The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [34]
When you feel mired in details or confused by the latest-and-greatest contradictory advice, return to this short chapter. All you need to remember is:
Rule #1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates (or anything that can be white).
Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again.
Rule #3: Don’t drink calories.
Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit.
Rule #5: Take one day off per week and go nuts.
For the finer points, we have the next chapter.
Andrew Hyde is community director at TechStars, a well-known start-up incubator in Boulder, Colorado. He is also an Internet-famous big bargain hunter. I use “big” in both the figurative and literal senses: Andrew is 6′5″ and 245 pounds.
I should say that he was 245 pounds. In his first two weeks on the Slow-Carb Diet, he lost 10 pounds and, perhaps more impressive, racked up incredibly unimpressive costs:
Total per-week food cost: $37.70
Average per-meal cost: $1.34
And this was including organic grass-fed beef! If he’d eaten a big salad three times a week instead of a few proteins, his weekly cost would have been $31.70.
He repeated four meals:
BREAKFAST: Egg whites, one whole egg, mixed vegetables, chicken breast
LUNCH: Mixed vegetables, peas, spinach (salad)
SECOND LUNCH: Chicken thigh, black beans, mixed vegtables
DINNER: Beef (or pork), asparagus, pinto beans
His exact shopping list was simplicity itself. The prices are the per line totals:
1x Eggs (12 pack) $1.20
2x Grass-fed organic beef (0.5-lb cuts) $4
4x Mixed vegetables (1-lb bags) $6
2x Pork (1-lb cuts) $3
1x Chicken breast $2
2x Asparagus bundles $2
1x Organic peas (2-lb bag) $2
1x Pinto beans (1-lb bag) $1.50
2x Spinach (3-lb bags) $6
1x Black beans (1-lb bag) $1
3x Chicken thigh $9
Getting these prices didn’t require a degree in negotiation or dozens of hours of searching. Andrew looked for discounted items near expiration date and shopped at smaller stores, including a Mexican grocery store, where he bought all of his dried beans.
Just to restate an important point: Andrew is an active 6′5″, 245-pound, 26-year-old male, and he exercised three times a week during his Slow-Carb Diet experiment. He’s not a small organism to feed.
He’s also not unique in his experience.
Though you might not get to $1.34 per meal, his two-week experiment shows what thousands of others have been surprised to learn about the Slow-Carb Diet: it’s damn cheap.
The myth that eating right is expensive is exactly that: a myth.
Can fruit juice really screw up fat-loss?
Oh, yes. And it screws up much more.
Not to speculate, I tested the effect of fructose in two tests, the first during a no-fructose diet (no juice, no fruit) and the second after one week of consuming 14 ounces—about 1.5 large glasses—of pulp-free orange juice upon waking and before bed. The orange juice was the only thing distinguishing diets A and B.
The changes were incredible.
Before (10/16, no fructose) and after (10/23, orange juice):
Cholesterol: 203 → 243 (out of “healthy” range)
LDL: 127 → 165 (also out of range)
There were two other values that shot up unexpectedly:
Albumin: 4.3 → 4.9 (out of range)
Iron: 71 → 191 (!) (out of range aka into the stratosphere)
Albumin binds to testosterone and renders it inert, much like SHBG (discussed in “Sex Machine”) but weaker. I don’t want either to be out-of-range high. Bad for the manly arts.
If you said “Holy sh*t!” when you saw the iron jump, we’re in the same boat. This result was completely out of the blue and is not good, especially in men. It might come as a surprise, but men don’t menstruate. This means that men lack a good method for clearing out excessive iron, which can be toxic.2 The increase in iron was far more alarming to me than the changes in cholesterol.
Here is just one of several explanations from the research literature:
In addition to contributing to metabolic abnormalities, the consumption of fructose has been reported to affect homeostasis of numerous trace elements. Fructose has been shown to increase iron absorption in humans and experimental