I can give you every popular diet in four lines. Ready?
• Eat more greens.
• Eat less saturated fat.
• Exercise more and burn more calories.
• Eat more omega-3 fatty acids. -The 4-Hour Body
I picked for the 4-Hour Workweek because I thought Timothy Ferriss was the same Timothy Ferris who wrote The Whole Shebang-not quite. The 4-Hour Workweek was fun and silly and about as useful as any other self help book. The first couple of pages of the 4-Hour Workweek said you should start a business that makes five hundred dollars a day-and then he spends to the rest of the book telling you how to spend all your extra money and time.
The 4-Hour Body follows the same general guidelines of the 4-Hour Workweek-that is to say a nice combination of the bleeding obvious and a collection of information you can find pretty much anywhere.
Tim advises that you shouldn’t sit down and read the 4-Hour Body straight through, just pick and chose the parts you need when you need them. He covers a number of topics from diet to sex to swimming to becoming superhuman. He is a big fan of supplements and vitamins and sleep.
He also has a number of pretty odd ideas-chief among the wacko factor is the idea that if you want to loose weight all you have to do is take an ice bath morning and night, take a set of vitamins several times a day, and do a minimum set of exercises. The vitamins and exercise fits in with standard well, duh advice-but ICE BATHS? Tim says that he has modified his approach and now advises just putting an ice pack on the back of your neck while you watch prime time TV.
Tim’s advice on sex is interesting as well. He says to help a woman achieve orgasm you need to focus your attention on her clitoris and g-spot. Stop The Presses! He goes on to say that he asked for volunteers so he could practice his clitoris stimulation techniques and that all of his volunteers were satisfied. The key seems to be the upper left quadrant of the clitoris, who’d have guessed?
His advice on swimming is to get a copy of the Total Immersion DVD and book, hey, they worked for him.
He has a lot of workouts, diet advice, vitamin and supplement recommendations and before and after photos of people who have figured out their own tricks to loose fat and gain muscle. A lot of this stuff is only of interest to the wanna be Mr Universe crowd and I’m afraid that my hours with free weights days are behind me.
I saw Timothy Ferriss on The View, where he gave his usual Advice From On High and appeared to be genuinely shocked when Barbara Walters questions some of his expert recommendations. The 4-Hour Body is fun, and he does bring together a lot of information from a wide range of sources. But I guess I’m too much like Tim, I’d already read most of the books he did, so there was little new in the 4-Hour Body for me.
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