He’s a New York Time’s best-selling author, entrepreneur and the ultimate self-help guru. In this interview, Dr. Oz sits down with Tim Ferris to discuss his secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good. If you think you don’t have the time to achieve your wellness goals, Tim has the simple field guide to success that just might surprise you! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It's extremely hard through industrially produced food in the U.S. and in other first world countries to get some of the nutrition that you need.
But for the most part, I've gone completely back to Whole Foods, which was a surprising conclusion for me because I would much prefer to say, I just need to take these five pills and my job is done.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz podcast.
We'll see you next time.
We're joined by Tim Ferriss.
Tim we had on the show probably a year ago now.
Almost exactly a year ago.
And we're a wonderful book that many of you are aware of, The 4-Hour Workweek, where he chronicles how if we were just smarter about what we did in our lives, we'd just work four hours and be happy about it.
It's not quite that simple, but it gets to some of the root issues that many of us are challenged by, that we want to work hard, but not necessarily work smart.
So that's what I thought I was done with the challenges of trying to limit the number of hours I work in a week to four hours.
He's come up with a book which has dominated my wife's recent reading called The 4-Hour Body, An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman.
And it is spectacularly laid out with pictures of him running and doing all kinds of fun things.
You know, really a user's manual to how to optimize your body.
And before I let Lisa loose on you, because she's going to...
She's picked through this book.
She's actually on the program that you outlined in there.
I wanted to kind of understand how you even began to get interested in this area.
I mean, was it because you had so many hours free after only working four hours a week?
It actually predated the 4-Hour Workweek by about 10 years, I would say.
So I was a...
But you're a child.
Come on, you're like 17. I just turned 17. I'm maturing quickly.
No, I was actually a competitive wrestler in high school and started tracking a lot of my physical data at about 16. So I have all of my workouts.
To this day, I still have all of the notebooks from about age 18 onward.
All of my workouts.
And slightly obsessive behavior.
I would say a little OCD going on there, right?
But at the time, I was cutting anywhere from 20 to 25 pounds routinely twice a week.
That was, in this case, water weight to make my weight class at 152. And so I had to learn, by extension, a lot about electrolytes, and then that led to protein, carbohydrate, balance in meals, how that affected water retention, etc.
But just to be clear, you would lose 20 pounds?
Very unhealthy, yes.
I would cut from 175 to 152. Towards the end of my senior year.
And I was an All-American senior year, but it is not advisable to lose that much water weight, certainly.
But in order not to permanently cripple yourself doing that, and it unfortunately is part of the sport, you have to learn a lot about how your body regulates heat, how much water you can lose per hour while maintaining 98.6 as opposed to jumping to 100 or having your blood pressure skyrocket.
So that was my starting point in data gathering.
And then...
Much, much later.
Now I'm in San Francisco.
I'm an investor in a lot of tech startups like Twitter and StumbleUpon, Evernote.
And new tools are available that allow you to do really spectacular things with self-analysis and self-tracking.
So my dad was 245 pounds at 5'6 about a year and a half ago.
And has since lost 90 plus pounds of fat, gained between 20 and 30 pounds of muscle by making small changes once we knew what his patterns were.
Not only in terms of looking at carbohydrates, fat, things like that, but looking at the behavioral change, looking at the behaviors and the habits.
So a big part of this for me was not just looking at the how-to, but speaking to people like B.J. Fogg, who's professor at Stanford and head of their persuasion lab, to figure out Why do people, for example, whose marriages depend on quitting smoking, pick up that cigarette?
Why does a type 1 diabetic eat something that they know will require an additional shot of Humulin R or something like that?
And this is the outcome, three years later, of all these tests.
Actually, since you raised the issue, talk about the motivational side.
Because, you know, you write the book, it's funny.
Self-deprecating at times, and yet at the same time you're chronicling some pretty amazing tasks for yourself.
Go back to the motivational issue.
How do you motivate your dad to lose 90 pounds while gaining muscle mass?
Right.
So I think that there were a few counterintuitive findings for me at least, and this was reflected in a lot of the research and a lot of the literature, but you see it in the real world very clearly.
When you have 90 plus pounds to lose, the task seems so insurmountable and the risk of failure is so high.
And most people who have that weight to lose have attempted diets in the past that it's very beneficial to start with extremely small changes.
So that's what I tried to do and what ended up being very successful with my dad.
You see that with Tracy in the book, lost 117 pounds, mother of two.
Starting with small changes.
So for example, in my dad's case, rather than say, alright, here's your new diet.
You're going to follow this for the rest of your life, which is a very daunting prescription.
I said, let's do a two-week trial.
We're going to get your before and afters.
We're going to look at your performance, so not just appearance.
