Out of everything I’ve ever blogged about, my experiments with weight loss using popular tools like P90X have always been the most popular. Perhaps, I’m blogging about the wrong stuff?
Anyway, like most people in the past two weeks, I’ve been completely engrossed by The 4 Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss (the best selling author of The 4 Hour Work Week). In it, Tim talks about a myriad of techniques that he claims, should be seen as a buffet, not a prescription.
My first blog about my experiments with cold exposure actually gained me a lot of comments on Twitter and a few e-mails. Not to withhold too much information, I decided it would be cool to tell people what I took from the buffet table (re: table of contents).
How I lost 5 lbs. in 3 days with The 4 Hour Body
The only way for me to get anything done right is to make an obsessively detailed list. After pouring over the book for days, I started listing techniques and applicable uses into Omnifocus, my to-do list maker of choice. After that, I spent about another day re-arranging tasks into a timeline for a daily schedule of experiments to try.
Here’s a breakdown of what I did last week to lose 5 lbs. The exact details are left out because I don’t want to fully detail everything in Tim’s book without his consent.
1. Before anything, I’ve made this experiment conscious.
Now I had told myself I would take photos, make it my cell phone and computer background as well as take photos of what I eat. I didn’t do all that, but I did download the DailyBurn app and tracked my food consumption, workouts and weight fluctuations.
The free version of the app doesn’t allow you to fully track everything, so I purchased a one month subscription to track all my other nutrients and filled them in with guidelines that I Googled. (A note: most will be based on a standard, 2,000 calorie diet which may not be for you. In fact, DailyBurn will calculate your needed caloric intake so what you will find Googling will not be accurate. I’m bad at math so I didn’t find out what would be MY accurate intake amounts – I merely used what I found as “guidelines”.)
I also only have been tracking my weight and not measuring my body fat percentage or physical measurements. (I really should though). I also decided to blog about it every week or so and here we are.
2. I’m following the “Slow Carb Diet”
I’m also not following this to the letter, but am trying my best to at least make my breakfast Slow Carb.
3. I’m using a series of temperature manipulation techniques
I’ve already blogged about the showering, but let me give you a breakdown of what I did over those 3 days (without exact numbers, don’t want to post the book’s content online, for free):
- Cold water first thing in the morning
- Cold shower in the morning
- Ice pack on the back of neck at night, while playing Xbox
- Cold shower at night
These are the easiest to do. By far the easiest is drinking water in the AM, which I do naturally, just not ice cold water and not the amount the book suggests. Also, putting an icepack on your neck while sitting down is also really easy and not nearly as shocking to the system as the showers can be.
4. I’m doing “Fleur’s workout” and the myotatic crunch
If you read the book, I only did two sets of the work out Tim suggested to “Fleur.” I did one set on Monday, ending with one set of the myotatic crunch and then another set on Wednesday with no crunches. That’s about it.
By now you might be wondering, why did I stop? Well, I’ll save that for another blog post but in the heart of experimentation, you’ll run into failures and mistakes and nearing the end of my week I hit a big one that actually threw me off course for almost an entire week.
Stay tuned.
Also, has anyone heard of http://www.paggstack.com? (Definitely looking into them for a future blog post!)
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