The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [51]
Nutrition Data (www.nutritiondata.com) Want to find out how many calories are in your favorite splurge meal or family recipe? Just use the “Analyze Recipe” Nutrition Management Tool on this site to calculate the nutritional value of the dish. You can also save your recipes and share them with others. I use this site often, including for the calculations in this chapter.
Thera-Bands (www.fourhourbody.com/thera) I started doing standing chest pulls with Thera-Bands (primarily gray), which are popular among physical therapists for rehab exercises. Once I got up to 75 reps per set without fatigue, I upgraded to the mini-bands below.
Mini-bands (www.fourhourbody.com/minibands) I now use these for standing band pulls. Made famous by Louie Simmons of the Westside Barbell gym, these bands are often used by powerlifters to add resistance to deadlifts, bench presses, and squats in the upper ranges of motion. On a related note, think age is an excuse? Tell Louie. He squatted 920 pounds at age 50.
End of Chapter Notes
6. Strange enough to begin with.
7. See “The Glucose Switch” for more on this.
8. It’s true that increasing the speed of gastric emptying can increase the glycemic index of meals; that makes it all the more important to blunt that response with a small dose of fructose.
9. Again, see “The Glucose Switch” for more tricks along these lines.
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF FAT-LOSS
PAGG
Without garlic, I simply would not care to live.
—Louis Diat, First Chef de Cuisines of the New York Ritz-Carlton
SUMMER 2007, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
The smoke wisped into the air amid the sounds of summer eating: laughter, beer bottles clinking, and the undeniable sizzle of tri-tip steak on three enormous outdoor grills. All was well in Willow Glen, San Jose, where my parents were visiting me. I was at home, but they had ventured out to explore downtown Lincoln Avenue on a beautiful afternoon, which led them to La Villa Italian restaurant.
My father was standing on the corner admiring the grill work when a thin homeless man sauntered up to his side. After a minute or two of silence and staring at meat and tongs, the homeless man made this opening:
“You know how I lost all my weight? More than 100 pounds?”
My dad was 5′6″ and almost 250 pounds at the time. Silence followed for several seconds, and my father—amused by the approach and more than a bit curious—finally relented: “How?”
“Garlic. Clove after clove. It’s that simple.”
The homeless man didn’t want anything and never asked for anything. He was earnest. After sharing his advice, he just walked away.
As unusual as this encounter was, I had, in fact, been looking at garlic for some time. This was just the final anecdotal push I needed to begin experimenting at much, much higher doses. The homeless man’s contribution to my latest cocktail made it all come together.
The final feedback from one guinea pig, a semiprofessional athlete with approximately 9% bodyfat at 200 pounds, was representative: “I’ve lost 6 pounds of fat in the last week. This is un-freaking-believable.”
Allicin, one component of garlic, appeared to be the missing fourth ingredient in a supplement stack I’d been refining for two years: PAGG.
Before: ECA
From 1995 to 2000, I experimented with a fat-loss cocktail that comprised ephedrine hydrochloride, caffeine, and aspirin—the famed and research-proven “ECA” stack. This was the mixture I used three times per day when on the Cyclical Ketogenic Diet to produce veins on my abdomen for the first time in my life, all in less than eight weeks.
Ephedrine hydrochloride: 20 mg
Caffeine: 200 mg
Aspirin: 85 mg
The biochemistry was spot-on, and dozens of studies supported the effects. If E = 1, C = 1, and A = 1, the three combined have a synergistic effect of 1 + 1 + 1 = 6–10.10
Sadly, the ECA stack is not a free ride. The effects are beautiful and predictable, but there