The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [26]
8. Also referred to as bio-impedance, or BI.
9. The coldness of the water will also help fat-loss.
10. There are population-specific formulas that give better numbers, but they are not commonly used since most fitness clubs and personal trainers deal with the broad population.
11. www.fourhourbody.com/bodyfat-examples
FROM PHOTOS TO FEAR
Making Failure Impossible
I have a great diet. You’re allowed to eat anything you want, but you must eat it with naked fat people.
—Ed Bluestone
What gets measured gets managed.
—Peter Drucker, recipient of Presidential Medal of Freedom
199.2 …
Trevor stared at the LCD as it delivered the news. He blinked a few times. 199.2. Then he blinked a few more times.
“Holy crap!”
He’d put on about 10 pounds a year after sophomore year in high school, tipping the scales at 240 pounds at college graduation. Now, for the first time since his teens, Trevor weighed less than 200 pounds.
That had been the goal since stepping on a treadmill almost two years earlier, but a distant goal. Breaking the 200 barrier had seemed unattainable. Now he’d done it. The question wasn’t so much how he did it. The real question was: why did it work?
Simple. He’d made an agreement with a coworker: they would go to the gym together three times per week, and if either of them missed a session, that person had to pay the other $1.
In his first gym visit, Trevor walked for four minutes on the treadmill.
Not long thereafter, he ran a mile for the first time since fourth grade.
Now he has run two half-marathons.
It’s not the $1 that matters (Trevor does quite well), it’s the underlying psychology.
Whether it’s one dollar or one inch, there are ways to ensure that the first step takes you to where you want to go.
Cheap Insurance—
Four Principles of Failure-Proofing
I love SkyMall magazines. But one fateful Tuesday, despite my best efforts to read about poolside hammocks and wall-sized maps, I couldn’t concentrate. There was a battle being waged across the aisle on Frontier Airlines, and I had a front-row seat.
In stunned silence, I watched a man, so obese that he needed a belt extension to buckle himself in, eat a full bag of Twizzlers prior to takeoff. He then proceeded to eat a full bag of Oreos, which he polished off before we had reached cruising altitude. It was an impressive display.
I recall asking myself: How can he rationalize eating so much? He had a cane, for God’s sake. The answer was, of course, that he couldn’t. I doubt he’d even tried. There was no logical justification for his behavior, but then again, there is no logical justification for how I hit the snooze button every 10 minutes for an hour or two every Saturday.
We break commitments to ourselves with embarrassing regularity. How can someone trying to lose weight binge on an entire pint of ice cream before bed? How can even the most disciplined of executives fail to make 30 minutes of time per week for exercise? How can someone whose marriage depends on quitting smoking pick up a cigarette?
Simple: logic fails. If you were to summarize the last 100 years of behavioral psychology in two words, that would be the takeaway.
Fortunately, knowing this, it is possible to engineer compliance. Pulling from both new and often-neglected data, including photographic research and auctions, there are four principles of failure-proofing behavior.
Think of them as insurance against the weaknesses of human nature—your weaknesses, my weaknesses, our weaknesses:
1. Make it conscious.
2. Make it a game.
3. Make it competitive.
4. Make it small and temporary.
1. MAKE IT CONSCIOUS: FLASHING AND “BEFORE” PHOTOS
The fastest way to correct a behavior is to be aware of it in real time, not after-the-fact.
The curious case of the so-called “flash diet” is a prime example of the difference. Dr. Lydia Zepeda and David Deal of the University of Wisconsin–Madison enlisted 43 subjects to photograph all of their meals or snacks prior to eating. Unlike food diaries, which require