wshaffer

The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


First off: I knew when I bought the audio book that it was abridged, but I don't think I'd realized quite how abridged. As a runner, I was disappointed that the chapter on ultrarunning didn't make it into the audiobook. Since I had audible.com credits to use up anyway, I found the audio made a nice taster to see if I want to read the full book. (I'll probably check it out of the library.) Along with the audio book, you do get a PDF that offers more details on the "Occam's Protocol" exercise program described in the book.

So, on the one hand, if you're into fitness and you're a certain kind of geek, you're going to find this book fascinating. If you've ever tracked your sleep, logged your food intake, worn a pedometer or a fitbit to track your daily activity levels, hit Pubmed to try to learn how to use the latest science to improve your workouts, or otherwise used your geeky obsession with data to try to improve your health and fitness, you're going to recognize a kindred spirit in Timothy Ferriss.

On the other hand, Ferriss is really really obsessive about this stuff. Far more obsessive than I am, or than anyone else I know (and I know some pretty obsessive people). He's also got some pretty extreme fitness goals. For example, he talks about how his "slow carb" diet allowed him to achieve low enough body fat to have visible veins on his abs. Which is fine, if that's your thing, but it's not really my thing. This means that some of the protocols he recommends strike me as being much more complicated and much more detailed than someone who's just trying to get a bit fitter would need. Then again, if you just want to get a bit fitter, you probably don't want to read this book.

Furthermore, it's important to keep in mind when reading this book that Ferriss's method of talking to scientists and then carrying out experiments on himself and his acquaintances is not the same as rigorous science. Most of the stuff in this book seems like it would probably work, and would at least not be actively harmful, but take it as inspiration for your own research and geeky experiments rather than gospel.

The book starts with a particularly interesting chapter about what motivates people to make changes to their fitness and to stick with those changes. From there, it covers diet/fat loss, building muscle mass, female orgasm, increasing testosterone, improving sleep, increasing longevity, and probably a few other topics that I've forgotten about. So, if you've got goals in any of these areas in your life, you'll find some ideas here. Just be prepared to think, "Wow, this guy is making it way more complicated than it needs to be."

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I've been boggling at this article since I read it, as it's some kind of amazing example of how to wrap a halfway decent point in a bizarre miasma of nostalgic pastoralism and weird ideas about masculinity.

You should really read the article, because it is well-written after a fashion, and also contains a number of striking details, but to summarize: The author has worked as a surgeon in Afghanistan and in Canada, and has observed that lots of people in Canada are fat, while hardly anyone in Afghanistan is. He has also been to Polynesia, and has observed that islanders who have hewed to traditional diet and lifeways are manly paragons of tattooed hotness who can navigate canoes with their balls, while the islanders who have taken to Western things like SPAM and the internets are jiggly and have high rates of diabetes. This is all the fault of urbanization making us unmanly.

So, okay, I basically agree with the premise that the Standard Western Diet is really bad for a lot of people. I'm certainly happier and healthier now that I eat differently. I would like to note that this did not require my learning to go out and kill my own dinner. Nor did it require reclaiming my lost manliness, which is good, because, being a woman, I haven't got much.

Oh, yeah, women. Our author does pause to note that diabetes often makes women infertile, but doesn't really seem to be interested in women beyond their reproductive capacity. He certainly never stops to ask whether the pre-urban lives he is idealizing were particularly fulfilling for women, who presumably were doing things like cooking, raising kids, and hauling water, rather than going out and hunting caribou or making long ocean voyages.

No, what really gets me about this article, besides the literally visceral horror of fat, is the sense that the author is really lacking a sense of proportion. It's like he's all, "Guys! Lay off the Cheetos! Or the world will suffer an epidemic lack of tattooed hotness! Oh, yeah, and kidney failure." (Never mind that I don't think I'd have to go very far in my social circle to locate a type 2 diabetic who is possessed of tattoed hotness.)

Or, I dunno, maybe that angle just stands out to me because I've read about a million articles about how the Western lifestyle is going to kill us, but this is the first article I've read about how it is depriving men of important manly capacities like being able to steer a canoe with your nuts.

November is American Diabetes Awareness Month, and yesterday was World Diabetes Day. So, in the interests of raising a little awareness:

Something like 24 million Americans have diabetes. About 1 in 3 of those people don't even know they have it. Many of them won't be diagnosed until the disease has done irreversible damage to their kidneys, eyes, nerves, or other organs. The tragedy is that this damage could have been prevented if their diabetes was detected and treated early on.

So, if you're at risk for diabetes, please talk to your doctor about getting tested and what you can do to reduce your risk. (Risk factors for Type 1 are kind of complicated. Risk factors for Type 2 diabetes include: a family history of diabetes, carrying excess fat in the abdominal area, and getting relatively little physical activity.) If you have any of the symptoms of diabetes, get checked right away.

If you want to learn more about diabetes, visit the American Diabetes Association website, or feel free to ask any questions here.