The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss: 3 Takeaways
“The major fears of modern man could be boiled down to two things: too much e-mail and getting fat.”
-Timothy Ferris
Tim Ferriss skyrocketed to stardom with his first book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich back in 2007. From there he has become respected for his podcast interviews and his work and funding with psychedelics through Johns Hopkins. He rode the “4-Hour” wave with The 4-Hour Chef and another called 4-Hour Body An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman.
The 4-Hour Body is a 500+ page book that combines his personal experience with interviews and experiences with the best in the fields of topics including muscle gain, sleep, injury prevention, sex, nutrition, and longevity. The book is loaded with pictures, graphs, and diagrams that help illustrate a variety of techniques (exercises, stretches, etc.) and the results of his anecdotal experiments.
A lot of what I read back then was fringe science but it has stood up to the critics and much of it is now well-recognized and practiced (although I don’t hear anyone talking about 15-minute female orgasms). I covered each chapter in notes and highlights worth reading but I’ve compressed that down to 3 things I learned from reading this book that still has an impact on me.
3 Takeaways From The 4-Hour Body
1. The Impact Of Carbs On Health
Tim Ferriss created The Slow-Carb Diet which has 5 rules including avoiding white carbs (except for cauliflower) and limiting fruit to once a week. He explains:
“Just for fun, another reason to avoid the whites: chlorine dioxide, one of the chemicals used to bleach flour (even if later made brown again, a common trick), combines with residual protein in most of these foods to form alloxan. Researchers use alloxan in lab rats to induce diabetes. That’s right–it’s used to produce diabetes. That is bad news if you eat anything white or ‘enriched’. Don’t eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.”
After lots of self-experimentation using a glucometer to see how carbs impact my strength- and endurance-based performance, I’ve found that my body operates best on a low-carb/high-fat ratio. My approach shares principles with the Slow-Carb Diet including substituting many fruits with vegetables and cutting out most “white stuff” (or, as Michael Pollan says, “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”) which is important to staying low-carb.
2. The Minimum Effective Dose (MED)
Before reading this book, I didn’t think much about the minimum effective dose of, well, anything. If some is good, more is better. In high school, college, and even before I had kids, I had plenty of time and energy so why would I care what the minimum was anyway? Then free time turned into “we time” with the family and squeezing workouts, sauna sessions, and meditation into a day was more difficult than ever.
Ferriss describes the minimum effective dose (MED) as the smallest dose that will produce the desired effect or outcome. He uses the example of boiling water to illustrate this. Water boils at 212°F. If you turn the temperature higher water doesn’t boil more. So, 212°F is the minimum effective dose to boil water.
He gives the MED for strengthening a muscle group like the shoulders = 80 seconds of tension using 50lb once a week. Later in the book, he breaks down a workout routine into push, pull, and leg movements and states that doing one exercise of each group will get you 80% of the results.
He doesn’t give an explicit minimum effective dose for everything, so I dove into the MED of strength training and found out exactly how much it is based on the research.
More than the recommendations for MED I realized that not everything is a 45° line on a graph. In fact, many things you can graph in life are J-shaped. Now I try to find the earliest part of that Goldilock’s effect in everything I do.
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3. How To Improve Sleep
Ferriss and I both have a love of self-experimentation for self-improvement which is one of the reasons I read this book in the first place. At the time it was published, sleep tracking was just beyond a groundbreaking technology. Nowadays this information is made available through a cheap smartwatch but most of us don’t experiment with what truly makes us sleep better. So, he gave us his guinea-pigging results.
Two glasses of wine 4 hours before bed decreased deep sleep by up to 50% but four glasses 6 hours before bed didn’t have this effect.
High-fat and protein meals were better than low-fat and protein meals at sleep latency (how long it takes to get to sleep).
Take a cold bath an hour before bed
Set an alarm to wake you up in the middle of the night for 5 minutes then go back to sleep.
The results of my own data-pointing with sleep are similar to Ferriss’. Alcohol kills the amount of time I’m in deep sleep, cold showers help a bit, and when I wake up in the middle of the night to pee, deep sleep stages follow (although I’ve never done this intentionally).
Contrary to Ferriss, any food too close to bedtime hurts my sleep regardless of the macro content, however, carbs actually help me sleep compared to a higher fat content so I save most of my daily carbs for dinner, about 2-3 hours before bed.
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