The 4-Hour Body – Sample Chapter and Full Table of Contents
A taste of things to come… (Photo: Blackbox Cases)
I'm excited to present the full table of contents from The 4-Hour Body, as well as the first chapter. Enjoy! …
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Thinner, Bigger, Faster, Stronger? How to Use This Book
Fundamentals – First and Foremost
The Minimum Effective Dose: From Microwaves to Fat-loss
Rules That Change the Rules: Everything Popular Is Wrong
Ground Zero-Getting Started and Swaraj
The Harajuku Moment: The Decision to Become a Complete Human
Elusive Bodyfat: Where Are You Really?
From Photos to Fear: Making Failure Impossible
Subtracting Fat: Basics
The Slow- Carb Diet I: How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise
The Slow-Carb Diet II: The Finer Points and Common Questions
Damage Control: Preventing Fat Gain When You Binge
The Four Horsemen of Fat-Loss
Subtracting Fat: Advanced
Ice Age: Mastering Temperature to Manipulate Weight
The Glucose Switch: Beautiful Number 100
The Last Mile: Losing the Final 5-10 Pounds
Adding Muscle
Building the Perfect Posterior (or Losing 100+ Pounds)
Six-Minute Abs: Two Exercises That Actually Work
From Geek to Freak: How to Gain 34 Pounds in 28 Days
Occam's Protocol I: A Minimalist Approach to Mass
Occam's Protocol II: The Finer Points
Improving Sex
The 15-Minute Female Orgasm-Part Un
The 15-Minute Female Orgasm-Part Deux
Sex Machine I: Adventures in Tripling Testosterone
Happy Endings and Doubling Sperm Count
Perfecting Sleep
Engineering the Perfect Night's Sleep
Becoming Uberman: Sleeping Less with Polyphasic Sleep
Reversing Injuries
Reversing "Permanent" Injuries
How to Pay for a Beach Vacation with One Hospital Visit
Pre-Hab: Injury-Proofing the Body
Running Faster and Farther
Hacking the NFL Combine I: Preliminaries—Jumping Higher
Hacking the NFL Combine II: Running Faster
Ultraendurance I: Going from 5K to 50K in 12 Weeks—Phase I
Ultraendurance II: Going from 5K to 50K in 12 Weeks—Phase II
Getting Stronger
Effortless Superhuman: Breaking World Records with Barry Ross
Eating the Elephant: How to Add 100 Pounds to Your Bench Press
From Swimming to Swinging
How I Learned to Swim Effortlessly in 10 Days
The Architecture of Babe Ruth
How to Hold Your Breath Longer Than Houdini
On Longer and Better Life
Living Forever: Vaccines, Bleeding, and Other Fun
Closing Thoughts
Closing Thoughts: The Trojan Horse
Appendices and Extras
Helpful Measurements and Conversions
Getting Tested—From Nutrients to Muscle Fibers
Muscles of the Body
The Value of Self-Experimentation
Spotting Bad Science 101: How Not to Trick Yourself
Spotting Bad Science 102: So You Have a Pill . . .
The Slow-Carb Diet—194 People
Sex Machine II: Details and Dangers
The Meatless Machine I: Reasons to Try a Plant-Based Diet for Two Weeks
The Meatless Machine II: A 28-Day Experiment
Bonus Material
Spot Reduction Revisited: Removing Stubborn Thigh Fat
Becoming Brad Pitt: Uses and Abuses of DNA
The China Study: A Well-Intentioned Critique
Heavy Metal: Your Personal Toxin Map
The Top 10 Reasons Why BMI Is Bogus
Hyperclocking and Related Mischief: How to Increase Strength 10% in One Workout
Creativity on Demand: The Promises and Dangers of Smart Drugs
An Alternative to Dieting: The Bodyfat Set Point and Tricking the Hypothalamus
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How to Use This Book
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA, 10 P.M., FRIDAY
Shoreline Amphitheater was rocking. More than 20,000 people had turned out at northern California's largest music venue to hear Nine Inch Nails, loud and in charge, on what was expected to be their last tour.
Backstage, there was more unusual entertainment.
