wife who was tickled pink when she was given free rice tonight after going into a local chinese restaurant where she had parked her car. For no real reason at all, they didn’t charge her for this. She didn’t want to tell me this at first because rice isn’t exactly on our GI diet plan, but who could blame her for being delighted by this generosity? I’m not sure she’ll be able to have a repeat performance of this of course. She joked that if she did that again, she’ll be known to them as the lady in the denim jacket who came in for some rice again.

Burn Notice is a Spy show about a guy who ends up in his hometown, Miami with no funds, no further contacts from the CIA and must use his wits and survival techniques to figure out his demise. By the looks of the trailer, there’s some quirky ways with which he goes about this.

But folks, let me be perfectly honest here. One’s survival in say… MIAMI or, any large city in California (case in point: free rice) is a far cry from, oh I don’t know, throw a dart anywhere in the middle of a Canadian map and try surviving there in the dead of winter. I mean really, if you’re going to have a choice of place to have no money and no where to sleep, please for the love of heaven, consider a WARM place, ya know what I’m saying?

Sleeping locations is the easy part. Granted, I’ve camped for years outside, with or without a tent. Unless you choose a very rainy location, chances are you’ll be able to find a patch of grass or sand to sleep through the night. A local park, some newspaper, hey you’d be set. Worried about a shower? Soap and gas stations work wonders for keeping clean.

I’m not sure I’d worry about food so much, especially in a big city (again: see free rice reference). Heck, I’d probably do really well on eating less if that was the case, but there’s no doubt in my mind that I’d start to look around my surroundings (isn’t that what spys do?). There’s freebies all over the place if you look hard enough. I’d be looking for Costco’s or any other grocery stores that offer free sampling of their foods. Free food was easy to come by when I lived in Nova Scotia. A friend of mine used to frequently “shop” for the raw produce that was tossed out in the back of local grocery store. It wasn’t hard for her to find perfectly good vegetables such as lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, and cucumber. There’s your garden salad right there!

I’m certainly not posting this to make a social commentary about poverty, but I believe when your back is up against a wall it’s possible for most people to survive by any means necessary. Perhaps that’s why spy shows like Burn Notice are so popular. We want this guy to struggle but we also want him to tough it out. Sometimes antics you see on TV are really reflections of ourselves, and this one promises to be like that.