Ecological footprint

Today I ran the ecological footprint calculator, which asks questions about my lifestyle and calculates my ecological footprint, or how much resources my lifestyle consumes. After going through the calculator, it stated that my lifestyle would require 4.1 earths if everyone lives with my lifestyle. I found this number startling and surprising because I thought I answered every energy question at the lowest setting. The breakdown of my footprint said that my largest impact was on services. This is probably because of where I live, in a large community building where lots of people live. This large building consumes large amounts of energy for all the people that live in my dorm. It requires about 18.2 global acres of the earths productive area to support my lifestyle. Food also had a large impact, as I consumed the maximum amount of animal products that the calculator would let me select. I consume a lot of animal products because I like to workout, and to support my lifestyle and keep my body weight up I need a lot of protein, which comes from the meat that is served in the cafeteria. It is really staggering to see how much energy and resources I consume, especially since I thought that I entered in a very low energy consumption into the calculator. It shows how large of an impact we really have on our environment even though everyone goes about their daily lives believing that they do not have a very large impact. If I use this much energy, it is probably unbelievable how much energy people that drive a lot consume.
Some feasible ways to reduce my lifestyle could be to reduce the amount of food intake that I consume, since I consume a lot of animal products. The calculator said if everyone did this, then there would be 645million acres saved. Since I live in a dorm and cannot control how the school gets energy, It is hard to change the source of my energy. If I lived in my own home, then it would be easier for me to switch to solar panels or renewable energy. Because of my limited capabilities, some major ways of changing my energy consumption are turning of my electrical devices when Im not using them so that I am not wasting electricity. I could also reduce how long my showers are so that I am not using as much energy to heat the water for my shower.