Lessons

Lesson Info

4-Hour Body Introduction

There are many reasons I did the 4-hour Body. The first was I have actually a lot more experience with the physical stuff than with the 4-hour Workweek stuff, and I record almost every workout since age 16, I still have all of them. I mean notebooks and notebooks just like eight feet of notebooks and the second piece just for people who are thinking about whether it's branding, building a career, what have you, was so that I wouldn't be the 4-hour Workweek guy forever, although that might not, we'll see if that works. But I didn't want to talk about auto-responders for the rest of my life, 'cause I'd wanna pew! So this was a good opportunity to test the waters and see will people follow me for the way I deconstruct skills, will people follow me for the story telling, the takeaways as opposed to just for the work stuff. And it worked, so the 4-Hour Body is I guess right off the bat and even now in some cases, selling at four, five times the rate of the first book, which a lot of people ...

don't realize. But we have I believe few examples, case studies that I would love to highlight. (audience laughs) So we have Amanda, before and after. Oh my. Which is awesome so, no, no it's great, it's great. So maybe you could just explain to me sort of the changes that you saw before and after. What were some of the changes? You want me to stand up, oh alright. (audience claps) Thank y'all, well that was like 2010, it was Thanksgiving 2010, I had just like my youngest was like a year old, and just normal Mommy stuff, you know. Did not make any time to work out, cooked like big fantastic meals but not you know necessarily the healthiest stuff and it was sort of a process, I got the book for Christmas and I read constantly and I think I read it in like 24 hours. Just read the whole thing, loved all of it and I liked it because it gave me really specific, weird kinda things to try, I was oh okay, I'mma go buy some ice packs, 'cause that sounds cool and I'm gonna like, okay I can scramble eggs, so like the things, the ideas that were in there, it was just a couple of simple behavior changes that as I started doing that it sort of just built upon itself and then I started doing yoga and yoga for me was the key because it helped me be more mindful about like the food choices I was making. So I already had the tools and it took me maybe a year to really get all the weight off and now it's been like a year and now I don't even think ... How much did you lose? It was like 40 pounds from that photo. Nice, congratulations. Thank you. That's awesome. Thank you. So we'll get to some of the steps, like the simple stuff, and explain what some of those takeaways are because it's really, really straightforward. And we'll jump to another case study in a second but what I think is important for people to understand is that in many, many businesses whether it's fitness magazines, fashion magazines, whatever, not everybody, but a lot of people follow a model that is complicate to profit. If something's really simple, you put yourself out of business, right? Something's really complicated you can keep people coming and so my counter to that would be there's always simplicity in the chaos. Like you can find elegant solutions. So we'll get to a couple of those in just a minute. Sergio, those are good, same angle before and afters, makes me so happy. (audience laughs) So Sergio, how much weight did you end up losing? I've currently lost 120 and still going. That's awesome, congratulations! (audience claps) And we've never before, right? We haven't met before, no. Okay so could you tell us a little bit about sort of what the trigger was, and I talk about this in the 4-Hour Body, is the harajuku moment. Sort of like coming to Jesus moment, where you finally reach the point where or you manufacture that experience so that you take the necessary steps. How did you get started? It's funny, just a quick side comment on the harajuku moment, you know I've had friends obviously come to me afterwards wanting to see how they did it, or how I did it and how they could do it and for some of them, they only wanted to lose like ten, twenty pounds, and in some ways, I told them, in some ways it's harder for you. Because I had a very profound, harajuku moment and for me, I'd struggled with weight my whole life and strangely I got blood tests every three or four months and the doctors were always baffled. They'd say, how could you be this overweight and have great cholesterol, great sugar, great liver function, that's weird to us. But what happened was I started having a compounding health issues, my sleep apnea was severe. I would have a waking event every minute I slept. And my blood oxygen would drop below 30% at some points in my sleep and so the doctor said if you keep doing this you will die and even then, that wasn't enough. I had a back issue which I went through physical therapy and wound up having a