Day Seventeen - Overeating

A little under 2500 calories this evening. Five ounces of tuna and another protein shake really made it a high protein day. Good thing I like tuna because it's a perfect food for adding muscle. Low on protein? Crack open a can of tuna and you're probably good for the day. Almost 30% of my calories came from protein today. I think that's going to be the plan. High protein on days when I've lifted weights and higher carbs on the off days. That way I'll have ingested a lot of carbs the night before a morning workout routine. That should mean more energy, theoretically.

Day Seventeen - Undereating

Coffee, bit of milk, multi-vitamin, protein shake w/Skim Plus milk, 1 banana and 3 ounces of blackberries. How odd that this seems like a great deal of food to me now. It's perfect though on days when I lift heavy weights. I feel strong everyday and not even a bit overworked.

Day Seventeen - Goal Update

I think I mentioned it yesterday but I've changed my goals for being on the Warrior Diet. Initially I wanted to focus on losing the stubborn fat around my midsection. When the first week went by and I lost almost six pounds and dropped 1.1% body fat, it was pretty obvious that this diet lends itself to accomplishing that goal. But a concern of mine at the beginning was timing. Why would I want to accomplish that by mid-March? That seemed something more suited to mid-May when the nice weather starts in. So right now I've been focusing on eating more calories and protein than I did during that first week and instead I'm going to focus on the muscle building aspect of the program. If the body fat drops, so much more the better but I'm really not looking to lose weight for the purpose of losing weight. I'd rather focus on gaining muscle over the next 2.5 months at which point I can up the cardio and do what I did during week 1 of this experiment. Don't get me wrong, I didn't starve myself during week 1, I ate about the same number of calories I had been eating previously, around 2200, but I've tried to get over 2500 since then. So we'll see how the next two weeks go. It was interesting that I dropped the 6 pounds, increased the calories and gained about 5 back but at a great muscle/fat ratio, for example, dropped 4 pounds of fat and 2 of muscle but gained back 3.5 pounds of muscle and 1.5 pounds of fat. I'll take that every week.

Day Seventeen - Exercise

Nothing but an hour of weightlifting today. Squats, bench press, barbell row, overhead press, and pull-ups. David recommended the 20-rep squat routine. I've seen that before and I'll probably try it at some point, maybe when I decide to cut down for summer, like mid-May or something. I just went through a high-rep workout routine and I'm looking for something a bit different at the moment. I've had good results messing around with the Stronglifts 5X5 so I'm basically doing those exercises in that manner with a little modification to suit my needs. I had a lot of energy this morning and moved up in weight in all the lifts, except the bench press but I did more reps at that weight than last time so it's good.