My 5 week 4 hour body progress
About 2 and a half months ago, i got Tim Ferris’ book The 4-Hour Body, which, among other things, talks about his Slow Carb Diet. It consists of putting a vegetable, meat, and legume at each meal and cutting out carbs and sugar in order to lose weight. That includes pasta, bread, potatoes, except red potatoes, as well as sweets and fruits. Even rice is off-limits on this diet.
At the same time, I have been listening to a podcast called Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott who said at the first of the year very definitively, “I am going to lose weight this year”. He never really went much further than that, but a few weeks later, he mentioned a book called Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It
Our culture has turned these cheap, white foods into the basis for all of our meals and snacks. If you look at pretty much any dish in magazines, there is almost always some sort of carb and/or sugar on the plate because that is what we see as normal, and it is cheap to produce, but in other cultures, only the poorer people eat a lot of potatoes, bread and rice because they are cheaper and filling. But just because they are filling doesn’t mean that they are good for you obviously. And his book is, like the 4 hour body, based on scientific findings, not on exercising and fads.
But one thing that the 4 hour body allows is an anything goes, eat as much as you want of anything cheat day. So, about 5 weeks ago, on February 21, I started doing the 4-hour body diet, and placed Saturday as my regular cheat day each week. I am not going to say that it hasn’t been hard, because it has. There are many times that I would much rather have sweets or bread or pasta over what I am having, (I had someone today set 5 full size snickers bars on my desk as a thank you for some work I did), but I know that my goal is to lose weight and feel better. So I push on and look toward Saturday. Like I said, I started on February 21, and here we are at March 31, and I have lost 10.6 pounds. I went from 215.4 lbs to 204.8 lbs in 5 weeks. Not too bad huh? And especially since I am not that big of a guy, I just wanted to get back to a comfortable weight for me since I have put on my married weight.
But I don’t think I would have stuck with it as long and I would have fallen off the wagon much more if it weren’t for those Saturdays where I could eat the things I missed throughout the week.
One thing I wish that I would have done early on in this diet is to take my measurements to see how much I have lost in inches instead of weight, because that is a better gauge of how much I have lost. But oh well. I know it’s working because my stomach is a little flatter than it was and I think that my face has gotten a little thinner as well.
My goal is to get down to 200, so I am very close, but I may stay on a little longer to get to 190 if things are going well. But we’ll see how it all goes. I like the diet and think it actually is a pretty sustainable long-term diet, which really becomes more of a lifestyle. Because of this diet, I will be making changes for the long term that I believe will help me in the long run. I eat more protein in the morning (eggs, bacon, tomatoes, and yogurt) instead of my smoothie (apple juice, strawberries, mixed berries, peaches, and keifer), which has helped me to regulate my blood sugar so that I don’t have a sugar drop in the afternoons like I used to. And I now know that I don’t have to always eat bread with every meal or there are other options besides french fries when I go out to eat (asparagus is always a welcome change).
Overall, i’m very happy with it and will keep going with my diet for awhile longer to get to the point where I’m happy with my weight and feel good as well. I would recommend the 4 hour body to just about everyone because it doesn’t just talk about how to lose weight, but also how to gain weight, workout, sleep better, as well as lots of other things in the process. Plus it’s a very interesting read because the author, Tim Ferris, has done lots of self-experimentation in order to find what works and what doesn’t. And obviously he has found the easiest way to lose weight with the least amount of effort. Hopefully I will be able to keep most of these changes permanent, but if not, at least I have some headroom before I get back to 215.