The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [19]
“But somehow, as the school nerd who always got picked last for everything, I had allowed ‘not being good at sports’ or ‘not being fit’ to enter what I considered to be inherent attributes of myself. The net result is that I was left with an understanding of myself as an incomplete person. And though I had (perhaps) overcompensated for that incompleteness by kicking ass in every other way I could, I was still carrying this powerlessness around with me and it was very slowly and subtly gnawing away at me from the inside.
“So, while it’s true that I wouldn’t have looked great in the fancy clothes, the seemingly superficial catalyst that drove me to finally do something wasn’t at all superficial. It actually pulled out a deep root that had been, I think, driving an important part of me for basically my entire life.
“And now I recognize that this is a pattern. In the culture I run in (computer programmers and tech people), this partial-completeness is not just common but maybe even the norm. My life lately has taken on a new focus: digging up those bad roots; the holes I don’t notice in myself. And now I’m filling them one at a time.
“Once I started the weight loss, the entire process was not only easy but enjoyable.
“I started out easy. Just paying attention to food and doing relaxed cardio three to four times a week. This is when I started thinking in terms of making every day just slightly better than the day before. On day 1 it was easy. Any exercise was better than what I’d been doing.
“If you ask the average obese person: ‘If you could work out for ONE year and be considered “in shape,” would you do it?’ I’d guess that just about every single one would emphatically say, ‘Hell, yes!’ The problem is that for most normal people, there is no clear path from fat to okay in a year. For almost everyone, the path is there and obvious if you know what you’re doing, but it’s almost impossible to imagine an outcome like that so far in the distance.
“The number-one realization that led me to be able to keep doing it and make the right decisions was to use data.
“I learned about the basal metabolic rate (BMR), also called resting metabolic rate, and was amazed at how many calories I would have to eat in order to stay the same weight. It was huge. As I started looking at calorie content for food that wasn’t obviously bad, I felt like I’d have to just gluttonously eat all day long if I wanted to stay fat. The BMR showed me that (1) it wasn’t going to be hard to cut calories, and (2) I must have been making BIG mistakes before in order to consume those calories—not small ones. That’s good news. Big mistakes mean lots of low-hanging fruit.1
“Next was learning that 4,000 calories equals about a pound of fat. I know that’s an oversimplification, but that’s okay. Oversimplifying is one of the next things I’ll mention as a tool. But if 4,000 is roughly a pound of fat, and my BMR makes it pretty easy to shave off some huge number of calories per day, it suddenly becomes very clear how to lose lots of weight without even doing any exercise. Add in some calculations on how many calories you burn doing, say, 30 minutes of exercise and you can pretty quickly come up with a formula that looks something like:
BMR = 2,900
Actual intake = 1,800
Deficit from diet = BMR – actual intake = 1,100
Burned from 30 minutes cardio = 500
Total deficit = deficit from diet – burned from 30 minutes cardio = 1,600
“So that’s 1,600 calories saved in a day, or almost half a pound of bad weight I could lose in a single day. So for a big round number, I can lose 5 pounds in a week and a half without even working too hard. When you’re 50 pounds overweight, getting to 10% of your goal that fast is real.
“An important thing I alluded to earlier is that all of these numbers are in some ways bullshit. That’s okay, and realizing that it was okay was one of the biggest shifts I had to make. When you’re 50–70 pounds overweight (or I’d say whenever you have a BIG change to make), worrying