Mike W's Reviews > The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman

Having seen Tim Ferriss on TV, I suspected he was a huckster. But I was sufficiently intrigued that I read his books anyway. Now, having read them, I'm convinced he's a huckster. The gullible reader of this book will be convinced that he can have the body of a champion athlete or model with very little effort, just as the gullible reader of Ferriss's other tome, the 4 Hour Workweek, might imagine that she can make millions of dollars (or at least live like a millionaire) with a mere 4 hours of work per week.

So Ferriss is a sophist, and much of this book is nonsense and chicanery.

And yet, even the Sophists had real insights at times, so that even their greatest adversary, Socrates, sometimes defended them. And so it is with the ebullient Ferriss.

While many of his particular prescriptions seem bogus, some of the general principles he suggests are valuable. I have myself benefited from following some of his advice.

Among his key idea are the "Pareto Principle" and the "Minimum Effective Dose." The Pareto Principle comes from the great economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. It's defined on Wikipedia thusly: "The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes." And the related concept of a minimum effective dose Ferriss himself defines as "the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome."

Here I found Ferriss's advice useful. Much of the time I spent exercising was wasted, because I had not thought sufficiently about how to optimize--how to be efficient. Following his advice on weightlifting, I cut down from doing 3 sets of 10 reps per session, at 2-3 sessions per week, to doing 1 set of 5-7 reps once a week and got substantially better results. Much of the time I had spent lifting weights was clearly counterproductive.

I also benefited from Ferrriss pointing me to the so-called "cyclic ketogenic" diet. That diet is different from the one Ferriss himself recommends in the book, but shares some common features. Ferriss's own diet he dubs the "slow-carb diet". It differs from low-carb or ketogenic diets by encouraging consumption of complex carbohydrates that do not metabolize quickly, like beans. And it shares with the cyclic ketogenic diet the idea of cycling, or taking days off periodically. My own experience suggests that this is superior to the typical low-carb diet.

Ferriss has a tremendous talent for self-promotion, like Madonna or Lady Gaga. And he is almost as superficial. But he sometimes has something interesting to say, unlike those two "ladies". He contradicts himself repeatedly. He advises, at different times, to take no rest in between sets in lifting weights, and to take 3 minutes between sets, and also 5 minutes. And in each case he's very certain and very precise in his prescription. This deepens the sense in any reader who is not asleep that he's just making things up.

And Ferriss takes a hard line on epidemiological studies because they are typically observational rather than experimental. And yet he himself frequently draws firm inferences from observational data that even a mediocre epidemiologist would deem far beneath her standards. For instance, Ferriss cites, as evidence for his assertions, the case of Casey Viator, who followed a regimen Ferriss approves of and purportedly gained 62 pounds of muscle in 28 days. But there was only Casey in this "experiment" and there was no control group. Just one guy, who might or might not have been taking anabolic steroids, in an emprical study from 1973 that was never repeated.

In sum, there's a lot of dross here and only a handful of gems, in a long book. But the discerning reader might still get some advantage from reading it.