surgery and then even then that wasn't enough, what really came the moment was when my same sleep therapist told me, you might wanna talk to a bariatric surgeon for a consult. And that was a psychological, ego thing that said you know I've always prided myself on being a mentally tough bastard. And how did I get here, now where someone's telling me you're gonna have to have a surgical solution to this. And I said no way, your book was actually on my shelf for a while, a very good friend of mine gave it to me a year before, and she said you really need to read that book and it changed my life. Cool man, awesome to have you here. (audience claps) But wait, wait I'd actually seen, I had come across your stuff before and I'd seen photographs and what not and I'm not sure if we have, do we have any of your before ... I was gonna say, we have some show and tell going on back here. Yeah we have some show and tell and then we're gonna jump into some really highly perspective stuff in just a minute. Like the shirt by the way, that is great. I hadn't seen that until just a minute ago. So these are two jackets that I used to wear. My original suit size was a 54 regular. You can see Wow I can fold this in on myself. Look at that But not only that, but I guarantee you Tim could fit in this coat with me. (audience laughs) Wow! (audience cheers) And we can still hangout. That is awesome, that is, congratulations man. Thank you. Well done, that's so awesome. Alright, so those are two examples and I like to point out these types of examples because there have been hundreds of people, not just one or two, who've lost 100 plus pounds. And I've never had any contact with them. Alright so trainers can be helpful, but ultimately the decisions you have to make are yours and to get started, it's helpful to have a few very simple, starting points. Ideally one behavior that you change. So typically, for instance my Dad had to lose 90 plus pounds. I didn't start him off with like going to gym four times a week, changing all your meals, etc, because it's too many behaviors. Just like when people try to learn how to cook, like I mentioned earlier, it's like grocery shopping, prep, cooking, clean up, those are four or five new behaviors. You're going to fail if you try to do all of that at once. Doesn't work. So with my Dad, it was 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, saying look, I know you're not gonna change your breakfast, I know you're not gonna change your lunch, so instead, like not ideal, but I'm gonna have you have like a Myoplex, just ready to drink, in the fridge, one thing when you first wake up, that's it. And that took him from the five pounds of fat lost to 17.85 in the first month and then pretty much lost all the weight and really took off the 20 with exercise. So the Slow-Carb Diet is really the first prescription that I have for people, so whether you want to feel better, look better, have better blood profile. Have seen many people and this is not medical advice, just a statement of fact, who have been able to reduce their insulin dosages by 70, 80, 90%, in some cases get off of insulin by fixing their diet. If you wanna lose fat, diet is 95 plus percent of it. Alright so the Slow-Carb Diet is really simple because complex fails. Alright so you see, you start with big white screen. And then you get to rule number one, avoid white carbohydrates. Alright so all of these rules apply six days a week, I'll come back to that. So white stuff, if it's white or can be white, bread, pasta, rice, yes sorry, don't care if you're Asian, don't give me that excuse, I always have people be like it's my culture, like no you just don't wanna change. So you can make due without it, it's super easy. So no white carbohydrates, there are a handful of examples like cauliflower, if it's a vegetable fine, but like no milk, no white stuff, okay. Rule number two, eat the same few meals regularly. So this is another one that kicks up a lot of resistance. People are like oh that sounds so boring, oh my god I could never do that, what about the variety. I'm like what have you had for breakfast for the last week, every day, tell me. It's like nine times out of ten, it's the same thing every morning, maybe two things. Fine, I'm asking you to do the same thing, you're just finding new default meals, really easy. And after four, five, you know five or six sessions, i.e five or six days, you don't even think about it. Just like Nike Plus. Alright so the way that you would combine those meals is let's say proteins, legumes, veggies, the legumes we can get into this, but you know beans or lentils, etc alright? The reason this is important for most people is that when you see diet failures with let's say low carb diets, people go from like baked potato 500, you know 400 calories, big rib-eye steak, big something else, like macaroni and cheese, like a 800 calorie meal and then they go to like filet of salmon plus leafy greens and they eat 