Eating clean on a warrior diet.

I've always been a proponent of eating clean. This is similar to how I would always tell people to get a full night's sleep, and then be falling off a barstool around 2am. Hey, it happens. :)
On some level, I always grasped that there was something seriously wrong with the manner in which our society was shoving non-sense into their bodies. It goes hand in hand with how I never even considered smoking, because it looks an awful lot to me like you're actually breathing smoke into your lungs. People run out of burning buildings to avoid doing this.
So many people will rant against the dangers of smoking, while poking the last bit of that twinkie into their mouths. What is in that thing anyway? In my adult life I don't think I've ever eaten a twinkie or a ho ho. I've eaten many other foods that are bad for me (is a twinkie even a food?) but not that bad.
I am the guy who really wanted to be healthy and eat clean, but could never pull it together enough to do it consistently. So what turned me around?
Warrior Diet. When I first heard about this diet I was skeptical, and I think that's healthy as long as you don't dismiss it out of hand. To me, it looked like a lot of not eating. For those of you who don't know, I'm a skinny guy. No, you don't understand. Not like you're thinking. At 21 I checked into MCRD San Diego standing 5'8" and weighing 114 lbs. That was my walking around weight. I hadn't been on a prison ship for a year, I wasn't fasting. That was my average weight. Being that small is psychologically demoralizing. Sure I was grappling with guys who outweighed me by nearly 100 lbs. and beating them, but I always knew that if this guy manages to me up and slam me to the ground it's over. You are on the bottom of the food chain when you're that small.
So the concern that I would start losing weight fast on this thing was a valid one. The first week I was doing it wrong, and sure enough I started to thin out. You have to understand that I have read every book ever written. Actually, let me clarify. I have read the first 30 pages of every book ever written. As Rollins pointed out it is primarily so that I can be so impressed with myself that I can say 'Raskalnikov' and have a vague understanding of who he was.
Okay, so I went back and actually read the book, which caused me to up my protein intake throughout the day. Weight went back up, bodyfat plummeted. By the scale I'm only two pounds down, but I'm visibly leaner.
Eating one meal a day makes it much easier to eat clean. I've eaten more vegetables in the past three weeks than I have in the past three months. I'm not joking. Ask Cindy.
Most importantly, I'm not consuming any nonsense. Everything is organic, everything is healthy. Right down to my milk. Oh, did I say I'm drinking milk? I'm the most lactose intolerant guy you have ever met. I smell milk and I'm doubled over in pain. Now I'm drinking organic unprocessed milk, and I get no ill effect.
I have a consistent energy level, no highs or lows. When people hear about the warrior diet they ask what I do for energy during the day. I eat healthy. Problem solved.
Now that I am doing this I'm looking more closely at what is in the foods we eat, and all of the lurking dangers. People tell me it's not that big a deal, but it really is. If you thought there were granules of sand in the gasoline at a certain station, would you pump that into your car if you had another option? So why would you do that to your body?
In addition to the energy and body composition changes I've becomes stronger and have better endurance as my body is not fighting itself at the same time it is fighting an external load.
I'm also much more aware of supporting the independent farmers who produce these fruits and vegetables. Believe me, I'm the last guy who will be complaining about 'Corporate America', but I do believe many companies take the easy way out by overly processing their products and running farms that look more like something out of a science fiction novel. Happy Cows= Happy Milk= Happy Body.
The moral of this story is- Don't expect to live healthy and achieve optimum athletic performance if you're treating your body like a garbage bin.

No, no... I'm a strength trainer.

The other day my girlfriend mentioned that she has stopped referring to me as a 'personal trainer'. Whenever she did this she would then get the follow up question of whether or not I work at 24 hour fitness. Of course she knows that this is a question that will send me off on a tirade of epic proportions no matter how much I try to bite back my discontent with the state of the industry. So she has begun referring to me as a 'strength trainer', and the 24 hour fitness interrogatives have ceased. Thank god. What is a personal trainer anyway? I think it actually makes sense for most trainers to carry this incredibly vague title. Hey, I can personally train you in how to best eat chicken McNuggets, or how to do a rockin' set of cable flyes. No, no... I'm a strength trainer. Or as Will Williams RKC Team Leader takes it a step further I could be an 'Authentic Strength Trainer'. Yeah, I like the sound of that.
You are what you decide you will be. Strength trainers do not get certified via weekend courses or by mail. They find themselves in dark gyms or dusty fields suffering through another lesson learned in pain. They trudge through learning the origin and insertion of the interspinales. They do not vanish on you for two months to go snow boarding or surfing. They do not tone down the training program out of fear you will think it is too hard and quit. If you wanted it easy and ineffective you would work with a personal trainer. One can be a personal trainer of ineffectiveness and potential injury as well as fitness and health.
Or Strength.

TSC Pre-test

I was pretty happy with how this went, considering how slipshod my training has been, and that my hands were wrecked for a few weeks. No excuses though, it is what it is.
I have to work out some deadlift issues. I think it's mostly psychological. I got stopped at 365 pounds, then brought it down to 335 and pulled it without too much difficulty. Key is that I had one of the trainers at Equinox who's a friend of mine watch me pull it. It's not a big mystery that you work harder in competition and when you're being observed. Reportedly I kept my back pretty straight, which I'm happy about. This was also sans chalk, so grip was an issue.
I definitely slacked on the snatches, so I think I can work it up to 90, possibly 95 or 100. We'll see.
I hate pull-ups. I actually get a feeling of despair before doing them.
Here it is:

Pull-Ups- 15
Deadlift- 335 lbs.
24 kilo snatches in 5 minutes- 80