<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  By 11:30 a.m. on a rainy Friday in March, thousands of people have stormed the convention center in Columbus, Ohio, for the Arnold Sports Festival. Among the attractions at &amp;quot;the world&amp;#039;s largest multisport fitness weekend&amp;quot;\u2014founded in 1989 by, yes, that Arnold\u2014are red-faced, throbbing-veined Russian Olympians dead-lifting 600-pound barbells; amateur strongmen hoisting maroon Ford Focuses clean off the concrete floor; and Ms. International body-builders, whose oiled bikini brawn is exhibited in gruesome close-up on 50-foot screens looming above the crowd. Fans line up to meet their favorite Ultimate Fighters and sample the flood of products available for the taking: tiny cups of phosphorescent blue liquid, jumbo-size tubs of jumbo-size pills. A kid who looks to be 18 or 19 approaches one of the guests of honor, Timothy Ferriss. &amp;quot;I just bought your book, man!&amp;quot; he says, proudly shaking the hand of the fitness world&amp;#039;s newest poster boy. Ferriss is the self-styled &amp;quot;lifestyle design&amp;quot; expert and author of the 2007 phenom The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9\u20135, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich\u201486 weeks and counting on The New York Times&amp;#039; advice best-seller list\u2014and 2010&amp;#039;s 571-page self-improvement compendium The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, which has sold more than 400,000 copies. Ferriss&amp;#039;s objective, he says, &amp;quot;is to have the greatest impact on the greatest number of people.&amp;quot; He currently has a million unique visitors monthly to Fourhourbody.com, 243,000 Twitter followers, and more than 71,000 Facebook fans\u2014and, he says, &amp;quot;the reach is beyond the sum of those numbers,&amp;quot; just in case you weren&amp;#039;t sufficiently wowed. Ferriss has mesmerized the masses by cultivating an image as a rogue extremist; in 4HB, he refers to himself as a &amp;quot;madman,&amp;quot; detailing his quest to crack the code of his own body, including recording almost every workout he&amp;#039;s done since he was 18 and quantifying every conceivable bodily function using pulse oxometers, ultrasound machines, MRIs, countless blood tests, even an implanted glucose meter. He has weighed his own waste, shot himself up with growth factors (he brags about setting one clinic&amp;#039;s injection record), and landed in the hospital with an injection-related staph infection that penetrated his elbow joint. Indeed, the testosterone stew of the Arnold Festival may be the only place in which Ferriss\u2014who has a degree in East Asian Studies from Princeton\u2014stands out as a mild-mannered voice of reason.  A compact 5&amp;#039;9&amp;quot; with health-nut-bright eyes and thinning, close-cropped blond hair, Ferriss has the pert facial features and muscular-boy-wonder quality of Jason Bourne. His body, he says, is extra-lean at the moment, down to 170 pounds from a high of 220, with 14 percent body fat. Soon, he tells me, he&amp;#039;ll trim that number to 8 or 9; even though he says he &amp;quot;sucks at running&amp;quot; and has never so much as tackled a 5K, he&amp;#039;s training for a 50-kilometer &amp;quot;ultra-marathon.&amp;quot; Such seemingly implausible feats, he says, &amp;quot;are a game to me.&amp;quot; By the time I meet Ferriss, I&amp;#039;ve already put roughly 168 hours into my own four-hour body. Not that I had any illusions about the book&amp;#039;s vow to make me &amp;quot;super-human,&amp;quot; whatever that means. In truth, I&amp;#039;m not especially interested in about 80 percent of what Ferriss covers in 4HB, including polyphasic sleep (how to survive on hyperscheduled 20-minute naps), geographic medical arbitrage (the cost/benefit analysis of having, say, seven MRIs performed in one week in Nicaragua), doubling sperm count, adding 100 pounds to my bench press, hitting a baseball like Babe Ruth, holding my breath longer than Houdini, or bloodletting to extend longevity. I was, I confess, briefly seduced by a chapter titled &amp;quot;The 15-Minute Female Orgasm&amp;quot; but soon realized that the idea was to accomplish the deed within a quarter hour, not to make it last that long. (Plus, after reading Ferriss&amp;#039;s tale of &amp;quot;wolverine sex&amp;quot; with a woman he calls Vesper\u2014named for the James Bond character\u2014who left him with 4- to 7-inch &amp;quot;bedroom wounds,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;s