The Four Week Body Guide

Posted on February 14, 2011 by AK

Cheat Sheet To Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Body

This is a guide to dropping weight super fast with minimal effort.

One month. $200. More than 20 pounds of fat loss – guaranteed.

There are five key elements to this method: The Low Carb Diet; Cold Exposure; PAGG Stack; Kettlebell Swings; and last but not least, body monitoring.

It is based on the methods described in the bookThe Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris, a “body hacker” who spent a decade figuring out the quickest, most effective formulas for acquiring superhuman strength and fitness so you don’t have to.

This guide is the cheat sheet to his cheat book for the truly lazy: sixty pages condensed into just six, with 90% of the ideas in 10% the content. It’s 80/20 all the way, baby – Enjoy!

Eating The Caveman

The Low Carb Diet is the lynchpin of the Four Hour Body system.

You absolutely MUST follow it.

1. Avoid “white” carbohydrates. This includes foods such as bread, rice (inc. brown), cereals, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, fried food with breading.
2. Eat the same few meals over and over again. Keep it simple and eat as much as you want – good ideas include egg whites, spinach, chicken breast, grass-fed beef, fish, lentils, black, pinto and red beans (canned are OK), broccoli, cauliflower, other mixed vegetables (frozen are OK), sauerkraut, kimchi.
3. Don’t drink calories. No fruit juice, soft drinks or milk. Instead, drink A LOT of water, as well as unsweetened tea, coffee with cinnamon, and/or one-two glasses of red wine in the evening.
4. Don’t eat fruit. Exceptions include tomatoes and a little avocado or guacamole.
5. Take one – and only ONE – day off per week and go nuts. “Paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate… doesn’t downshift from extended caloric restriction.”

There are some other important tips.

• Eat breakfast within one hour – preferably 30 minutes – of getting up.
• Go protein heavy (esp. at breakfast – use two-three egg whites).
• Drink lots, lots of water.
• Taking vitamin and mineral supplements is fine, but without iron!
• Buying organic beans, or soaking them in water for a few hours, prevents farting.
• To add flavor: garlic, balsamic vinegar, black pepper, cayenne, most herbs, olive oil, salsa.
• For heating, use ghee butter or macadamia oil.
• These are OK in moderation: almonds, Brazil nuts, chickpeas, hummus, peanuts, macadamias.
• Good “dry” red wines include Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.
• There’s a special art on how to binge while losing weight. In one sentence – eat grapefruit with coffee before second meal; drink citric juices; 2.4g of cissus quadrangularis plant and 90 seconds of air squats a few minutes before meals; and consider fermented foods such as cheese, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, fermented fish, or kombucha tea.
  

Experience The Ice Age

Leveraging the laws of thermodynamics to burn more calories can be more effective than exercising your ass off. Why not let the Ice Age do the hard work for you?

• EASY – POLAR EXPLORER: “Place an icepack on the back of the neck or upper trapezius area for 20-30 minutes, preferably in the evening.” Do this five times a week, e.g. when working on a computer or reading. It’s 60% as effective as an ice bath.
• EASY – ICE ON THE ROCKS: Drink a half liter of chilled water right after waking up.
• MODERATE – COLD DRIZZLE: “Take 5-10 minute cold showers before breakfast and/or before bed.” They’s also cool for increasing lean muscle gain, immune resistance, and treating depression!
• HARD – ICEMAN: “If you’re impatient, and can tolerate more, take 20 minute baths that induce shivering.”
• EXTREME – HUMAN POLAR BEAR: Take inspiration from Lewis Pugh, shown above, whose idea of a nice vacation is swimming with the icebergs!

Carry The PAGG Stack

This is a cool new supplement that turbocharges fat loss and accelerates muscle gain.

1. 20-25mg Policosanol.
2. 100-300mg Alpha-lipoic acid
3. 325mg+ decaff Green tea flavanols (or Epigallocatechin gallate)
4. 200mg Garlic extract

Take AGG’s before every meal and a PAGG before bed.

Take one day off per week, and ONE WEEK off every two months.

You can purchase a month’s supply for c.$55 by buying separately, or make things easy and order the whole joint from PAGGStack.com for $92. Quoted costs may change and exclude shipping.

PS. If you’re really hardcore you can try the ECA Stack, which is more effective than PAGG, but be forewarned that it produces bad side effects and dependency.

Kettlebells Will Get You Ripped

Buy a kettlebell (гиря) for c.$50-80.

Girls – 35-44lb (16-20kg, 1-1.25 pood), guys – 44-53lb (20-24kg, 1.25-1.5 pood).

The Russian kettlebell swing.

• Position feet as shown to the right.
• The lowering movement is a sitting-back-on-a-chair movement, not a squatting-down one.
• Generate swing power using the hips, thigh and lower back muscles – and NOT the arms.
• Squeeze ass cheeks at the peak of the swing.
• Shoulders are pulled back and NOT in front of the knees at any time.

Do 75 swings in five reps. Increase to 150 and then weight with time.

Do Russian kettlebell swings twice a week – and NO MORE.

Once you get to 12% body fat, build a sixpack by following up kettlebels with 10 reps of myotatic crouches over a Swiss ball and 10 rept of the “Cat Vomit” exercise. You can watch a video of these 4HB exercises here.

Monitoring Body Hacking

No, that’s not the latest horror movie – at least we hope!

Improvements by the numbers will encourage you to keep on the right path, and give you advance notice if something isn’t working. So track or fail!

• Get tape measure and calipers to measure body fat.
• Create a spreadsheet with dates and columns for weight, Total Inches, and body fat.
• To get Total Inches, add up lengths of: both upper arms (mid-biceps), the waist (navel), hips (widest below waist) and both legs (mid-thigh). Use calipers instructions to estimate body fat.
• Update your spreadsheet at least once a week and draw graphs to visualize your progress.
• Get some friends to compete with you in losing weight fast. Nobody wants to be the public loser!
• Take a “before” swimsuit photo of yourself, in order to enjoy the “after” photo all the more!
• Photograph everything you eat if diet discipline isn’t your thing.
• And if you ever lose enthusiasm, then gaze at the picture above – and it will come back to you stronger than ever!

Photo Acknowledgements

1. Four Hour Body cover – Amazon.
2. Food photo – my own.
3. Lewis Pugh – National Geographic.
4. The PAGG Stack – from its sellers.
5. Kettlebell swing – Fitness Bootcamps Arizona.
6. Body fat through MRI scan – HealthHabits.ca.

The Author

Anatoly Karlin runs the site Arctic Progress, which provides the latest news, expert analysis, and travel and investment opportunities in this exciting region.

Not surprisingly, he’s particularly enthusiastic about the Ice Age parts of the Four Hour Body!

He also runs a personal blog at Sublime Oblivionabout Russia, geopolitics and peak oil.

Read The Four Week Body Guide in PDF! (no links)