The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [6]
Most breakthroughs in performance (and appearance) enhancement start with animals and go through the following adoption curve:
Racehorses → AIDS patients (because of muscle wasting) and bodybuilders → elite athletes → rich people → the rest of us
The last jump from the rich to the general public can take 10–20 years, if it happens at all. It often doesn’t.
I’m not suggesting that you start injecting yourself with odd substances never before tested on humans. I am suggesting, however, that government agencies (the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration) are at least 10 years behind current research, and at least 20 years behind compelling evidence in the field.
More than a decade ago, a close friend named Paul was in a car accident and suffered brain damage that lowered his testosterone production. Even with supplemental testosterone treatments (creams, gels, short-acting injectables) and after visiting scores of top endocrinologists, he still suffered from the symptoms of low testosterone. Everything changed—literally overnight—once he switched to testosterone enanthate, a variation seldom seen in the medical profession in the United States. Who made the suggestion? An advanced bodybuilder who knew his biochemistry. It shouldn’t have made a difference, yet it did.
Do doctors normally take advantage of the 50+ years of experience that professional bodybuilders have testing, even synthesizing, esters of testosterone? No. Most doctors view bodybuilders as cavalier amateurs, and bodybuilders view doctors as too risk-averse to do anything innovative.
This separation of the expertise means both sides suffer suboptimal results.
Handing your medical care over to the biggest man-gorilla in your gym is a bad idea, but it’s important to look for discoveries outside of the usual suspects. Those closest to a problem are often the least capable of seeing it with fresh eyes.
Despite the incredible progress in some areas of medicine in the last 100 years, a 60-year-old in 2009 can expect to live an average of only 6 years longer than a 60-year-old in 1900.
Me? I plan on living to 120 while eating the best rib- eye cuts I can find. More on that later.
Suffice to say: for uncommon solutions, you have to look in uncommon places.
The Future’s Already Here
In our current world, even if proper trials are funded for obesity studies as just one example, it might take 10–20 years for the results. Are you prepared to wait?
I hope not.
“Kaiser can’t talk to UCSF, who can’t talk to Blue Shield. You are the arbiter of your health information.” Those are the words of a leading surgeon at UCSF, who encouraged me to take my papers with me before hospital records claimed them as their property.
Now the good news: with a little help, it’s never been easier to collect a few data points (at little cost), track them (without training), and make small changes that produce incredible results.
Type 2 diabetics going off of medication 48 hours after starting a dietary intervention? Wheelchair-bound seniors walking again after 14 weeks of training? This is not science fiction. It’s being done today. As William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace,” has said:
“The future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed.”
The 80/20 Principle: From Wall Street
to the Human Machine
This book is designed to give you the most important 2.5% of the tools you need for body recomposition and increased performance. Some short history can explain this odd 2.5%.
Vilfredo Pareto was a controversial economist-cum-sociologist who lived from 1848 to 1923. His seminal work, Cours d’économie politique, included a then little explored “law” of income distribution that would later bear his name: “Pareto’s Law,” or “the Pareto Distribution.” It is more popularly known as “the 80/20 Principle.”
Pareto demonstrated a grossly uneven but predictable distribution of wealth in society—80 percent of the wealth and income is produced and possessed by 20 percent of the population. He also showed