the last person on earth I wanted sex advice from.) But I&amp;#039;ve been dieting since age 11, painfully, gradually, trudging up, down, and inexorably back up the scale, each time landing a bit higher. That&amp;#039;s a demoralizing and frankly astonishing amount of time, considering I&amp;#039;m 34 and, at 5&amp;#039;10&amp;quot;, usually a size 8. I&amp;#039;m not obese, and I don&amp;#039;t long to be stick-thin; my weight fluctuates between five and 15 pounds above my ideal. But those pounds, though relatively few in number, weigh on my psyche with the heft and density of lead, pressing far deeper than most people\u2014even some I hold dearest\u2014would ever guess. So in February, when I get a copy of 4HB, with its ultramale tone and euphoric, beyond-reason claims (&amp;quot;Lose 20 pounds in 30 days without exercise&amp;quot;), I react with one clear and, admittedly, unobjective thought: By God, we&amp;#039;ll see about that. Which is how I come to land\u2014soft, pale, and dreadfully exposed in overpriced yoga leggings and sports bra\u2014in the claustrophobic Bod Pod at Brooklyn College&amp;#039;s kinesiology and sports-medicine lab. Ferriss is a data junkie whose way of life requires precise measurements, and for this he doesn&amp;#039;t trust humble bathroom scales or the fat-pinching calipers found in gyms. He advises initiates to assess themselves the way NFL athletes do, by sitting inside the Bod Pod, a 6-foot-tall, egg-shaped chamber that measures weight and body density using air pressure. After a payment of $75 and three minutes in the pod, I&amp;#039;m handed a two-page printout. My bod, as it were, weighs eight pounds more than the already-high number I expected and consists of 33 percent fat\u2014three percentage points over what&amp;#039;s generally considered healthy, let alone aesthetically pleasing. I scramble back into the safety of my clothes, realizing I&amp;#039;ve hit bottom, or rather top: the heaviest weight of my life. And like that, I&amp;#039;m torn: still skeptical of Ferriss&amp;#039;s plan, but also, like every dieter, yearning for it to prove astoundingly, improbably right. I came to Brooklyn rolling my eyes; I left with tears in them. Within an hour, I&amp;#039;m at Whole Foods, buying the groceries and supplements 4HB promises will turn me into a fat-burning engine, including capsules of aged garlic, alpha-lipoic acid, green tea, and a plant wax extract called policosanol. Here&amp;#039;s what I don&amp;#039;t buy: wheat or grains, sugar or its substitutes, and much of the healthy food I usually eat, especially yogurt and fruit (4HB cites a list of published studies that suggest lactose, whey, and fructose inhibit fat burn). In truth, Ferriss&amp;#039;s plan is a distant relative of the protein-centric Atkins, except that his carbs aren&amp;#039;t just low, they&amp;#039;re &amp;quot;slow.&amp;quot; In addition to lean meat and vegetables, he advocates protein-rich legumes\u2014beans and lentils\u2014which break down more gradually than those in grains. It&amp;#039;s not all draconian: Based on the notion that occasional calorie spikes improve thyroid efficacy, Ferriss also commands dieters to gorge on whatever their hearts desire one day a week. (Though the rigmarole he suggests to keep &amp;quot;cheat day&amp;quot; from settling on your hips will make you wonder if two slices of pizza\u2014and, okay, a latte, a chocolate croissant, and a brownie sundae\u2014could possibly be worth it. The idea is to minimize the extra carbs&amp;#039; ability to increase insulin, thus preventing the body from storing the calories as fat. It requires exquisitely timed doses of cinnamon, lemon juice, and grapefruit juice; vats of yerba mate, a South American tea with a mix of stimulants intended to not-so-elegantly speed digestion; and 60- to 90-second exercise sessions before and after meals. Phew!) 4HB&amp;#039;s spin on exercise is equally unorthodox; those who want to slim and define are prescribed just three weekly sessions of 60 to 75 full-body swings of the kettlebell, the cast-iron, handled cannonball that originated, no surprise, in Russia. For supe-r\u00ADvision and moral support, I enlist Tehera Nesfield, a kettlebell-credentialed (yes, there is such a thing) trainer at Manhattan&amp;#039;s Equinox gym. When I give Nesfield Ferriss&amp;#039;s workout chapter, she raises an eyebrow: &amp;quot;Kettlebells are great resistance trainers. But you want results from 75 swings? That&amp;#039;s...ambitious. And unbalanced.