Life Optimization

Some of you may be familiar with Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek.  For those of you who aren’t, he’s quite an interesting character.  He’s constantly experimenting with life hacking techniques, or getting the maximum results with minimal effort.  That should not be confused with laziness, but achieving the desired effects without unnecessary expenditure of time and effort.  His new book , the 4-Hour Body, is an expansive 570 page book on achieving muscle gain, fat loss, rehabilitating and preventing injuries, improving sex, and a host of other topics that cannot all be covered in one blog post.  I will simply have to break my review down into a few parts.  In this post, I’ll talk about what he advocates in order to achieve the greatest amount of fat loss.

In his book, Tim promotes a diet called the Slow Carb Diet.  In essence, this is nothing new.  It is simply a variation of the Paleolithic Diet that I am a strong proponent of. The Paleolithic Diet is also known by other names such as the Primal Blueprint or the Cavemen Diet. The idea of Paleo is that our bodies are genetically conditioned to eat what our ancestors ate, a diet consisting of meats, vegetables, some fruit, and healthy fats. Specifically, Tim advocates the following rules:

1. Avoid “white” carbohydrates – No bread, rice, cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, or food with breading. If you want to get technical, carbohydrates get converted to glucose by your body, which then has to produce insulin in order to get it out of your bloodstream and into your muscles and liver in the form of glycogen. Since your body can only hold a small amount of glycogen in proportion to the carbs consumed by the average American, the rest gets stored as fat.

2. Eat the same few meals over and over again -  Eerily, I talked about this in an earlier post and I swear I didn’t copy him.  He probably copied me   Anyways, this also makes sense.  In the Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz talks about how we are inundated by an unlimited amount of choices every day in today’s society.  Go into a typical supermarket and you have to make a decisions between dozens of brands in every imaginable category.  Limiting yourself to the same few meals not only makes your trip to the store shorter, but will also save you money and the mental energy of having to navigate this sea of possibilities.  It also makes it easier to stick with your lifestyle change (I don’t like using the word diet because it connotates a desire only to make a short-term change in your life, often for superficial reasons.)

3. Don’t drink calories – I would personally rank this one as high, if not higher than not eating grains.  In a world in which most of us are fueled by sodas and energy drinks, most people should be aware that replacing those calorie-laden drinks with water (or black coffee if you need a buzz) would dramatically improve their health.  In Tim’s Slow Carb Diet, milk and fruit juice are out as well.

4. Don’t eat fruit – Slightly different that Paleo here, which allows some fruit.  However, Tim suggests that the fructose in fruits can get converted to fat even more efficiently than carbohydrates.

One more rule, and one that most of you will love…

5. Take one day off per week – Use this “cheat day” to eat whatever the hell you want.  ANYTHING.  This can include pizza, ice cream, fries, or all the doughnuts you can stuff in your face. The idea behind this that “spiking your caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat-loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate doesn’t downshift from extended caloric restriction.” Keep in mind that making every day a cheat day doesn’t work.  Once a week.  This also helps you stay on track, in a way, because you have something to look forward to and not constantly in deprivation mode (Woe is me, I can’t eat that…). Tim suggests that you still eat a sensible breakfast high in protein and binge from lunch to dinner so that you don’t completely go off the deep end with this.

If you want the short version of this diet, it’s essentially Paleo with a cheat day. Easy. My own experiences with Paleo have been outstanding. Everyone knows I eat a shit-ton of food.  However, I still weigh 135 lbs because I also eat very clean.  As long as you eat the right things, I believe that there are no restrictions as to how much you can or should eat. So go out there, eat and be merry.

About a year and a half ago, I canceled my cable subscription and gave my TV away.  I had decided that nothing that I was watching had really provided me with anything of substantial value in my life.  In fact, all those hours I had spent in front of it had only taken away time from activities I could have spent learning something or improving myself.

Watching television is kind of like eating potato chips.  You tell yourself that you are only going to watch for one hour or eat “a few” chips.  Before you know it, you’ve spent 3 hours watching TV and have killed about half the bag of chips.  With television gone, I found I had much more time to myself after work instead of feeling like there weren’t enough hours in the day.

