As I mentioned before, I have read and enjoyed Tim Ferris’ first book The 4-Hour Work Week. His straight to the point, no fluff style is what really pulled me in to his writing. As I finished that book, I also realized he backs most or all of his findings with extensive testing and retesting. Not only does this make him more credible to the audience, it adds to the originality of his conclusions.

Although a bit neurotic in his dedication to removing meaningless variables from his tests, he has a very down to earth approach when applying his findings to real life situations. The following is my review on the various sections of new book. I hope you find this 4-Hour Body review helpful.

WEIGHT LOSS CHAPTERS

It was in 2006 that I finally lost the 10 pounds I had put on in college. At this point I have been down around 6-8% body fat for around 24 months. This has given me the ability to continue to play sports recreationally, as well as run my first official race, which is a 10k mud run in the middle of summer. Although it might seem like a small feat, I would have never entertained the idea of running recreationally nor for fun before I lost the weight.

Ferriss stresses that people should always be eating low on the glycemic index in order to maintain your blood sugar level. This is something that I feel strongly about and have been applying to my diet since around the time I started to lose weight. The benefits of this advice goes beyond weight loss. There are dietary additions you can make as well, such as lemon juice or cinnamon. Ferris mentions that by adding these to foods you can literally lower their glycemic index. It was great to read information I had known about for a while now, showing that he has done his own research to verify such findings.

Ferriss has excellent tips for choosing low glycemic index foods. Avoid white flour, artificial sugars, and any refined carbs. One tip that I’ve been casually following for last two years is not to drink your calories. I’ve read mixed information about fruit juices and their health benefits. But Ferris stresses not to drink fruit juices as they pack a ton of sugar. He also writes that you shouldn’t eat fruit because the fructose in it converts to glycerol phosphate and fat to store in your body.

The best part about Ferris’s meal plan is his “Day Off”. He recommends taking a day off every week from the diet plan. On this day you are allowed to eat literally ANYTHING you want, and I mean anything. His suggestion is that by keeping your metabolism up, it aides in the loss of fat throughout the week.

Ferriss endorses not consuming dairy, since it provides a high insuline reaction in spite of it’s very low glycemic index.

The theme throughout his meal plan is that he advocates a high-protein diet with few carbs, “slow carbs” to be precise. You learn that he feels slow carbs provide more stable long-term energy. Since I have been an avid fan of the Paleo Diet for a few years now, I feel strongly that his recommended diet is one that provides true results to his claims.

I appreciate what Ferris has discovered in his book because it doesn’t contain any ground breaking claims of some sort of science exploding diet. Rather, it is a combination of very effective and very well-known ideas. He has combined findings from several theories, tested them, and found which are the most effective while removing the ideas that are not needed. New ideas are constantly being “discovered” with diets, but the truth is we have always had the answers, it just takes the application and discipline that many do not have to find the answers.

Now unless someone tests the hundreds of ideas out there in order to find the fads, we wouldn’t have meaningful and verfiable data. Tim Ferris has taken the time as an honest, down-to-earth run-of-the-mill guy to answer the questions we all have. I highly recommend the diet section of this book! It offers a ton of valuable facts about dieting that took me years to learn on my own.

I’ve heard so many different claims, and had people around me try variations of them all. His diet plan is undoubtedly the best I’ve stumbled upon as it brings together knowledge provided by several distinct areas and does so with some more recent verifiable science.

• Learn to get 95% of the results from 2.5% of the effort
• Binge eating without gaining fat
• Sleep 2 hours per day and be fully rested
• Gain 34 lbs of muscle 28 days
• Reverse permanent injuries
• Give a woman a 15 minute orgasm
• Lose 20 lbs in 30 days with zero exercise
• Hold your breath for 5 minutes

Timothy Ferris is the best-selling author of The 4-Hour Work Week, a book written about his experiences minimizing his time working and enjoying a lifestyle he describes as “The New Rich.” Personally I was a huge fan of his first published work and found his insights to be enlightening. However, being an avid health and fitness buff, I was a bit critical of someone who had previously written a business book now becoming an “expert” on the human body.

What did draw me in about Timothy Ferris writing on such a topic is that he is famous for his ability to test everything in order to find the “Minimum Effective Dose.” In other words getting the most bang for your buck. He tests every variable, inside and out in order to eliminate unnecessary work and time-consumers. The goal is to understand what variables cause the best end result. Ultimately, he does this so that you can spend the least amount of time doing something while still seeing 95% of the results you would if you took the long route.

His methods are known in the internet community as Life Hacks and he pursues them restlessly. The 4-Hour Work Week was formed around the basis of what he calls Lifestyle Design, Tim coined this phrase in his previous book. In it, he focuses on the 80/20 principle, a concept which claims that 80% of your results come from a small amount of your efforts. A majority of your time spent working only yields 20% of your results.  Allowing you to focus on the least amount of work necessary. This idea led Tim to shortening his work weeks to under 4 hours per day while still accomplishing over 80% of the same productivity.

Since becoming a best-selling author from his previous book, Tim has become a notable public speaker, entrepreneur, and internet icon. He is an advisor for StumbleUpon and Shopify, two internet-based companies. At the age of 23 he founded a company from which he formed the ideas in The 4-Hour Work Week. After redesigning his company and allowing him to work remotely from any destination in the world, he applied the 80/20 principle with a new found success. Taking “mini-retirements” as his preferred road map (instead of a “deferred-life” of waiting until 60 to retire), he would travel to countries all around the world and study various arts and languages while running his company BrainQUICKEN.

Eventually selling his company to a London equity firm, Tim has turned to angel investing. He has invested in companies such as Posterous, Twitter, and DailyBurn. Fast Company named Ferris as one of their “Most Innovative Business People of 2007,” not a small award by any means. Some of his other notable accomplishments include a Nation Chinese Kickboxing Champion, a Tango Champion, a Guinness Book of World Records holder for the most consecutive Tango spin in one minute, and a New-York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author. He has a strong following in the internet community, more specifically with his blog.

In his second book, The 4-Hour Body he claims to have recorded every workout he has done since his late teens. Along with a variety of fitness and weight loss methods he has studied, his workout records are the basis on which the book was created. Of the over-abundance of authors nowadays who claim to have discovered the latest and greatest workout / diet secrets, Tim Ferris has years of data and testing to back his discoveries. He notes specifics when needed and his claims are in no way outrageous.

Even though Ferris has no medical or biology background, as a reader you find yourself wanting to believe him. His matter of fact way of explaining the information presented allows you to understand both the background and the “why” of what he is reporting. He also practices what he preaches. Throughout the text he gives real life examples of how to perform the exercises he teaches. There are also virtually no start up costs to anything in the book as well.