&amp;quot; We compromise: Our 30-minute sessions\u2014still less time than she says it would take to really make a change\u2014will be kettlebell-based but include other strength-training moves. When I fill in Ferriss on the details, he seems stoked. &amp;quot;If you do the diet and kettlebells? In two months you won&amp;#039;t recognize yourself.&amp;quot;  In 2004, Ferriss was peddling his own sports supplement, BrainQuicken (designed to increase reaction speed, it was a hit with the Ahnold crowd), but had gotten fed up with the long hours required to run a company. That year, he decided to change up a semiannual lecture he&amp;#039;d been giving to Princeton undergrads about launching a business. He delivered his next talk via Skype from a temporary apartment in Buenos Aires and titled it, with typical button-pushing brio, &amp;quot;Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit.&amp;quot; Ferriss explained how he&amp;#039;d begun to extricate himself from workaday life using Pareto&amp;#039;s Law, named for an early-twentieth-century economist-slash-sociologist. Just as in Pareto&amp;#039;s garden, where 20 percent of the peas produced 80 percent of the harvest, a fraction of BrainQuicken&amp;#039;s clientele yielded the majority of the profit. By identifying which 20 percent of any work was the most remunerative, Ferriss advised, you could spend the rest of your time as he did, taking tango lessons in Buenos Aires. After his virtual tutorial, a student filled out a feedback questionnaire: &amp;quot;Why are you telling this to 50 students when you could just go write a book? :)&amp;quot; Coming from a Princeton kid, that smiley emoticon was &amp;quot;almost certainly a sign of snark,&amp;quot; Ferriss says. Still, he thought, maybe the guy had a point. Apparently, few publishers agreed; Ferriss is fond of mentioning that 26 of them turned him down before he found a taker in 2006. He signed the book deal for 4-HourWorkweek while on vacation in Belize, he also likes to say, in a shack with a fax machine and spotty Internet connection. (When I tried to track him down in January, he was vacationing in Colombia, then Panama, and a few weeks later, he jetted off to Jordan for a seminar held by the social-welfare think tank the Aspen Institute, of which he&amp;#039;s a fellow.) Facilitating this lifestyle is the job of one Amy Hogg, a single mother of two who lives outside of Vancouver, BC. For more than four years, she has functioned as Ferriss&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;virtual assistant&amp;quot;\u2014delegating to far-flung, low-cost employees is a major tenet of 4HWW\u2014but they&amp;#039;ve never actually met. (Hogg has shed 16 pounds on her boss&amp;#039;s plan, but she tells me that she&amp;#039;s saving the big news for their first in-person meeting, slated for April.) As his &amp;quot;buffer to the world,&amp;quot; Hogg is regularly tasked with, say, calling every gym in San Francisco to see if they can measure Ferriss&amp;#039;s body fat using a specific type of caliper\u2014within the hour. His other employee, Charlie Hoehn, spent nine hours photoshopping vulvas to ensure the illustrations in 4HB would be anatomically correct. &amp;quot;In the name of science and mankind, he had to get those images right,&amp;quot; Hogg says, laughing. Self-help authors are generally their own best advertisements; their transformed lives\u2014and bodies\u2014are, after all, what inspire the rest of us stressed, pudgy schlubs to walk their walk. But in his books, at least, Ferriss exudes a narcissism that reads as comical, if not alienating. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve chartered private planes over the Andes, enjoyed many of the best wines in the world in between world-class ski runs, and lived like a king, lounging by the infinity pool of a private villa,&amp;quot; he writes in 4HWW. He also provides a checklist of his rather peculiar accomplishments, including a Guinness World Record in tango; a Chinese kickboxing championship; a role in Human Cargo, a &amp;quot;hit TV series in mainland China and Hong Kong&amp;quot;; and the dubious-sounding distinction of being Wired magazine&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Greatest Self-Promoter of 2008.&amp;quot; The Ferriss I meet in Ohio, however, is disarmingly unpretentious. Here is the sensitive soul who dropped his college neuroscience major because he couldn&amp;#039;t stomach the gory rites of animal testing. This Ferriss &amp;quot;respectfully disagrees&amp;quot; with accusations of arrogance, enumerating various shortcomings for me. &amp;quot;Vertical jump? Horrible,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Running, even worse.