Joe:
For you to be doing something "wrong" you have to qualify what would make it wrong. Your goals should dictate this. One diet might be correct for weight loss but incorrect for weight gain. If your goal is to gain weight then a caloric deficit is "wrong". If your goal is to lose weight then it is "right". That being said, I know your goal is to deadlift a house so I would say that having a bit of a caloric surplus is a good thing. At the same time you don't want to be the size of a house, so don't make the surplus a surplus haha. One of the beauties of strength training is that you can make decent gains without shoveling down ungodly amounts of food.
But really, if you're progressing and not getting fat I'd say your diet is fine. If you're progressing and able to cut some fat, I'd say you're doing something right.
I still object to the amount of whey you're guzzling though.
Eric:
Yep don't over-react to short term fluctuation in mood and appetite. Getting stressed over being stressed is not really a helpful reaction to being stressed, lol. Sometimes it is what it is. And remember regression to the mean.
Beyond that what Joe said about eating for strength versus "bodybuilding" is very important and you've heard me say the same thing a lot of times. Yes you need a lot of nutritional support for strength training but short term alterations in diet don't make that big of a difference except in performance. And that is the key…how much and for how long is performance affected? Strength training, at the end of the day, comes down to performance (rather than the size principle, eh Joe?). If you can 'perform' while dropping weight then do so. If you can perform while "eating when your hungry" then all the better, I say.
