Ramit Sethi has always joked about his "Indian frailty."
He had wanted to add muscle to his 127-pound frame for years, but it didn"t happen until he made one simple addition to his life: another bet. Ramit has an entire folder in his Gmail dedicated to bets against friends, all adding up to about $8,000 in prize money.
This time, he bet them all that he could gain 15 pounds of muscle in three months.
In the first seven days alone, he gained five pounds and was the heaviest he"d ever been. In the end, he added 20% to his bodyweight-surpa.s.sing 15 pounds-while keeping his bodyfat low. Now, three years later, he"s maintained his new muscular weight almost to the exact pound.
There were three reasons it worked after years of failing to gain weight.
1. He used a bet and tracked results publicly Ramit set up a free PBworks wiki page (like the pages found on Wikipedia) and invited all the bettors to receive notifications when he updated his weight. He then proceeded to talk an unG.o.dly amount of trash.
Needless to say, smack-talking would make him look doubly stupid if he didn"t win the bet. Ramit elaborates on the accountability: "Use psychology to help; don"t just "try harder." If you"ve repeatedly tried (or committed to do) something and it hasn"t worked, consider public compliance or a bet."
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2. He ignored almost everyone From Ramit: "Everyone has a d.a.m.n opinion. Some people told me I would get fat, as if I would let that happen for a few hundred bucks. And of course, everyone had theories about what to eat, drink, and even what combination of weights to lift.
"More than a few people shrieked upon finding out my strategy (working out, running, and eating more): "What!? You can"t run! You"ll lose too much weight!" All I could do was point out that it seemed to be working: I"d already completed one-third of the bet in the first seven days. There wasn"t much they could say to that.
"Everyone"s got an opinion about what you "should" do. But the truth is, most of them are full of hot air and you can get it done using a few simple steps.
"I ignored every one of them."
3. He focused on the method, not the mechanism "People warned me that I had to understand how lipids and carbs and fatty acids worked before I started. That"s such nonsense. What if I just started working out and ate more? Could I learn all that fancy stuff later? You don"t have to be a genius to gain or lose weight."
4. Make it small and temporary: the immense practicality of baby steps "Take the pressure off."
Michael Levin has made a career of taking the pressure off, and it has worked. Sixty literary works later, from national nonfiction bestsellers to screenplays, he was suggesting that I (Tim) do the same: set a meager goal of two pages of writing per day. I had made a mental monster of the book in your hands, and setting the bar low allowed me to do what mattered most: get started each morning.
Dr. B. J. Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, wrote his graduate dissertation with a far less aggressive commitment. Even if he came home from a party at 3:00 A.M. A.M., he had to write one sentence per day. He finished in record time while cla.s.smates languished for years, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.
Understanding this principle, IBM led the computing world in sales for decades. The quotas for its salespeople were the lowest in the industry because management wanted the reps to be unintimidated to do one thing: pick up the phone. Momentum took care of the rest, and quotas were exceeded quarter after quarter.
Taking off the pressure in 4HB means doing experiments that are short in duration and not overly inconvenient.
Don"t look at a diet change or a new exercise as something you need to commit to for six months, much less the rest of your life. Look at it as a test drive of one to two weeks.
If you want to walk an hour a day, don"t start with one hour. Choosing one hour is automatically building in the excuse of not having enough time. Commit to a fail-proof five minutes instead. This is exactly what Dr. Fogg suggested to his sister, and that one change (the smallest meaningful change that created momentum) led her to buy running shoes and stop eating dessert, neither of which he suggested. These subsequent decisions are referred to in the literature as "consonant decisions," decisions we make to be aligned with a prior decision.
Take the pressure off and do something small.
Remember our target to log five sessions of new behaviors? It"s the five sessions that are important, not the duration of those sessions. Rig the game so you can win. Do what"s needed to make those first five sessions as painless as possible. Five snowflakes are all you need to start the s...o...b..ll effect of consonant decisions.
Take the pressure off and put in your five easy sessions, whether meals or workouts. The rest will take care of itself.
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In 2008, a 258-pound Phil Libin decided to experiment with laziness.
He wanted to lose weight. This is common. As is also common, he wasn"t particularly keen on diet or exercise. He"d tried both off and on for years. The intermittent four- to eight-week programs helped him drop pounds-and then his other behaviors helped him gain them back even faster.
He began to suspect there might be an easier way: doing nothing.
Phil had a simple method in mind: "I wanted to see what effect being precisely aware of my weight would have on my weight."
This is where we depart from the common. Phil lost 28 pounds in six months without making the slightest attempt to change his behavior.
First, having arbitrarily decided that 230 pounds was his ideal weight, Phil drew a blue line in an Excel spreadsheet. The downward slope represented his weight decreasing from 258 to 230 over two years. Every day"s target weight, which sat on the blue line, was just 0.1% (approximately) lower than the previous day"s. Easy peasy. See his graph on the next page, where the "blue" line is the middle dashed line.
He then added in two important lines below and above his "target" blue line: his minimum-allowable weight (green line) and his maximum-allowable weight (red line) for each day. He had no plan to hit his exact target weight each day, as that would be too stressful. He just had to keep between the lines.