&amp;quot; Hardly crippling insecurities for anyone who&amp;#039;s aged out of high school track, but Ferriss says running and jumping are examples of &amp;quot;learnable skills&amp;quot;; they&amp;#039;re not innate, even for him.  His corporeal self became a source of fascination for Ferriss even before he hit high school. Born six weeks prematurely, he says he was given a 10 percent chance of survival; he still suffers complications with his left lung. He was a puny but hyperactive kid, so his mother registered him for wrestling, hoping he&amp;#039;d tire himself out against opponents his own size. Eventually the &amp;quot;rat-tailed townie&amp;quot; from a middle-class home in East Hampton, Long Island\u2014a childhood far removed from &amp;quot;Seinfeld and Spielberg playing tennis,&amp;quot; he says\u2014caught up with the other kids in height, but the wrestling bug stuck. After a friend was stabbed in the leg at troubled East Hampton High, Ferriss convinced his parents he&amp;#039;d be better off at boarding school; they borrowed money to send him to the exclusive St. Paul&amp;#039;s in New Hampshire, where he joined the wrestling team. By his senior year, he was routinely dehydrating down from 175 pounds to 152 twice a week via steam, hot baths, diuretics such as coffee, even spitting (evidently, vigorous expectorating can shave off &amp;quot;up to a pound an hour&amp;quot;). To survive that, he read up on electrolytes, which led him to potassium-sparing diuretics, which led him to examining &amp;quot;how the ratio of carbohydrates to protein affected water retention,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It was Pandora&amp;#039;s box.&amp;quot; San Francisco circa 2011 is the right place at the right time for a person like Ferriss. He doesn&amp;#039;t just dress in the anticorporate garb of the Social Network\u2013era entrepreneur\u2014Henley T-shirt, knit cap, and nylon belt, all in a distinctly unmacho shade of cerulean\u2014he is also hardwired with the irreverence and single-mindedness of a hacker. The way he tells it, his very lack of medical credentials is a bonus; at one point in 4HB, a doctor friend smiles over her glass of wine and says, &amp;quot;You\u2014Tim Ferriss\u2014can do more outside the system than inside it.&amp;quot; He describes the medical establishment as risk-averse, hindered by short-sighted university committees, hamstrung by government agencies such as the FDA, which, he writes, are &amp;quot;at least 10 years behind current research.&amp;quot; Of course, there&amp;#039;s a reason it takes agencies like the National Institutes of Health longer than Ferriss, who spent three years writing 4HB, to issue health recommendations. It takes time to study\u2014preferably double-blindly\u2014tens, or hundreds, or even thousands of subjects, then to have findings peer-reviewed and published; and, finally, to wait for other research to support the initial results. The process is excruciatingly slow for someone like Ferriss\u2014or, much worse, for someone with an incurable disease\u2014but crucial nonetheless, not least because it keeps the multitudes from rushing out and spending thousands on &amp;quot;miracles&amp;quot; that don&amp;#039;t work or carry grave side effects. Ferriss doesn&amp;#039;t seem insensible to the siren call of authority, however, because in addition to extolling the do-it-yourself ethos, he holds himself out as an expert on experts. For 4HB, he says he cited or consulted more than 100 PhDs, NASA scientists, MDs, Olympic athletes, and sports trainers. (Then, too, he also credits the testimony of body-builders, weight lifters, and, for her insight on fine-tuning masturbation and sexual positions, a porn star named Nina Hartley.) But it&amp;#039;s Ferriss&amp;#039;s seemingly abject faith in his party-of-one experiments that have led to 4HB&amp;#039;s most scathing reviews, including a hilarious and brutal New York Times write-up that said the book &amp;quot;reads as if The New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the SkyMall catalog. Some of this junk might actually work, but you&amp;#039;re going to be embarrassed doing it or admitting to your friends that you&amp;#039;re trying it.&amp;quot; More specifically, American Dietetic Association spokeswoman Heather Mangieri, RD, says that while much of the research Ferriss cites is credible, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s taken way out of context.