Wartime rationing

 When we were kids at home, mum and dad didn't have a lot of money.  Mum didn't go out to work, she was a housewife with us 4 children to look after.  Dad was in the RAF initially, not as glamorous as it sounds, he worked in catering - I think possibly in the officers mess.  He liked to make out he had a responsible high-up job, he even showed us his medals - they meant nothing to us kids, but he liked to show them off to us.  He left us to go and live with another woman, leaving Mum alone with 4 young kids, I was the eldest at 13 (he buggered off 6 days after my birthday, and on my brother's birthday), my youngest sibling was just 18 months old.  Some years later, I asked Mum what he got the medals for - he'd taken them with him when he left.  She gave an ironic laugh and said he hadn't earned them, they weren't even his - he'd bought them off a market stall!

Anyway, Mum did find life hard after he left, she/we survived on Social Security.  The house was quite often cold - no central heating, just a coal fire in the lounge and paraffin heaters in the bedrooms, but we all had hot water bottles for our beds and lots of blankets and wore jumpers, gloves and hats knitted by our Nanna.  We never went hungry - Mum cooked from scratch - well, ready meals and processed stuff wasn't really a thing back then.  She wasn't an adventurous cook, I don't think she even really liked cooking, but we had good, filling meals and if we were still hungry, there was always bread and homemade jam to fill up on.  I think Mum made similar meals to what her mum had made - mum was a child during WW2 so obviously her mother cooked meals according to what was available on rations.

I recently joined a FB group dedicated to living on WW2 rations, just because it interests me.  It's been said that people during the war were actually very healthy (and not fat!), the rations were carefully worked out by the Ministry of Food scientists to give people just what they needed in terms of nutrition to stay healthy.  The woman who runs the FB group (she's called Carolyn Hyland) also has a website called the 1940s Experiment, she tries to live on wartime rations to both lose weight and save money.  She's quite an authority on wartime rations and is currently writing a book, which will be published next month.  

I'm thinking about giving a wartime diet a try, for a couple of weeks initially.  There's not much meat in it, which suits me just fine actually, although husband won't be quite so keen.  There's plenty of vegetables, fruit is a bit limited as so much of it comes from abroad and it won't be our soft fruit season for a few months yet, and of course apples and pears not till the end of summer.  The only thing that concerns me though is that the rationed diet did contain quite a lot of carbs, and I don't do well eating too many carbs.  But I expect I could get round that, with a bit of thought, eating wholewheat carbs would be better for me and I've read that cooking, freezing and then reheating carby foods makes them less likely to cause glucose spikes.

Have any of you tried a wartime diet, or actually lived through rations (I know rationing of some things continued for a few years after the war)?  I'd be interested to read your experiences.