Hello good people, my name’s Burt and I’ve been been lurking this site for a few months now, but I think I finally want to ask for help, because I am well aware that I know next to nothing about this.
My story isn’t too too different from a lot of other people’s stories, so I won’t bore you with my full life story. The gist of it is this:
I was about 185lbs and 5’9" a year ago, overweight with no muscle. Dieted and biked it off over the spring and summer which landed me around 150lbs. About six months later (and six months ago) I started lifting when I transferred to rutgers because my roommate is very much a T-Nation fan, very much jacked, and very much russian.
Anyway, he advised me to spend a few months training for strength, and now I alternate heavy lifting weeks with higher volume weeks. I lift about 4 times a week. My deadlift has gone from about 85lbs to 315, squat is up to 205. I’ve never maxed out, which I’m sure is terrible, so I don’t know what my max is for either of those, but I generally do sets of 5x5 for each.
On days I don’t do those, I do pullups and dips, military press dumbbells, bench (max is around 185), row, and on sundays I’ll usually switch it up to powersnatches or cleans or something like that. My schedule generally looks like this:
tuesday: bench and row, sometimes curls or military press
thursday: squat and deadlift, abdominal planks etc
friday: pullups and dips, power snatches sometimes
sunday: varies
My diet is somewhat of an issue, because I am both motivated and lazy (I surely didn’t lose 35lbs overnight), and doing the research gets really frustrating for me because everyone has different opinions as to how and what I should eat, when to eat, what supplements, etc, so I try not to get too in depth with what I consider to be a budding science at this point. The first 4 months I lifted, I was probably eating under 2000 calories a day because I have body issues and I don’t want to get fat again, but my roommate eventually convinced me to crank it up to 3000kcal/day or more, and pretty much all my size gain has happened in the last 2-3 months.
My typical diet might look like this:
breakfast: oatmeal, 2 hardboiled eggs
snack: protein shake
lunch: turkey burger, whole milk, sometimes roast beef sandwhiches on whole wheat
snack: protein shake
dinner: 2 chicken breasts, whole wheat pasta on lifting days, sometimes 2 6oz salmon steaks, spinach and greens
snack: protein shake, or green apples with peanut butter.
I know that’s pretty bland, but I’m poor as balls and I can’t afford better. I’m lucky enough to have a free gym on campus. For supplements I have protein (obviously), creatine, fish oil, and a multivitamin that I probably paid too much for.
I’m not sure what else I could add, but the bottom line is that I am looking for cost effective improvements and constructive criticism which you’ll all no doubt provide happily, and whatever else you can think of.
As for my goals, I wish to be around 180 lean by christmas, and to increase my squat to 300 at least and my deadlift to 400 or more.
Current weight is 175. If I had to guess, I would place myself between 15% and 18% body fat, because I’m too poor to buy calipers. 
I’ll put up my 6 month side by side when I figure out how.
