4 Hour Body experiment - 2 week progress

For the last 2 weeks I've been focusing on following the 'Occum Protocol' in the new Tim Ferriss book The 4-Hour Body. My goal is to increase my weight from below 69kg to above 75kg in 5 weeks by adding muscle mass not fat. The approach is to use a few principles that might seem counter-intuitive to hack your body and create exceptional results without too much effort.

Why am I doing this? Well, your body is the most important gift you have, so I believe that you should figure out how to make the most of it. After spending way too much time in the office, and not enough time getting in shape, I now really want to make sure I'm in peak physical condition, and this is the first big step.

After 2 weeks I can definitely say that it's already working!

 

The blue dots show weight in kgs. The green line is where I need to be in order to hit target. If I go below the red line it's not working, if I go above the yellow line it's working better than planned! The graph also shows the week previous to starting the experiment where I was already eating well and exercising a little but as you can see, I was actually losing weight.

As soon as I started on the plan my weight began to shoot up and I've consistently been above target since. This is with minimal gym time but a big focus on food input. What's interesting is that lots of people doubted that this plan would work at all, but for me at least it is proceeding perfectly and I'm not getting fat either.

Here's what I've learned so far...

The amazing egg trick!

I'm bang in the middle of my 4 Hour Body challenge. So far so good and I'm already ahead of target according to my Google spreadsheet tracking tool. Woohoo! This seems to be down to the fact that I'm stuffing my body with a ton of protein and doing exactly the right kind of exercise (not very much at all) to trick my body into converting it to muscle.

Most folks look to dairy in the form of milk or whey isolate (part of the cheese making process) to up their intake, but for the last few years I've tried to stay clear of dairy as I thought I was intolerant. I was lucky enough to put the question of dairy and protein to Tim Ferriss himself, when @hermioneway interviewed him about 4HB book.

Here's what he had to say (@michaeledge is my personal twitter name by the way)...



So eggs are the way to go! Actually, in all honesty I've been introducing goats milk and whey into my diet and I've been totally fine so far. Maybe I'm not as dairy intolerant as I originally thought! Anyway back to the eggs and the real reason for the post.

If you do decide to eat more eggs, you'll soon get sick of peeling them. It's slow and messy. So here is a little trick courtesy of (yet again) Tim that will get those eggs out of their shells in a few seconds. Yes his hacks do work!



The secret is to boil the eggs for about 10 minutes with a teaspoon of baking soda. This changes the ph of the water which has a magical effect on the eggs. Once they are cooked, cool them down in some cold water then do what I did in the video. You have to blow pretty hard but it's a damn sight easier than messing about with little bits of egg shell, and also quite entertaining for anyone watching!

Enjoy!

PS this is my first, sort of, videoblog, so I can tick that goal of my list now too. Hooray!

The Art of Focus, 3 tools and techniques to help you beat distraction addiction

Have you noticed something different in the last few years? Have you noticed that many people, maybe even you are addicted to information stimulus. We've become addicted to distractions that get in the way of what we want to do.

It's hard to imagine now, but only 20 years ago most of us wouldn't have had a mobile phone. We might have just set up our first email account, but we'd rarely check it. SMS wasn't used much (did it even exist?). Twitter and Facebook were a long way from being conceived. There weren't many distractions really. I'm not sure if this was a better time, but for me it was a very creative time. I'd lock myself in my room and create music, free from any distractions or disturbances. It was just me, my imagination and my music.

Now when I sit down to create there is so much temptation. The modern computer is an incredible tool, it gives us all the power to create things that 20 years would have been out of our reach. My little Macbook is a typewriter, a photography lab, an artistic workshop, a global communication device, an endless library of knowledge, a video production suite, a unix supercomputer, a publishing house, an incredible digital recording studio. It can do so many things, it has endless possibilities.

And yet now we sit in front of our computers or stare at our phones endlessly checking email, refreshing the Twitter stream or spending too much time browsing around Facebook. Instead of initiating action, we now await stimuli and respond to it. If there is no stimuli we feel somehow disconnected, we're not sure what to do, we have become addicted to this constant stream of new information. All these systems work on a similar principal to fruit machines and computer games, that of random rewards...

Never be scared to fail - take action, fail fast, learn quickly and keep going

At the end of December 2010 we began a demand test for Bulbomatic, a muse business idea. The idea of a muse business is that it isn't dependent on you being involved. For example if you setup a design agency, become a lawyer or any type of freelancer, then you're basically exchanging your time for money. With a muse business the goal is to setup a system that you can eventually remove yourself from, so you can earn money without having to trade your time directly for money. A muse business is ultimately more scaleable, as it's growth isn't dependent on the amount of time you put into it (in the long run). Ultimately it's a way to have both time and money.

Bulbomatic was a test case to go through the process of early stage business creation. We followed the steps that I talked about in a previous post Bulbomatic.com case study - 7 simple steps to test any idea or muse business. We ran the test page for 4 weeks, here are the results and learnings.