The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [31]
First, having arbitrarily decided that 230 pounds was his ideal weight, Phil drew a blue line in an Excel spreadsheet. The downward slope represented his weight decreasing from 258 to 230 over two years. Every day’s target weight, which sat on the blue line, was just 0.1% (approximately) lower than the previous day’s. Easy peasy. See his graph on the next page, where the “blue” line is the middle dashed line.
He then added in two important lines below and above his “target” blue line: his minimum-allowable weight (green line) and his maximum-allowable weight (red line) for each day. He had no plan to hit his exact target weight each day, as that would be too stressful. He just had to keep between the lines.
Interested in Phil’s Excel spreadsheet? Download a blank version at www.fourhourbody.com/phil. Just input your starting weight and desired ending weight, and you can duplicate his experiment.
How?
He weighed himself naked every morning at the same time before eating breakfast. He stepped on the scale a few times and put the average of the results in his Excel spreadsheet. The jagged line above shows his actual weight changes. Gaps represent periods of travel when he didn’t have access to a scale.
Phil kept the spreadsheet in the program he helped pioneer, Evernote.com, so that he could see it from any computer or phone. It was always at his fingertips.
It was pure 100% awareness training, nothing but tracking.
In fact, Phil made a concerted effort not to change:
“I actually made a conscious effort not to deviate from my diet or exercise routine during this experiment. That is, I continued to eat whatever I wanted and got absolutely no exercise. The goal was to see how just the situational awareness of where I was each day would affect my weight. I suspect it affected thousands of minute decisions that I made over the time period, even though I couldn’t tell you which.”
Oddly, he treated excessive drift upward (gaining) or downward (losing) as equally bad:
“The only times I sprang into deliberate action were the few times (seen on the graph) where my weight dipped below the minimum acceptable level. Then I would eat doughnuts or gorge myself to make sure I was back in the ‘safe zone’ the next day. That was a lot of fun. I suppose I would have done the opposite and eaten less had I ever gone over the maximum weight line, but that never happened. The whole point was not to lose weight quickly. It was to see if I could lose weight slowly and without any effort.”
Awareness, even at a subconscious level, beats fancy checklists without it.
Track or you will fail.
End of Chapter Notes
12. Full disclosure: I am now an adviser to both Posterous and Evernote because I believe in the services.
SUBTRACTING FAT
Basics
THE SLOW-CARB DIET I
How to Lose 20 Pounds in
30 Days Without Exercise
Out of clutter, find simplicity.
—Albert Einstein
11:34 A.M. SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009,
SAN FRANCISCO
Text message from London, eight hours ahead, meant to impress:
This is my dinner. Happy times!
The accompanying photo: a pepperoni and sausage pizza so large it doesn’t fit on the screen.
Chris A., a fellow experimenter, and I were having our weekly virtual date.
Text response from me:
This is my breakfast. BREAKFAST. Can you hear the insulin pouring out of my eyes? Woohoo! Ante up, fat boy.
My accompanying photo: two bear claws, two chocolate croissants, grapefruit juice, and a large coffee.
Response from Chris:
LOL … please don’t make me do this …
And so it continued, a text-message eating contest. The truth is, I do some version of this every Saturday, and thousands of people over the last four years have joined me in doing the same. In between pizzas and bear claws, the net result is that the average follower has lost 19 pounds of fat, and a surprising number have lost more than 100 pounds total.
This odd approach has produced something of a small revolution.
Let me explain exactly how Chris and I reach and maintain sub-12% bodyfat, often sub-10%, by strategically