I wanted to look at his lifts in the gym, which he tripled.
In two weeks he tripled?
No, he tripled over the span of a few months, his lifts.
Tripling is a big number.
It is, it is.
He got really strong.
And we changed his breakfast so that he was getting 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up.
So I wanted to make it easy to remember, easy to implement.
And then secondly, made tiny changes to his meals.
And he had one day off per week as a psychological release valve, among other things, to eat whatever he wanted.
So it wasn't as though he was giving up his favorite foods for the rest of his life.
He was just doing it for six days at a time.
And that made it very sustainable.
Is the only reason that you allow that one day free, which my wife says she does every day now, Yes.
Every day is a cheat day.
Is that the only reason to help?
Because I must say, speaking from a very personal perspective, it doesn't help me to have a cheat day.
It's just too far away.
You don't need a diet.
Okay, both of you, looking at you, you're both very self-disciplined, very fit, people who don't understand the idea of cheating, period, when it comes to potato chips.
But if I'm going to cheat, I'd rather cheat a little bit every night than cheat once a week.
Like an almond or a walnut.
Yeah, so this is a good...
Question on a really important topic.
So what I was looking for...
In making a mainstream recommendation was what would do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
And for many people who have weight issues, and when I say weight issues, in some cases that's an extra 5 to 10 pounds.
But for people who really have weight management problems, let's say 30 plus pounds to lose, they in many cases don't have an effective shutoff switch.
So if they could just eat...
wouldn't be an issue.
But if they have one cookie, there's a domino effect and they'll eat 10, 20.
And for myself, I actually know that's true with certain things like chocolate croissants as an example.
So I limit the damage to one 24-hour period.
It's not the only reason though, the psychological aspect.
When you look at some of the literature related to, let's say, thyroid conversion of T4 to T3, you find that very intermittent overfeeding helps maintain levels of certain levels in specific ranges of T3 or affects leptin in ways that helps with sustained you find that very intermittent overfeeding helps maintain levels of certain levels And...
Unfortunately, on many diets that are extremely calorically restrictive, You'll see women stop menstruating, so you'll see amenorrhea.
You'll see a lot of side effects that can be fairly easily prevented with one day of strategic overeating.
But for some people who would fall in, let's say, your camp, or even in my camp, if I really want to lose weight quickly, I will have one cheap meal a week, let's say.
But I think that the The cumulative impact of cheating a little bit every day for most people is going to do more harm than good, but there are, let's just say, 10% of the readers out there who will not need to cheat at all.
So I think it comes down to very personal prescription.
What was the biggest surprise for you as you wrote this book?
The most surprising part for me, I've always been, I ran a sports nutrition company for eight years, which allowed me to see inside that industry, which was fascinating.
So I got to see the best and the worst practices, of course, and there's a lot of bad in that business.
But I've always been a symptom and then treatment type of person.
I like the precision of problem, solution, and I use supplementation, I use prescription medication in many cases.
I like the specificity of that.
And what I realized for myself personally looking at, whether it was fertility markers or any number of things, I was actually doing more harm than good in many cases by taking isolated nutrients.
Because scientists can only study what they can isolate.
The problem is, if you look at something like beta-carotene, by itself it doesn't behave in the human body as it would in naturally occurring relationship to other cofactors and Any number of whole foods.
So I've actually turned 180 and gone back to almost exclusively whole foods.
And I say almost because it's extremely hard through industrially produced food in the US and in other first world countries to get some of the nutrition that you need.
But for the most part, I've gone completely back to whole foods, which was a surprising conclusion for me because I would much prefer to say, I just need to take these five pills and my job is done.
Well, you have four, I think it is.
P-A-G. Right.
Something.
Exactly.
Yeah, so you have PAG, the non-stimulant stack that I found to be very effective for increasing the rate of fat loss.
Explain what everyone what PAG is.
So PAG is...
I was...
For a very long time, one of millions of people using ephedrine to lose fat, to accelerate fat loss, ephedrine hydrochloride, or ephedra mahuang, it's called by many different names.
And it was made illegal for a number of reasons, one of which was it could be used to freebase methamphetamine.
And it was found in primatine mist tablets, etc.
So these days, the amount you can buy, let's say at Walgreens, it's limited for that reason.
Ephedrine, caffeine, and aspirin have been studied in combination for fat loss.
The problem with that stack, the problem with most fat loss products, is they're very strong stimulants.
It's like being on speed all day.
It is.
It's very, very chemically close.
And you can do a lot of damage to your adrenal glands, which I did to myself.
I had chronic sinusitis, lots of very, very...
I wanted to look for a non-stimulant stack of supplements that could potentially help.
And I have no financial interest in any of these.
I actually did something pretty fun with the supplements that I can talk about in a second.
