The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [12]
That hour on the Stairmaster was worth seven calories.
As luck would have it, three small stalks of celery are six calories, so you have one calorie left to spare. But wait a minute: how many calories did that sports drink and big post-workout meal have? Don’t forget that you have to burn more calories than you later ingest in larger meals due to increased appetite.
F*cking hell, right? It’s enough to make a lumberjack cry. Confused and angry? You should be.
As usual, the focus is on the least important piece of the puzzle.
But why do scientists harp on the calorie? Simple. It’s cheap to estimate, and it is a popular variable for publication in journals. This, dear friends, is referred to as “parking lot” science, so-called after a joke about a poor drunk man who loses his keys during a night on the town.
His friends find him on his hands and knees looking for his keys under a streetlight, even though he knows he lost them somewhere else. “Why are you looking for your keys under the streetlight?” they ask. He responds confidently, “Because there’s more light over here. I can see better.”
For the researcher seeking tenure, grant money, or lucrative corporate consulting contracts, the maxim “publish or perish” applies. If you need to include 100 or 1,000 test subjects and can only afford to measure a few simple things, you need to paint those measurements as tremendously important.
Alas, mentally on your hands and knees is no way to spend life, nor is chafing your ass on a stationary bike.
Instead of focusing on calories-out as exercise-dependent, we will look at two underexploited paths: heat and hormones.
So relax. You’ll be able to eat as much as you want, and then some. New exhaust pipes will solve the problem.
A DRUG IS A DRUG IS A DRUG
Calling something a “drug,” a “dietary supplement,” “over-the-counter,” or a “nutriceutical” is a legal distinction, not a biochemical one.
None of these labels mean that something is safe or effective. Legal herbs can kill you just as dead as illegal narcotics. Supplements, often unpatentable molecules and therefore unappealing for drug development, can decrease cholesterol from 222 to 147 in four weeks, as I have done, or they can be inert and do absolutely nothing.
Think “all-natural” is safer than synthetic? Split peas are all-natural, but so is arsenic. Human growth hormone (HGH) can be extracted from the brains of all-natural cadavers, but unfortunately it often brings Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease with it, which is why HGH is now manufactured using recombinant DNA.
Besides whole foods (which we’ll treat separately as “food”), anything you put in your mouth or your bloodstream that has an effect—whether it’s a cream, injection, pill, or powder—is a drug. Treat them all as such. Don’t distract yourself with labels that are meaningless to us.
THE 20-POUND RECOMP GOAL
For the vast majority of you reading this book who weigh more than 120 pounds, 20 pounds of recomposition (which I’ll define below) will make you look and feel like a new person, so I suggest this as a goal. If you weigh less than 120 pounds, aim for 10 pounds; otherwise, 20 pounds is your new, specific goal.
Even if you have 100+ pounds to lose, start with 20.
On a 1–10 attractiveness scale, 20 pounds appears to be the critical threshold for going from a 6 to a 9 or 10, at least as tested with male perception of females.
The term “recomposition” is important. It does not mean a 20-pound reduction in weight. It’s a 20-pound change in appearance. A 20-pound “recomp” could entail losing 20 pounds of fat or gaining 20 pounds of muscle, but it most often involves losing 15 pounds of fat and gaining 5 pounds of muscle, or some blend in between.
Designing the best physique includes both subtraction and addition.
THE 100-UNIT SLIDER: DIET, DRUGS, AND EXERCISE
How, then, do we get to 20 pounds?
Imagine a ruler with 100 lines on it, representing 100 total units, and two sliders. This allows us to split the 100 units