It's the start of Week 3 of The Second Expedition. Yesterday, I broke my 40-hour fast early...it wound up being only 24 hours. I don't think I'll do that in the future and will leave my Sundays be. It was a weird day for me as I also began planning to change my whole nutritional program. It wasn't going to be a shift away from a low-carb regimen and I pushed to make it meet all the RDAs. But, I was looking to make it into a "keto" diet around 70% calories from fat instead of my present 46%. It proved impractical to do with a low calorie approach. At the end of the day, it's all about calories in and calories out. There's no magic meat that'll change that equation. If I have to hit 1800+ calories to hit 71% fat, well, that's about 600 calories more than my diet today and a LOT of time on the elliptical to compensate for it. If I pull the calories down on keto, than I can no longer meet my amino acid req's. I won't even go into ratios. No, the diet I've got is optimal for rockin' weight loss—it can't be beat. Is it a thrill ride? Hardly. But, I've done my time having funzies with food. This period of my life is one of transition—it feels like a time machine. Yes, I wanted to introduce chicken into my diet, but there will be a time for that. When I open up the gates in and add more calories back in, it'll happen. When I'm looking for muscle gains, I'll do it.

But, for now...it's all about the burn.

I'm looking forward to the summer. On sunny days, I've been laying out, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, 15-minutes on each side. I haven't read his paper completely, but the reviews seem to justify my laying out for fat loss:

"'When the sun's blue light wavelengths—the light we can see with our eye—penetrate our skin and reach the fat cells just beneath, lipid droplets reduce in size and are released out of the cell. In other words, our cells don't store as much fat,' said Peter Light, senior author of the study, who is a professor of pharmacology and the director of the U of A's Alberta Diabetes Institute'" (link).

I may have overtrained yesterday, for I was fighting against fatigue most of my workout this morning, preventing me from taking it to a higher gear until the last 20 or 30 minutes. My body tempted my spirit to quit, but I didn't. It was important to hit that 6AM mark. Who knows—without his movies, perhaps the powers of Tom Cruise left me? After the morning workout and my protein shake, I began cutting the grass around 6:50AM, finished around 9:11AM, and I then loaded up the trash in my truck, and headed off to the satellite dump.

I still have another hour of cardio to squeeze into this day until I can close the book on the 2nd week of The Second Expedition.

Without weighing, I know I lost substantial weight yesterday: after a botched moustache trim, I decided to shave off my entire beard. An 8-month-old beard. You could have found me on Duck Dynasty. It was awesome. Yet, it's nice to see me again.

It's Friday! Of course, I've changed my training so that it no longer marks the end of resistance training. Still, nevertheless, I refill my vitamin dispenser!

I'm at the end of my Tom Cruise action foray as I believe my DVD/Blu-Ray collection is now tapped out. He's a great actor to watch because he just runs so much. I haven't seen The Last Samurai since June 2004; it was on a flight back from my first backpacking trip across Europe. On the same media center that I listened to Hootie and the Blowfish's cover of Goodbye Girl, I watched the movie on the back of the seat ahead of me. I was bored with it, but I'm sure it was the context of where I was in my life at the time, upon my own adventure throughout that year. This time around, some 14 years later, I found the movie to be entertaining while I churn out the sweat on my elliptical.

I'm highly considering making a shift to a minimum of 3 hours of cardio, Mo-Sa. It's not particularly hard to do. I made a change to my alarm to 3:50AM to ensure that I'm not wasting my time in setup, so that I can straight up 4-6AM. I then can hit 30min midday and another 30min at the end. Of course, I said "minimum," and I fully expect to do more. It's experimental, but I've been sliding exercises into my day. For example, as I make the kids oatmeal in the morning, I slip in 20-rep sets of twisting crunches on an exercise ball.

I have a little over 30 days until I weigh-in for the end of the Second Expedition. I fully intend to blow the First Expedition's results out of the water, despite the First's advantages.