The 4-Hour Body: Rapid Fat Loss by Tim Ferriss
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The 4-Hour Body: Rapid Fat Loss by Tim Ferriss

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Fundamentals

These two chapters set the stage and context for how you should think about fat loss.

Minimum Effective Dose

The Minimum Effective Dose (MED) is the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome.
For rapid fat loss, there are two fundamental MEDs to keep in mind:
To remove stored fat —> do the least necessary to trigger a fat-loss cascade of specific hormones.
To add muscle in small or large quantities —> do the least necessary to trigger local (specific muscles) and systemic (hormonal) growth mechanisms.

Key Takeaway: More is not better. Your greatest challenge will be resisting the temptation to do more.

Rules That Change The Rules

The following mental models in The 4-Hour Body will separate your results from the rest.
No exercise burns many calories - Exercise is one pathway to calories leaving the body. Better pathways are heat and hormones. You burn calories sitting on your couch via your BMR (Base Metabolic Rate).
A drug is a drug is a drug - Ignore the labels. Pills, creams, injections, powders—they're are all drugs. For anything other than whole foods, if you put it in your mouth or bloodstream and it has an effect, it's a drug.
The 20-pound "recomp" goal - 20 pounds of recomposition does not just mean "lose 20 pounds" but could mean losing 15 pounds and gaining 5 pounds of muscle. Think addition as well as subtraction.
The 100-unit slider: diet, drugs, and exercise - In order to reach the 20-pound recomp goal, you have 3 "levers" to pull: diet, drugs, and exercise. The recommended balance in The 4-Hour Body is 60% diet/10% drugs/30% exercise.
The duct tape test: will it stick? - Avoid all methods with a high failure rateーbetter to follow a decent method than quit a perfect method.
Don't confuse recreation with exercise - Recreation is for fun. Exercise uses an MED of precise movements to produce a change.
Don't confuse correlation with cause and effect - Be skeptical of new observational health studies that claim X causes Y. It's more likely that Y happens while (not because) X happens.
Use the yo-yo: embrace cycling - Timing overeating is better than trying to sustain a reduced-calorie diet.
Predisposition vs. predestination: don't blame your genes - Even if you are predisposed to being overweight, you're not predestined to be fat. Take if from Eric Lander, leader of the Human Genome Project: "To say that something has a genetic component does not make it unchangeable."
Eliminate propaganda and nebulous terms - In addition to being skeptical of new health studies, be skeptical of terms like "toning," "firming," "optimal," etc. and then linking goals to these terms ("I want a toned body.") Goals should be measurable and precise ("I want to reduce my waist circumference by 1 inch.")

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Ground Zero
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