More Goals!!!!!

Over the past few days I've been thinking about things from my daily life that I'd really like to improve.

Nutrition - One that I'm diligently improving would be my nutrition.  I sometimes think I'm way too interested in how different foods/vitamins/supplements affect the body positively and negatively.  I'm consistently finding a way to plan out my meals and add in certain parts of my nutrition that I am missing, while keeping at a minor calorie deficit.
Sleep - Sleep is unbelievably hard for me to regulate for myself, and I feel that it's the #1 important thing for me on my list of self-improvement.  I grew up with a curfew when I was fairly young, though I was sneaky and always found ways to break it and play my little handheld games or read a book when I was supposed to be sleeping.  Even today I'll have worked a 3pm - 11pm shift, have to be back in to work at 5AM, and STILL stay up until 1-2AM.
Studies have shown that 1 month of doing something consistently can make the activity a routine and habit for you, where you will MAKE TIME to do the activity.  My plan is to take advantage of that information, and apply it to consistently waking up at the same time each day.  Since my work schedule tends to push my evenings to 11PM-Midnight area, I'll be looking to be up most mornings by 8:30-9AM, with a good breakfast and after some settle time, a workout to follow.

On the note of sleep/waking up, I recently purchased a new alarm clock.  Specifically I picked up the Philips wake-up light because I got sick of my annoying and frustrating *BEEP BEEP* clock.  I was skeptical about whether or not I'd actually get up to the light or not, but it definitely did its job correctly.  I woke up on time, and I made sure to turn off my *BEEP BEEP* clock before it went off and tempted me to crush it into bits.  The wake-up light is a non-violent way to wake up and the snooze button does not turn the light off, only the sound choice you made to wake up to, (whether it be radio, bird chirps, or some relaxing drumming - more expensive versions have more choices I believe) and is set to a permanent 9 minute snooze timer.  If you got the correct amount of rest for the night you will feel ready to get up and move on with the day, otherwise you'll still feel groggy, but less annoyed.

Time to start working that sleep schedule =)

Goals

First off, it's about time I had a few seconds to hop on and write a bit.  My work schedule has been fairly busy/crazy, for example a Saturday 5AM-1PM, Sunday night 3PM-11:30PM and following up this morning with 5AM-2PM.  Needless to say, getting my correct amount of sleep has been daunting, thankfully this was during my recovery week and not after some tissue-tearing workouts.

Today is the official beginning of my Doubles Phase 2, meaning I throw Cardio X in on my resistance days. Though as mentioned before, since I plan on doing 2 resistance workouts on my Mondays and Wednesdays, I'll be pushing the Cardio X forward to the off-resistance days if I feel too tight on time.
I did Chest, Triceps, and shoulders today and got a TON of pump from my triceps, though my chest and shoulders just felt like they got an average workout, but they just weren't up for the heavy push today, they couldn't keep up.
I had a small fibrous carb meal following that workout consisting of ~7 egg whites + salsa scramble, and 1 cup of broccoli and some greek yogurt.  My mornings nutrition hardly existed, I had an unsweetened iced tea and a protein bar and a skim milk, oddly I didn't feel hungry throughout the day until after my resistance workout.
Following my meal a little time period of rest, and then Cardio X to finish up the night.

Now lets get down to my main focus of this post:

Goals
I've made a final decision of what my fitness goals are up until the end of the year (end of 2011 that is) if I don't surpass them by then.
I want to have my body fat % reach around 10-15%.  That being said, I have a requirement I need to go through before I even bother focusing on numbers, I need to pick up a skinfold caliper and record my % on a regular basis into a spreadsheet.  I'm thinking maybe a bi-weekly check, and I have no idea where I stand right now, my general guess is around 27% but it's just a guess.

In order to reach this goal, I am making a MAJOR nutrition change after doing a large amount of time researching bodybuilding nutrition from beginners up to professional levels (note that my goal is not to be a bodybuilder, but they have very strict and nutritious diets that pack on results fast).

The basic nutrition I'll be acquiring will be my own tweaked version of a "Carb Cycling" diet.  The basic idea behind carb cycling is to maximize your bodies metabolism through low carb and high carb days based on your workout schedule, but doing it in a way to avoid ketosis(When your body goes into starvation mode and drops your metabolism rate a LOT).
...I was going to put a link up for those who were really interested which carb cycling plan I was tweaking, but it seems the page is currently down (Some carb cycling diets are too extreme for my liking).

In general, my nutrition quality is going to jump pretty high, and I'm expecting some pretty nice results maybe even by the end of Phase II.