We’re doing a Four Hour Body weight-loss and body hacking challenge with Tim Ferriss. Officially, it runs until Friday, November 16.

Participation is easy. Download Lift. Search for 4HB. Sign up for whichever 4HB habits you want (there’s six, with slow-carb diet being the most important). Track your progress.

Three Reasons

Behavior change is hard. Dieting is hard. But let me tell you, you’re not going to get a better opportunity to make a big change like this.

The Four Hour Body diet is one of the most user friendly diet changes to test on yourself, mostly because the meals are simple and friendly to people who often eat out. Anyone who is serious about achieving a goal needs to track their progress and Lift is the simplest tool out there for tracking. If you have an iPhone, iPod, or iPad download Lift. Otherwise, you can track in Excel and follow along via our Twitter account. Lift comes with built in community support. Let’s take this challenge together, as a group, and help each other out when we have questions or need motivation.

How To

Lift is a tracking app with community support. After you download it, search for “4hb”. This will bring up the following Four Hour Body habits. Add whichever ones you want to follow (some are optional).

The Habits of The Four Hour Body

Slow-carb diet. This is the keystone habit. Eat a slow carb diet six days a week and then allow yourself one cheat day. Slow carb means eating stuff like lean meat, beans, and veggies. It also means no “white foods” that spike your blood sugar, like sugar, flour, potatoes and pasta, as well as no fruits or liquid calories.

Eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. In the book, this is a metabolism trick, but I think of it more as an adherence trick. Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re starving and start making bad decisions.

Exercise. This plan is light on exercise. Mostly you want to do some high intensity exercise, like a set of 50 air squats before your meals on cheat day. But let’s all track whatever exercise we’re doing together and see what the effects are.

Cold shower. This probably sounds like a weird habit, but a cold shower will activate your fat burning tissue, giving your metabolism a little boost. If you consider this optional, then please, at least consider taking a regular shower.

Measure weight, body fat, and total inches. The book goes into detail about the importance of getting an accurate measurement of your progress (given the confusing effects from changes in water weight and muscle mass).

4hb. Last, we have a 4hb meta habit for everyone to congregate in if you have general questions.

Resources

We’re going to have Tim participating and I think he has some resources to bring, including a service that delivers slow carb meals. I’ll post more 4HB resources here as we go.