It’s been just around two months since I started the Four Hour Body lifestyle, more precisely the slow carb diet portion of Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Body book. First thing every morning that I am here in San Francisco, I weigh in to see my progress. Some days my weight is up, most times it is down.
I do this in the morning, religiously and on the same scale, so that I can get a consistent measure of my progress. During my trips, which happen far more often than not, I have tried weighing myself on other’s scales with mixed results. Seems my friends and family’s scales are either really nice (I’ve been up to ten pounds lighter on theirs!) or mine is really mean.
Nevertheless, I present to you, my chart of weight loss.
As you can see, there has been a pretty dramatic loss in weight. Twenty-two pounds to be exact. The first week on the diet I had a sharp drop in weight. Most diets work this way as your body is shocked into a new regimen. The first two spikes upwards are from the “cheat days” where you get to eat whatever you like. The much slower drop in weight later on the graph represents my two weeks traveling.
I made a silly decision to start my slow carb diet the week of Pride. But I was tired of putting it off for this reason or that. Family in town, traveling, still having to live in hotels, etc etc.
I knew that this wasn’t going to end any time soon and that putting off this experiment would do me no good. Even if it meant I couldn’t enjoy the food and drinks of Sunday’s Pride Parade here in San Francisco.
This morning I woke up, went downstairs and did my weigh-in. Down twelve pound! Almost too good to be true so I did a scale reset and tried again. Twelve pounds, right there. Wow. Here’s how I did it.
Last week, I went to the grocery store and purchased a weeks worth of food, slow carb food. If you don’t know, here is how the diet works.
There are three things you have to eat at every meal. You can mix this up a bit with spices and different ingredients here and there. I recommend you buy the book. You do this for every meal, six days a week. On your seventh day, your cheat day, you eat whatever you want and as much of it as you want (don’t go too crazy). Continue reading →
I first heard about Tim Ferriss‘s new book, The 4-Hour Body, through commentary on a podcast from the TWiT network. It was during the show that I checked out the Audible version of the book. Unfortunately the reviews were pretty horrible for the Audible version. Not for the lack of quality content but an actual lack of content. A six hundred paged book abridged to just a few hours of audio.
So it came to be that I completely forgot about the book, until I was listening to another podcast, Nerdist Podcast #73: Tim Ferriss. Nerdist is a weekly podcast about all things nerdy and standup comedy related hosted by Chris Hardwick, Jonah Ray and Matt Mira (wow, look at me name drop).
Ferriss was on to talk about his new book, which coincidentally two of the Nerdists hosts were already following. The idea of the book was intriguing enough the first time I heard about it, however, learning all the gritty details, experiments and science really got my interest going. Before the podcast was even over I purchased a copy from the iTunes iBook store.
The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, fixated on one life-changing question:
For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results?
I’m only a few chapters in but I can say it is interesting and I can’t wait to finish it and start putting the new knowledge to good use. The premise of the book is basically that most of what you know about working out, dieting and getting “healthy” is wrong. Not in that calories vs calories out is a lie but rather it is a misconception. And so seem to be a lot of the other things I thought I knew about nutrition.
I’d love one of my nutrition-fanatic friends and readers to give this book a read and tell me what they think. Things like how drinking grapefruit juice before consuming carbs helps burn the carbs instead of storing them. That cinnamon with sugary foods helps more efficiently process the sugar. That fructose is bad, when I had always been told that it was a better sugar compared to sucrose.
Back in February I started working out again, after nearly a one year hiatus. I was in pretty bad shape. The first week of training left me a miserable mess of pain and stiffness. By the second week, and with the help of USP Labs Jacked, I was pain free, running faster and lifting more.
In a month I went from running a 20 minute mile to a 10 minute mile, doubled my lifting abilities in nearly every category and increasing my overall energy and feeling of wellbeing. It was awesome. But then I went on a business trip for a month and broke down my workout a bit. Then there has been the mold infestation that kicked us out of our apartment and took almost all of our belongings, which has really slowed me down.
Tag on the fact that I wasn’t seeing any real results in weight loss, only in performance enhancement. It wasn’t long before I began to lose my motivation.
So in the spirit of Ferriss writing a book about his exercise experimentation, I am going to dedicate a series of posts to my own exercise experimentation using his book as my guide (as well as my personal trainer). So here goes. Let’s see a 20lb fat reduction with muscle gain and let’s make it happen soon! No one wants to spend summer inside right?
A short while back I wrote about a doctor appointment gone horribly wrong. In that post I chronicled my experience at the University Physicians Urgent Care where a doctor insisted that I had a “viral fungal” infection, that I probably had never had a bacterial sinus infection and that all the diagnostic tests I’ve had that had confirmed various things regarding my health were totally wrong.
By glancing at the dark circles under my eyes, she claimed she was able to diagnose this viral, fungal infection, that it was chronic and that I probably have had it for some time now. In reality, I just wasn’t sleeping enough.
She insisted that an antibiotic would do me no good. That I wouldn’t start feeling better for seven to nine more days before saying “I will write whatever prescription you want, what do you want? I don’t think you should take anything but if you insist, I will write whatever you want.”
And now that nine days have passed since my initial appointment I felt an update was in order. Twenty-four hours after my first dose of the antibiotic I requested and I was feeling dramatically better.
Just goes to show that sometimes you know more about your body than the doctor you’re paying to treat it.
After months of waiting for my health insurance to be activated, and after paying for it all the while, I was informed recently that I am uninsurable.
What horrible malady might I have? Cancer? Multiple sclerosis? Heart disease? Let’s take a look at the letter they sent. I’m sure that will tell me why.
Oh, yes. I was denied health insurance because of “*”. Seriously? All you people who think the United States of America doesn’t need a major overhaul of its health insurance industry should look at this and think twice.
For no reason I was denied health insurance. Previously they told me they were waiting on the results of an electrocardiography exam I had nearly three years ago. An EKG that came back saying my heart was in perfect condition. Now they tell me because… asterisk. They literally have no reason for their rejection. I have been dealing with them since August with this mind you.
Welcome to America, land of the brave, the free and the uninsured.
Thanks Republicans who did all they could to prevent people like me from getting coverage and the Democrats that let them do it. Tea Party members… Don’t even get me started.
Share your insurance issues, thoughts on reform in the comments.
As you can see, there has been a pretty dramatic loss in weight. Twenty-two pounds to be exact. The first week on the diet I had a sharp drop in weight. Most diets work this way as your body is shocked into a new regimen. The first two spikes upwards are from the “cheat days” where you get to eat whatever you like. The much slower drop in weight later on the graph represents my two weeks traveling.
