The Cron-o-Meter

Since work has been a little slow lately I've had quite a bit of free time on my hands. I thought that since I have about 10 weeks left here in the sandbox that I would work on my fitness a little more. Wouldn't Sarah be surprised if I came home looking like this:

In order to come even remotely close I've been watching what I eat. I'm not talking about watching it go onto my plate and then into my mouth but actually being careful of overloading on calories and carbs. My team leader is a big fitness nut and told me about a program called Cron-o-meter. It's a FREE computer program that you can download from the 'net and it calculates your daily intake for you. After typing in your age, weight, activity level and setting your protein, fat, and carb percentages you input the food and portions that you eat and it tells you how you're doing. It's a very easy program to use. It has a HUGE database of foods and their nutritional value so you don't have to worry about inputting it yourself.

I've set my limit at 2400 calories a day since I'm trying to lose some body fat. In order to not lose muscle I need to up my protein by A LOT. The hard part is that I like carbs. They taste sooo good. I've kept track these pass four days and I'm actually not doing too bad. The food selection here sometimes makes it very hard. Yesterday I wandered around the chow hall for about 20 minutes trying to pick something healthy to eat. They tend to fry a lot of the foods that they serve. I'm trying to cut down on my portions at meal time but eat more often throughout the day. Finding and planning healthy snacks can be difficult. It defiantly takes more time and thought trying to eat better.

I've been lifting weights and doing cardio five times a week plus some pull-ups here and there. The lifting program that we're doing now is a higher rep/ lower weight program. It's suppose to help define the muscles instead of just adding bulk. I've never really tried it before so it's going to be interesting to see the results. Last time that I had my body fat checked I was at 14%. I'm trying hard to get around 8%.

P.S. I was going to post progress pictures of myself but I didn't want to scare anyone.