150 calories. So of course they're hungry and miserable. You can not be hungry and miserable or it won't work. And an easy way to get around that is by using legumes. So beans, lentils, do you have to have them every meal, no. There is wiggle room but speaking very broadly, proteins, fatty is fine, just get a good source, legumes, veggies each meal. Mexican makes that really easy, Mexican food just get rid of the rice and the tortillas. Thai food makes it really easy. Do you have any go to meals that you used? Those are the two, Thai and Mexican. Thai and Mexican, so people are like oh what if I'm traveling, come one, like there's a Mexican place or Thai place every airport, every town, easy, super, super easy. And as far as cost goes, when you're like oh what I have to sub out like the rice and it's an extra three bucks, I'm like really, really, come on, that is your like six pack tax or like not dying ten years earlier tax. Like spend the extra two bucks if you have to sub it out. Don't drink calories, no fruit juice, no milk, just like tea, water, the allowance that I make is like one or two glasses of red wine a night, and there are some examples of drier wines, so lower residual sugar content than others, but we may go into that later. So don't drink calories. Again six days a week. Don't eat fruit, we already kinda touched upon this. Your ancestors did not eat Florida oranges in December. And they survived just fine, so fruit is not something you need every day, secondly fruit has been engineered and bred so that it has you know five to ten times the sugar content it did 50 to 100 years ago. And fructose, glycerol, phosphate, body fat. All you need to know is you eat a lot of fruit, specially fruit juice, you're going to stall out or really inhibit your fat loss. But the good news is, take one day off per week. Alright so this is cheat day which has become somewhat infamous and famous some people call it dieters gone wild day, some people call it fatter day because I recommend scheduling it on Saturday. And you can go nuts, you can eat bear claws until they come out your eye balls, fine with me. And like I have, I like chocolate croissants, I like pizza, like all this stuff. Saturday, great and if you need something to keep you going through the week preceding your cheat day. So from Sunday to Friday night, keep a list. This is something a lot of people do, is they'll have a little notebook and every time oh I just wanna eat, ahh, okay fine. Pizza with wild nettles with an egg on top. Chocolate bar, okay, okay, okay. Till Saturday, just have to wait six days. I'm not giving this stuff up for the rest of my life. Chocolate bar, boom. And this is sustainable, I've been doing this for eight to ten years myself. There are people who have been doing it since the book came out. If you really want to lose, whether it's the last ten pounds or the first 100 pounds, this is it. Need not be complicated. And that is it, we have our guest coming out very shortly but I wanna see if there are any questions related to this whether it's from the audience or from the interwebs. Hi my name is Maura and my question is, I don't eat sugar, but I love fruit. And I see all this stuff that says eat more fruits and veggies, so the other stuff very doable, the fruit real challenge. Here's the thing, so what I would say is if you love fruit I'm absolutely for veggies, so I have a high vegetable, I eat more vegetables that most vegetarians, right I do. It's just the fact of the matter. But if you can't do the fruit, can't do the fruit. Right, I mean if you can't give it up, ultimately it's about like, if you're gonna be preparing for a body building competition and you're trying to get down to 5% body fat, sorry no fruit. If you're just trying to lose a little bit of the extra stuff down here, then you can keep the fruit, all I'm gonna say is it'll be suboptimal. But if, it'll be suboptimal result for fat loss. And also for certain blood markers, I won't get into it, but there are a lot of things in the world of nutrition that are repeated so much that they're accepted as fact. But there's, a consensus does not mean true. And you know I'm part of a non-profit called New See which is the first really independently funded group of scientists and researchers who are tackling a lot of these big questions. Because like the food pyramid, etc, etc does not have any basis in human biology or evolutionary biology. I would say if you like fruit, keep the fruit. If I were being militant and are trying to get you to have the highest per week or per month fat loss than I would minimize it. One day a week, you know eat blueberries until you take a power nap, totally fine. [Female Audience Member] So I can eat as much food as I want to on the-- Absolutely, oh yeah, six pack and like a barrel full of strawberries, yeah whatever. Obviously don't eat yourself to death, that would make me really unhappy, but yeah you can go nuts, no problem at all.