I am now quite a voracious reader of books, both self-improvement and non-fiction.  Every book I read opens my mind to ideas I had never considered or educates me on periods of history I had little knowledge about.  For example, I am currently deployed to Afghanistan, but knew embarrassingly little about the country.  After reading Ghost Wars, the voluminous, Pulitzer Prize winning book about the CIA and our history in Afghanistan, I developed a much clearer understanding of all the events leading up to our current occupation here.  Like an addiction, each book leads me to explore other titles, which I make a note in my head to read in the future.  Although I could do better at applying more of the techniques I learn about, even if they are not implemented, they are now additional tools that can be recalled and applied to my life as necessary.  Any topic that you can imagine has been addressed by many people in great detail and opening a book is like taking someone’s life work and gaining all that knowledge in the span of a few days.  To me, this is invaluable and will continue to shape my view of health, fitness, finance, personal relationships, and life for years to come.

I am a big fan of the blogs Early Retirement Extreme as well as I Will Teach You to be Rich.  The former, written by Jacob Fisker, teaches you how to become financially independent within 5 years by saving 75% to 80% of your income, maximizing the use of your resources, and cutting expenses to the point where the revenue generated by your saved income exceeds those expenses.  The latter, Ramit Sethi, believes that you can only cut expenses so much and that at a certain point, you should concentrate on earning more.  He has a course called Earn 1K on the Side in which he shows his students how to generate additional income through freelancing without quitting their full-time job.  Although the two authors differ in how best to achieve financial independence, they also share a common thread that made me realize something.  I am highly lacking in actual skills.

In his book, Jacob Fisker talks about the difference between the Salary Man and the Renaissance Man.  The Salary Man is something that most of us are.  We go to work day in and day out, living from paycheck to paycheck, and use the money that we earn to purchase stuff that we use (food, housing, clothes, etc.).  In turn, the more stuff we use, the more we have to work in order to pay for that stuff.  It is essentially a cycle with no end unless you change the fundamental structure.  The ideal solution is to have enough assets saved so that the dividends received from those assets is able to pay for the stuff that you use.  It is at that point that you have achieved financial independence because you have eliminated the need to work to pay for the stuff that you consume.  Essentially, the work produced by others is now paying for your expenses.  However, there is another problem with being a Salary Man.  The main problem is that he has essentially put all his eggs in one basket.  If he loses his job, the scramble is on to find another one because his only source of income has been eliminated.  If the economy is good and he is able to find a market for his skill, then all is well.  However, especially in today’s economy, it could take months if you even end up finding another job.  It can be pretty stressful given the fact that you could be laid off at any time and be forced into a tough situation.  With unemployment at 10%, many Americans are currently in this predicament.  The Renaissance Man has no such problems.  Rather than being specialized in one skill, he is relatively proficient in many.  Since his skills are varied and not directly tied to one another, losing one source of income is not a big deal because he has multiple options and other sources of revenue that he can sustain himself with.  Skills can include things such as watch repair, bicycle or automotive repair, construction, carpentry, etc.  Since we have evolved into a society in which we pretty much pay someone to do even the most mundane of tasks for us, having such skills can prove to be even more valuable than many white-collar skills that are typically associated with more earning power.

Switching gears, one of the first exercises that Ramit’s Earn 1K on the Side Course asked me to do was to think of some skills that I could potentially freelance with in order to earn money.  I must admit, this was an extremely difficult exercise for me.  Yes, I could tutor or provide financial advice, but this exercise really made me realize that I had few actual skills.  In essence, I was not a true Renaissance Man who would have no difficulty coming up with at least 5 skills he could effectively freelance with.

I believe the fist step in transforming yourself into a more versatile and, in essence, more interesting person is to start learning about something that you think you’d be interested in.  Rather than wasting time watching TV or playing video games, you could spend that time developing those skills until you are relatively proficient in it.  Jacob suggests that it takes approximately 1,000 hours to go from novice to journeyman (competent in your skill) and 3,000 hours to become a master (proficient in your skill).  Being competent or proficient in a variety of skills has the following benefits:

• You open your mind to new ways of thinking that you can couple with existing knowledge in different and interesting ways.

• You make yourself recession-proof by being able to earn money in a variety of ways, not just one.  However, if the dividends achieved by your savings can cover your expenses, this is a moot point.

• Your can cut your expenses because you are able to do more things for yourself rather than having to pay to have them done.  You become self-sustaining and independent.

I have to emphasize that developing such skills shouldn’t be all about money either.  Although they can be used as a source of income, I believe that being versatile and self-sustaining (being able to build your own house or grow your own food, for example) is much more important.  I don’t know about you, but I need to get started on becoming a true Renaissance Man.