But P stands for polycosinol, which is by far the most controversial portion of the entire stack.
And I say controversial because it's based on an extract of whether it's sugarcane or beeswax.
Most of the research comes out of Cuba.
And many studies from Cuba, and now keeping in mind that this relates to some of their main exports, show fantastic results.
And then you look at some of the studies that are done in Europe or the U.S., and they show no results.
But keeping in mind that I measured all of this, we can come back to the measurement part.
A stands for alpha-lipoic acid, which is a fascinating, fascinating compound.
It is an antioxidant that's both fat and water-soluble, which makes it very unique, and it helps to improve insulin sensitivity.
Certainly, if you're a type 1 diabetic, you need to be aware of that and speak to your doctor before using any supplement if you're on medication or have a medical condition.
The two G's, green tea extract, I'm decaffeinated because you're going for the EGCG specifically.
What I found fascinating about green tea is that it can trigger apoptosis or cell death in mature fat cells, which is really uncommon actually.
So one of the reasons people regain fat so quickly is they decrease the size of their fat droplets, but they still have the same number of cells.
So they get fat really quickly and they rebound.
And you can inhibit a lot of that by using green tea effectively.
And then the last is garlic, which came about in the most circuitous of fashions.
But my dad, when he was still 245, was visiting me in San Jose and walked down the street to an Italian restaurant where they had this huge outdoor grill and he was waiting to order his tri-tip steak.
And this homeless guy sauntered up to him, really thin homeless guy in the end of the day.
And stood there next to my dad watching the grill.
And my dad's like, hi, how's it going?
And the guy goes, you know how I lost 100 pounds?
And my dad's like, I have no idea.
And he said, I ate clove after clove after clove of garlic.
And then he just turned and walked away.
It was like the messenger had arrived.
And it seems like the raving of a lunatic.
But I'd been looking at garlic for a really long time.
It just turned out that I wasn't taking a sufficient dose.
And garlic really, really also helps with fat loss.
So those four things in combination, if I removed any one of those four, the results were less.
I tested that on myself and about a dozen, I would say in the beginning, about a dozen other subjects, mostly friends, male and female, and worked really, really effectively.
You take it every day?
I don't currently take it every day.
With PAG specifically, I tend to be very goal-focused, not terribly surprising.
I can tell that.
Yeah, a little...
I tend to obsess, so hopefully the readers don't have to.
Right now, I'm very fascinated by sex hormones, so testosterone and other markers like sperm count, not because I'm trying to have kids, but just because I think it's a good reflection of overall health.
So eating for fertility was another big surprise.
Simplifying things, if you eat for fertility, a lot of the other pieces of the puzzle tend to take care of themselves.
So I'm not taking PAG every day.
But if I'm trying to minimize fat gain during the holidays, for example, so let's say we have Christmas coming up, I like to eat.
Part of the reason I live in San Francisco is I really like to eat.
So there are Briar Mirror Farms out on Long Island.
I know we're getting pies.
I know we're getting cakes.
And I'm going to have plenty of it.
So I'll have, let's say, 300 milligrams of alpha-lipoic acid at the same time that I would have, let's say, the main course.
And that would help to minimize some of the fat gain.
So I would use it around that time and then I would have the polycosinol before I go to bed.
Specifically, just to geek out for a second, because the cholesterol synthesis in most people tends to peak between midnight and 4am.
So I'll have it before I go to bed.
There are so many questions that when we come back I want to ask you about, but I do want to go back to the issue of sex.
Sex hormones, sperm count.
The theme, of course, is that if you're able to rev your engines, particularly in an area which we know is fundamentally important and reflective of human health, reproduction, then you're probably going to do okay in other places as well.
I'd like to pick up on that theme when we return and also get into some of the deep issues around muscle building.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
Before we get to the superhuman component, let's talk about incredible sex.
So you have spent a lot of time in this book, and it really is beautifully written.
I mean, when I say that, it's not just that it's meticulous, it's just, it's funny.
Thank you.
It's playful.
Appropriately self-duplicating at times, but serious at others.
Talk to us a little bit about the research you've done yourself and others, and particularly how you gauged health based on sperm count, and how you were able to change those numbers in ways that I found dramatic.
So, the book was initially planned to be a very...
It's a very, very small book.
This changed.
It's like 500 pages or something.
Yeah, it's more than that.
It's 558 pages, and I'm carting this thing around for my wife.
I may get you a Kindle for Christmas.
Will the pictures come out as well, I wonder?
Well, we had to replace all the photographs with illustrations, of course.
Being in the U.S., boy, that was a challenge.
The book was initially going to be a very thin book that covered simply fat loss and muscle building.
That's it.
And when I looked at muscle building, of course one of the limiting factors was testosterone, certainly for men and for women.