"Dude, I go into the stall to take care of business, and I look over and see the top of Tim's head popping above the divider. He was doing f*cking air squats in the men's room in complete silence."
Glenn, a videographer and friend, burst out laughing as he reenacted my technique. To be honest, he needed to get his thighs closer to parallel.
"Forty air squats, to be exact," I offered.
Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, one of the top-500 most popular websites in the world, joined in the laughter and raised a beer to toast the incident. I, on the other hand, was eager to move on to the main event.
In the next 45 minutes, I consumed almost two full-size barbecue chicken pizzas and three handfuls of mixed nuts, for a cumulative total of about 4,400 calories. It was my fourth meal of the day, breakfast having consisted of two glasses of grapefruit juice, a large cup of coffee with cinnamon, two chocolate croissants, and two bear claws.
The more interesting portion of the story started well after Trent Reznor left the stage.
Roughly 72 hours later, I tested my bodyfat percentage with an ultrasound analyzer designed by a physicist out of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Charting the progress on my latest experiment, I'd dropped from 11.9% to 10.2% bodyfat, a 14% reduction of the total fat on my body, in 14 days.
How? Timed doses of garlic, sugar cane, and tea extracts, among other things.
The process wasn't punishing. It wasn't hard. Tiny changes were all it took. Tiny changes that, while small in isolation, produced enormous changes when used in combination.
Want to extend the fat-burning half-life of caffeine? Naringenin, a useful little molecule in grapefruit juice, does just the trick.
Need to increase insulin sensitivity before bingeing once per week? Just add some cinnamon to your pastries on Saturday morning, and you can get the job done.
Want to blunt your blood glucose for 60 minutes while you eat a high-carb meal guilt-free? There are a half-dozen options.
But 2% bodyfat in two weeks? How can that be possible if many general practitioners claim that it's impossible to lose more than two pounds of fat per week? Here's the sad truth: most of the one-size-fits-all rules, this being one example, haven't been field-tested for exceptions.
You can't change your muscle fiber type? Sure you can. Genetics be damned.
Calories in and calories out? It's incomplete at best. I've lost fat while grossly overfeeding. Cheesecake be praised.
The list goes on and on.
It's obvious that the rules require some rewriting.
That's what this book is for.
Diary of a Madman
The spring of 2007 was an exciting time for me.
My first book, after being turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers, had just hit the New York Times bestseller list and seemed headed for #1 on the business list, where it landed several months later. No one was more dumbfounded than me.
One particularly beautiful morning in San Jose, I had my first major media phone interview with Clive Thompson of Wired magazine. During our pre-interview small chat, I apologized if I sounded buzzed. I was. I had just finished a 10-minute workout following a double espresso on an empty stomach. It was a new experiment that would take me to single-digit body-fat with two such sessions per week.
Clive wanted to talk to me about e-mail and websites like Twitter. Before we got started, and as a segue from the workout comment, I joked that the major fears of modern man could be boiled down to two things: too much e-mail and getting fat. Clive laughed and agreed. Then we moved on.
The interview went well, but it was this offhand joke that stuck with me. I retold it to dozens of people over the subsequent month, and the response was always the same: agreement and nodding.
This book, it seemed, had to be written.
The wider world thinks I'm obsessed with time management, but they haven't seen the other—much more legitimate, much more ridiculous—obsession.
I've recorded almost every workout I've done since age 18. I've had more than 1,000 blood tests performed since 2004, sometimes as often as every two weeks, tracking everything from complete lipid panels, insulin, and hemoglobin A1c, to IGF-1 and free testosterone. I've had stem cell growth factors imported from Israel to reverse "permanent" injuries, and I've flown to rural tea farmers in China to discuss Pu-Erh tea's effects on fat-loss. All said and done, I've spent more than $250,000 on testing and tweaking over the last decade.
Just as some people have avant-garde furniture or artwork to decorate their homes, I have pulse oximeters, ultrasound machines, and medical devices for measuring everything from galvanic skin response to REM sleep.
The kitchen and bathroom look like an ER.
If you think that's craziness, you're right. Fortunately, you don't need to be a guinea pig to benefit from one.