&amp;quot; He often fails to account for differences in gender, age, or body type, she says, and takes evidence from tests done on animals or on, say, sedentary, obese people and applies it to those who are fit (and human).  Ferriss&amp;#039;s body may be a finely calibrated machine, but mine feels more like a mutinous organism I happen to inhabit. I&amp;#039;ve long felt safer not exactly in my body but hovering somewhere around it, divorced from its hard facts. Averting my eyes from the doctor&amp;#039;s scale seems to me the most constructive form of denial\u2014why put the issue front and center where it might balloon into an even unhealthier obsession? Yet when I avoid the numbers entirely, they have a way of galloping out of control. In Ohio, Ferriss addresses the impassioned, sometimes negative response he gets to 4HWW: &amp;quot;Most people who read it have already dedicated several years, if not decades, to [career and retirement] plans that I call out as completely bullshit. Which would piss you off. It&amp;#039;s almost like a religious discussion\u2014people take it very personally.&amp;quot; After my encounter with the Bod Pod, that is exactly how I&amp;#039;m taking his body book. Halfway through the diet, after my third or fourth kettlebell session, when my editor asks how the story&amp;#039;s going, I burst into tears. In a month, I lose two, maybe three pounds; the tape measure offers slightly better news\u2014an inch off both my hips and waist\u2014but my body-fat percentage stubbornly holds steady. (That Ferriss&amp;#039;s plan doesn&amp;#039;t work for me doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily mean it doesn&amp;#039;t work entirely: A 25-year-old colleague credits 4HB with quickly erasing his excess holiday-season heft; a woman I know lost six pounds and several inches off her waist and hips in two weeks; Hogg, Ferriss&amp;#039;s assistant, says that some thousand people a day rave about their in-a-blink transformations on his blog.) When I review the depressing figures on my figure with trainer Nesfield, she gives me an odd look. &amp;quot;Wait,&amp;quot; she says not unsympathetically. &amp;quot;Didn&amp;#039;t you come to me saying this four-hour thing was far-fetched, that it would never work?&amp;quot; But alas, you can&amp;#039;t stick to a diet for 30 minutes, let alone a month (or six) if you don&amp;#039;t believe on some level that it will pay off. People who&amp;#039;ve never struggled with their weight may have a hard time grasping exactly how devastating it is when a diet doesn&amp;#039;t deliver. To my surprise, it&amp;#039;s Ferriss\u2014a man seemingly immune to defeat\u2014who best describes my ache: &amp;quot;Imagine how you&amp;#039;d feel if this were a business, if you&amp;#039;d done everything right, again and again, and you couldn&amp;#039;t make it succeed. You&amp;#039;d feel like a failure.&amp;quot; Ferriss offers to review my blood work to ferret out the source of my body&amp;#039;s recalcitrance, and assures me that many women over 30 lose incrementally for the first three or four weeks on his plan and then, voil\u00E0, &amp;quot;the next week, it&amp;#039;s seven pounds,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I have no idea why.&amp;quot; The problem, of course, is that 4HB over-promises; in this, the smart and sensitive guy in Ferriss has been overruled by his inner salesman. Big claims sell more books! Losing two and a half pounds in four weeks isn&amp;#039;t spectacular, but, by most weight-loss standards, it&amp;#039;s not terrible, either. Yet when you&amp;#039;ve been told you&amp;#039;ll lose 20, dropping one tenth of that makes your efforts seem pointless. Why not just eat the damn office cupcakes\u2014all of them? Still, dieters can learn from Ferriss. Some of his tricks do work and, more than that, he emanates a quality that anyone who wants to change her body will need: relentlessness. Ferriss is that guy, the one who, upon receiving any grade below an A on a college paper, would wear down his professor with questions until he or she gave up in exhaustion. If that guy&amp;#039;s diet was stalled, he&amp;#039;d keep testing and trying and tweaking until he figured out how to fix it. Which, sadly, takes a lot longer than four hours. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/advice/a11661/4-hour-body-timothy-ferris/?click=smart&kw=ist&src=smart&mag=ELM&link=-SMT-ELM>