The 4-Hour Body

The 4-Hour Body is a complete guide to hacking your health, helping you achieve anything from rapid fat loss and quick muscle gain to better sleep, sex, and extreme athletic performance.

Tim’s #1 rule for life is the 80/20 principle that says 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the results. It’s a universal law that governs most bilateral relationships in life and health is no exception. He says it’s often even more skewed than that. For example, with 2.5% of all Spanish words you can understand 95% of all conversations.

When it comes to making healthier choices, this means you’re often better off oversimplifying and sticking to a few simple rules, rather than trying to create a perfect system. 4,000 calories equal about a pound of fat. 30 minutes of cardio burns two cheeseburgers. Rules of thumb you actually use are better than exact details you don’t.

That’s why Tim built his Slow-Carb Diet around just five rules:

No white carbs, such as bread, white and brown rice, cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas and everything that’s fried. Eat the same few meals over and over again. Assemble them only from main proteins (beef, chicken, etc.), legumes (beans, lentils), and vegetables. Drink only water, tea and coffee without milk or sugar. No fruits. Have a cheat day once a week on which you can eat as much as you want of whatever you want.

Combined with a breakfast of at least 30 grams of protein within 60 minutes of waking up, it can help you both lose weight and gain muscle, while increasing your energy levels. No diet is perfect, but this one’s simple, so it’s a good place to start.

In this example, you can already see oversimplification at work. There are thousands of numbers you can track, but starting with a single one gets most people farther than trying to sift through all the different markers. Some I used when I first started my health journey are:

Total inches combined for arms, legs, hips, and waist. One number to track it all. Weight on a weekly basis. Taking pictures of meals before eating them, which forces you to re-evaluate your food choices. Before-and-after pictures of your body.

Also, always use the same tool to measure and always measure under the same conditions.

Tim’s overweight friend who lost over 70 pounds tracking mainly calories was Chad Fowler. When he asked him what sparked the change, Chad described an event he called a Harajuku Moment. As Tim defines it in the book: For Chad, this moment happened while clothes-shopping in Tokyo. At one point, he heard himself saying out loud: “For me, it doesn’t even matter what I wear; I’m…