The Book

If you get past the baity title and occasional exaggerations this is actually a good book. It presents tips and some of the science for loosing fat and gaining muscle, gaining strength and physical fitness in general.

One of the highlights of the book is the so called Minimum Effective Dose, the minimum amount of something you need in order to obtain the effect. Tim argues that once you get past the MED you start to get diminishing returns. Why lifting 5 times a week for 2 hours if your MED is lifting 3 times a week for 20 minutes? According to Tim the most important then is finding the MED for everything, from consumption of nutrients to exercise.

Tim introduces what he calls the “Slow-Carb” diet. It turns out this is a pretty vanilla low carb high fat diet. Bottom line: eat as few carbs as possible. Try to get all your carbs from legumes and vegetables. Avoid simple carbohydrates like sugar, rice, pasta, bread and pastries in general. The Slow-Carb diet allows you one off day per week in which you can splurge and eat whatever you like. This helps you keep your sanity and sends confliting signals to your body so it doesn’t adjust so easily to your diet what would make it burn less calories. There’s a chapter on how minimize the amount of fat gained on these off days, with tricks like ingesting cinnamon and certain kinds of supplements. I didn’t try any supplement recommended in the book but I did incorporate cinnamon into my diet. Another tip is taking cold baths or showers as there will be more heat transfer from the body and consequently the body has to spend more calories for staying at its normal temperature.

There are some good tips on the chapter about exercise but I couldn’t make use of most of them since I’m not currently doing any kind of gym work. However, I’m trying at last doing a circuit with push-ups, crunches, planks and squats at home three times a week.

There’s also a chapter on sleep. Some of the tips are controlling room temperature when going to sleep (the colder the better), special lighting in the bedroom and cooling off your body before going to sleep. I’m adopting cold showers and they really seem to help besides the aforementioned benefits for weight loss. The book also talks about polyphasic sleep (sleeping several times over the course of 24 hours). I’ve read about polyphasic sleep in the past, but as I have work and school it is just not practical. I’m planning to at least start biphasic sleep, sleeping a core 6 hours in the evening and then 20 minutes after lunch. Truth is that I’m feeling more alert and less sleepy since I decreased the amount of carbs I ingest.

Additional topics on chapters that I have just skimmed over: reversing injuries, improving sex, swimming and improving life expectancy.

Takeaways

I have been following a non strict Low-Carb High-Fat (LCHF) diet for a few months now. I lost a few pounds and I’m feeling great. Most of what I read in the book is in accordance to what LCHF preaches. My meals are structured around

  • breakfast - two eggs or skip it, having just a cup of black coffee
  • lunch - vegetables and/or legumes (broccoli, lentils, white beans, cauliflower, chickpeas) and meat (generally red, but I’m trying to eat more chicken)
  • snacks - peanuts, cashews, pecans and cheese. Sometimes a splash of milk.
  • dinner - steaks or chicken with vegetables. Add one or two eggs if I’m too hungry

Sometimes I eat fruits in my day off. Generally I have a pastry or two in my day off, as well as ice cream and candy (but not too much). To be honest once that you start eating healthy it is hard to go back and eat junk, it just does not feel good.

I incorporated cold showers into my routine. I’m still not sure whether they are good for fat loss or not, but they do seem to improve sleep for me. Also they seem to improve my recovery after exercise, I feel less sore in the days following training sessions. There is some evidence they might improve health too.