Tim Ferriss Wants to Hack Your Body
- By Gary Wolf via Wired Magazine
Photo: Lucas Foglia
Tim Ferriss is a self-made lab rat. The author and entrepreneur has been subjecting himself to audacious experiments in physical training and nutrition since high school. In perhaps the most extreme undertaking, he packed on 34 pounds of muscle while dropping 3 pounds of fat in 28 days. He recounts his adventures in a new book, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, a title he reverse-engineered from data he collected from the clickstream and Twitterverse.
The book is a sequel of sorts to his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek. Aimed at young men curious about wealth, leisure, and foreign travel, Workweek was rejected by some 26 publishers before Crown took a chance on it. Its viral mix of anything-is-possible enthusiasm and practical productivity tips turned out to be the formula for a publishing phenomenon—it’s still riding best-seller lists more than three years after it hit bookstores.
Now, in The 4-Hour Body, Ferriss, 33, turns to an entirely different set of keywords: weight loss, muscle gain, sperm count, and female orgasm. Wired asked contributing editor Gary Wolf—cofounder of theQuantified Self, a blog about self-tracking and self-experimentation—to interrogate Ferriss about his history as an n-of-1 guinea pig, his experience with performance-enhancing drugs, and his faith in heretical recipes for radical self-improvement.
Wired: When did you start experimenting on yourself?
Tim Ferriss: When I was a competitive wrestler in high school, I was prone to overheating. So I had to find ways to dissipate heat. Manipulating hydration was really my starting point.
Wired: Did you diet a lot?
Ferriss: In my senior year, I cut from between 175 and 178 to 152 twice a week. I did it by pure dehydration. You have to be careful with that, because you can have organs fail if you go about it the wrong way. I don’t recommend it.
Wired: How did you learn about these dark arts? I mean, you’re a teenage wrestler. Did your coach clue you in?
Ferriss: No, my only help came from other wrestlers who themselves had tested the methods of previous wrestlers. When you have good data, such as pound-per-hour loss rates, you can learn quickly through trial and error. I also read a lot about electrolyte balance. I wanted to find out what was just below the threshold of life-threatening.
Wired: How far did you take it?
Ferriss: By the time I was 21, I had refined the approach, and I was using diuretics as well. I cut about 20 pounds to compete in the kickboxing nationals; then, after weighing in, I hyper-hydrated. I weighed in at 165, and the next day I stepped onto the platform at 193. It was pretty funny. My first opponent stepped onto the mat and started looking around because he thought he was on the wrong platform. He was like, this can’t be right! I won a gold medal.
Wired: Diuretics aren’t banned?
Ferriss: Yes, in many cases they are. Not only because of their weight-loss effects but also because they can mask other drugs. In any event, at the higher levels of athletics this sort of thing is the rule rather than the exception. In any sport where power, speed, or endurance is a determining factor, everyone is using drugs.
Wired: You got your start with this stuff in the ’90s, just as the shadow world of performance-enhancing drugs seemed to be hitting the mainstream. It looks like you were able to stand on the border of those two worlds.
Ferriss: There are a lot of things that can be learned from the darker corners of athletics. You have doctors who view bodybuilders as cavalier amateurs of science. And then you have the bodybuilders who view the doctors as too conservative to do anything interesting. So I’ve tried to become the middleman for putting some of those pieces together.
Wired: Aside from the diuretics, what were you into in those days?
Ferriss: The cocktail that I began experimenting with was ephedrine plus caffeine plus aspirin. Basically, you’re hitting the accelerator.
Wired: These are all over-the-counter drugs.
Ferriss: Ephedrine was for a long time. But people were using it to manufacture methamphetamine, so they started blending it with other drugs to make that harder to do. But I don’t recommend it anyway. There’s an entire generation of male strength and endurance athletes, even recreational lifters, who have never gotten off the ephedrine-caffeine-aspirin stack. The process of getting off stimulants is really horrible. I’m more cautious now. Hey, um [pulling a bottle of pills and a plastic pouch of fine powder from a paper bag], I brought you some goodies. I don’t know what the law is governing these, so let’s say I’m giving them to you for visual reference only.
Wired: OK, right.
Ferriss: God knows I don’t want to be accused of “intent to distribute.”
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