Week 3 – Day 6: Water for Occam

This busy life of shopping, cooking, eating and now a bit of exercise is really taking a lot of our time. I may only try to post one or two times per week. Maybe one long post on Saturdays and a short post Monday or Tuesday nights what I will try for. Saturdays we have more time and Monday evening is our official weigh and measuring night at the weight loss clinic so I will want to update you with the my stats that day.

Speaking of stats I'm trying to record more information for comparison. Something that I'm hearing from everyplace especially from Timothy Ferriss's book “The 4-Hour Body” that I will talk to you more about below. So I will be posting pictures on my pictures page along with tracking my weight, body fat percentage and measurements. I will be posting all the stats on a new page and updating that as I go. If I'm really busy I may just update the stats page without posting a main blog post so check it even if you don't see something new here. Like I said I will try to post my stats every Monday or Tuesday.

Now for some bad news...I gained 2 LBS one visit to the weight loss clinic. It was a little upsetting but they gave me the suggestion that I may not be drinking enough water. I always thought I drank enough water before joining the weight loss clinic and after we joined I started drinking more water. I was averaging 10-15 cups of water before program and was getting 13-17 cups after joining program. So it was even more upsetting to have them tell me I need to drink more water!

Well the next day I began drinking more water and now I'm averaging 15-20 cups of water each day. Guess what? The next weigh in I lost 3 LBS!!!! Crazy what the right amounts of water can do. Funny but at the same time I was reading the part in Timothy Ferriss's book about how he recommends large amounts of water also. Needless to say I got this message compounded into my brain this past week and it paid off!

Now that we know the program is starting to work we have begun telling some of our friends and family about it. I was nervous about telling people because we have been trying to lose weight for so long I didn't want to hear any negative comments. We have chosen not to tell people about how much money we spent pre-paying for 25 weeks of the program again just to avoid any negative comments. Our health is important and we are at the breaking point.

Two friends we told last night where very supportive and asked us a lot of positive questions while giving us a few tips. The experience of telling them was better then I expect from say our close family members. These friends are very into cooking so they got very interested in our meal plans and we even made plans to have them over for a healthy smoothy tasting. This should be fun we have it planned for two weekends from now.

Our friends were also very interested in the vitamins and supplements that we're taking as part of the program. When we joined the weight loss clinic the girl doing our consultation was explaining the program and showed us a book called “Nutrisearch Comparative Guide to Nutritional Supplements” by Lyle MacWilliam. This book shows independent research about the quality and absorption rates of over 1500 nutritional supplements available in the United States and Canada. This was the real kicker that got me to agree to dish out the money for the program. The company that makes the weight loss clinic's vitamins we would be taking got a 5 out of 5 star rating! It's crazy but common big name vitamins like Centrum rated 1 star or less and many of it's products rated 0 stars. Anyway I think this book will be very useful when you're trying to choose the right vitamins for yourself or family.

4-Hour Body – Review Part 1

So the new book I bought last weekend “The 4-Hour Body” by Timothy Ferriss is great! Don't bother reading any more of my review because if you want to transform your body, lose weight, gain muscle, recover from any injury, improve sleep or improve your sex life you need this book...BUY IT!

Ok...I'm a little mad that I spent all that money joining the weight loss clinic when all I needed was this book! That being said the money spent has been a real motivator so I don't really have any regrets. My plan is to stay with the weight loss clinic for the full 25 weeks we paid for and lose as much weight so we can adjust to a new healthy lifestyle. While doing that I will begin implementing some of the ideas set forth by Timothy.

The ideas Timothy sets forth in his book are simple to the point of non-believable at first. He always backs up his crazy ideas with research of top people and pictures or facts of his personal experience.

Have you heard of Minimal Effective Dose (MED) or Occam's Protocol?

That's when taking a certain amount of a drug or doing a certain amount of something is the minimum amount needed to get a result. You only need 1 or 2 pain killers to get rid of your headache so why take 3 or 4? In regards to bodybuilding if you want to gain muscle mass you only need to do enough exercise and the right exercise to stimulate the hormones in your body to start building muscle THEN give your body several days of rest. Muscle building hormones stay in your body building muscle for days and over training can hinder your muscle growth.

Occam's Razor: “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity” or rephrased as “The simplest answer is usually the correct answer ” but I like to say KISS – Keep It Simple Silly!

Occam's Protocol page 193 of his book is what I plan to be using to gain muscle mass in the weeks to come. I may not start if for a few weeks as we adjust to our healthy lifestyle more. The Protocol is a workout plan that has 2 different workouts that should only take about 30 minutes to do and are alternated every 3 or 4 days. So workout A today then 4 days later workout B another 4 more days before workout A again and so on for about 4 hours of workout time per month. This is where the book got it's name...you only need to work out 4 hours per month to build a great body!

I also read the section on weight loss but I will not get into that until after we complete the 25 weeks at our current program. At the start of the book Timothy recommends reading the basic parts of the book first and then reading the parts that interest you like a reference book. If you're only looking to gain muscle mass then just read those pages or just read the pages on improving your sex life.

I will post more reviews of the book another time also I will not be updating my stats here because I'm about to build that new stats page to keep everything in order.

Have a great day!

-Ian