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Interested in Phil"s Excel spreadsheet? Download a blank version at www.fourhourbody.com/phil. Just input your starting weight and desired ending weight, and you can duplicate his experiment.
How?
He weighed himself naked every morning at the same time before eating breakfast. He stepped on the scale a few times and put the average of the results in his Excel spreadsheet. The jagged line above shows his actual weight changes. Gaps represent periods of travel when he didn"t have access to a scale.
Phil kept the spreadsheet in the program he helped pioneer, Evernote.com, so that he could see it from any computer or phone. It was always at his fingertips.
It was pure 100% awareness training, nothing but tracking.
In fact, Phil made a concerted effort not not to change: to change: "I actually made a conscious effort not to deviate from my diet or exercise routine during this experiment. That is, I continued to eat whatever I wanted and got absolutely no exercise. The goal was to see how just the situational awareness of where I was each day would affect my weight. I suspect it affected thousands of minute decisions that I made over the time period, even though I couldn"t tell you which."
Oddly, he treated excessive drift upward (gaining) or downward (losing) as equally bad: "The only times I sprang into deliberate action were the few times (seen on the graph) where my weight dipped below the minimum acceptable level. Then I would eat doughnuts or gorge myself to make sure I was back in the "safe zone" the next day. That was a lot of fun. I suppose I would have done the opposite and eaten less had I ever gone over the maximum weight line, but that never happened. The whole point was not to lose weight quickly. quickly. It was to see if I could lose weight It was to see if I could lose weight slowly slowly and and without any effort without any effort."
Awareness, even at a subconscious level, beats fancy checklists without it.
Track or you will fail.
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End of Chapter Notes 12. Full disclosure: I am now an adviser to both Posterous and Evernote because I believe in the services. Full disclosure: I am now an adviser to both Posterous and Evernote because I believe in the services.
SUBTRACTING FAT.
Basics
THE SLOW-CARB DIET I.
How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise Out of clutter, find simplicity.-Albert Einstein 11:34 A.M. SAt.u.r.dAY, JUNE 20, 2009,.
SAN FRANCISCO.
Text message from London, eight hours ahead, meant to impress:
This is my dinner. Happy times!
The accompanying photo: a pepperoni and sausage pizza so large it doesn"t fit on the screen.
Chris A., a fellow experimenter, and I were having our weekly virtual date.
Text response from me:
This is my breakfast. BREAKFAST. Can you hear the insulin pouring out of my eyes? Woohoo! Ante up, fat boy.
My accompanying photo: two bear claws, two chocolate croissants, grapefruit juice, and a large coffee.
Response from Chris:
LOL...please don"t make me do this...
And so it continued, a text-message eating contest. The truth is, I do some version of this every Sat.u.r.day, and thousands of people over the last four years have joined me in doing the same. In between pizzas and bear claws, the net result is that the average follower has lost 19 pounds of fat, and a surprising number have lost more than 100 pounds total.
This odd approach has produced something of a small revolution.
Let me explain exactly how Chris and I reach and maintain sub-12% bodyfat, often sub-10%, by strategically eating like pigs.
The Slow-Carb Diet- Better Fat-Loss Through Simplicity It is possible to lose 20 pounds of bodyfat in 30 days by optimizing any of three factors: exercise, diet, or a drug/supplement regimen. Twenty pounds for most people means moving down at least two clothing sizes, whether that"s going from a size 14 dress to a size 10 or from an XXL shirt to a large. The waist and hips show an even more dramatic reduction in circ.u.mference.
By April 6, 2007, as an example, I had cut from nearly 180 pounds to 165 pounds in six weeks, while adding about 10 pounds of muscle, which means I lost approximately 25 pounds of fat. The changes aren"t subtle.
The diet that I"ll introduce in this chapter-the Slow-Carb Diet-is the only diet besides the rather extreme Cyclical Ketogenic Diet (CKD) that has produced veins across my abdomen, which is the last place I lose fat.
There are just five simple rules to follow: RULE #1: AVOID "WHITE" CARBOHYDRATES.
Avoid any carbohydrate that is, or can be, white. The following foods are prohibited, except for within 30 minutes of finishing a resistance-training resistance-training workout like those described in the "From Geek to Freak" or "Occam"s Protocol" chapters: all bread, rice (including brown), cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, and fried food with breading. If you avoid eating the aforementioned foods and anything else white, you"ll be safe. workout like those described in the "From Geek to Freak" or "Occam"s Protocol" chapters: all bread, rice (including brown), cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, and fried food with breading. If you avoid eating the aforementioned foods and anything else white, you"ll be safe.
Just for fun, another reason to avoid the whities: 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 produce diabetes. This is bad news if you eat anything white or "enriched." diabetes. This is bad news if you eat anything white or "enriched."
Don"t eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.
RULE #2: EAT THE SAME FEW MEALS OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
The most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat-loss, eat the same few meals over and over again. There are 47,000 products in the average U.S. grocery store, but only a handful of them won"t make you fat.
Mix and match from the following list, constructing each meal with one pick from each of the three groups. I"ve starred the choices that produce the fastest fat-loss for me:
Proteins *Egg whites with 12 whole eggs for flavor (or, if organic, 25 whole eggs, including yolks) *Chicken breast or thigh *Beef (preferably gra.s.s-fed) *Fish Pork