And When I started doing a lot of extensive blood testing, I realized that as healthy as I was, or healthy as I thought I was, I registered on the low range of testosterone, which struck me as very, very strange.
And I had noticed also over time that my interest in sex, while it was still there certainly, had decreased pretty markedly from, let's say, 25 to 30. And when I dug into it even deeper, I found through testing at a laboratory called SpectraCell, which is allegedly used by Lance Armstrong and many other top athletes.
It's a good lab.
It is a good lab.
And they also measure white cell antioxidant levels.
Right.
Vitamin levels.
Yeah.
And the way they present the actual results is, I think, very good as well.
I identified a selenium deficiency.
I had a selenium deficiency.
So how many people think about selenium every day?
I certainly don't.
And commonly found in Brazil nuts, among other things.
Actually, really high doses in Brazil nuts.
You have to be careful you don't have too much.
But I identified a selenium deficiency and a few other things that were slightly off kilter.
I fixed those, and within, I want to say, 8 weeks, 8 to 12 weeks, I tripled my bioavailable testosterone.
I did a few other things, specifically cold exposure, and that just means 10 to 15 minute ice baths three times a week.
That's painful.
That's not like an easy, like, oh, just this simple little step.
Right.
My dad called those the Guantanamo Bay treatments.
But if you do it up here, if you go fully submerged, it is truly an out-of-body experience.
But if you go up to your mid-abdomen and just read a newspaper or something like that, it's surprisingly easy.
You acclimate really quickly.
Why does that raise your testosterone?
The testicles are frozen.
It's a panic response.
It's a panic response in the testicles.
This is probably not far off, but for sperm count specifically.
So I was trying to address both at the same time because I also registered on the lower scale of things for sperm count.
And that came about again accidentally because I had a few brushes with mortality.
A number of my friends were diagnosed with cancer.
One passed away very sadly in 32, 33 years.
Two friends diagnosed with testicular cancer, which we could come back to in a second, but I realized that I better buy myself an insurance policy, so I wanted to start banking sperm.
Another nasty surprise on the low end of normal, and dropping.
That was the scary part, as I did it over time.
So, the selenium, the ice, among other things, vitamin D, vitamin A, I began taking fermented cod liver, which sounds horrific, and I recommend capsules as opposed to liquid.
Why do you ferment the cod liver oil?
So, there's a long...
This is a very controversial area of debate, but if you look at Weston Price, who is an ethnographer and dentist who travels around the world looking at different indigenous populations and trying to identify the populations that were free of disease and why they were free of disease, one of the consistent...
Food products was lacto-fermented foods, various types.
And there's some very interesting properties of fermented foods.
But you could eat sauerkraut.
You don't have to ferment your cod liver oil.
You don't have to ferment your cod liver oil for whatever reason.
And the hypothesis is vitamin K or vitamin K2. I figure if I can get it fermented and just get it in one capsule, again, coming back to my...
My fixation on the efficiency sniper shot, one shot, one kill, then I would take it that way.
But I also consumed the sauerkraut for the bacteria benefits.
I ended up tripling my bioavailable testosterone, doubling my sperm count, I actually do think, and this came from a very high-level strength coach who's dealt with multiple world champions and professional athletes, removing the cell phone from the pocket.
And this is something I did not want to put in the book because most people associate that type of recommendation with...
They're Aunt Susie who also likes to tell them to use crystals.
And it's like, oh sure, everything's going to give me cancer.
The microwave's going to kill me.
The cell phone's going to kill me.
But when I spoke with his strength coach, his name's Charles Poliquin.
Very, very smart guy.
And in fact, some of his genetic testing recommendations that I later explored led to a journal article in Nature, believe it or not, from a senior scientist at a company called Illumina, which processes all the 23andMe and Navigenics tests.
But coming back to Charles, I asked him, you've said in interviews that you correlate low testosterone levels with cell phones and pockets with your athletes.
And I said, is this something you've actually observed in testing?
And he got pretty upset.
Not upset, but he responded with, this is my opinion.
He said, look at some of the peer-reviewed literature.
But he said, filter out the studies that have been funded by industry.
And look at some of the studies.
And I did.
And it's pretty compelling.
So that was another change that I made.
Where do you keep your cell phone now?
I have my cell phone with me, but it's off.
Usually I'll keep it in a jacket.
So yeah, it's in my jacket right now.
And if I have it in my pocket, I'll just turn it off.
And then I'll check it When I get to my destination.
So if I'm sitting here, if I were, let's say we were on our laptops working, I would just have myself an off to the side.
And I've replicated this with a number of male friends.
They've seen the exact same change trend-wise in sperm count and testosterone.
I would say at the very least, it's a hypothesis worth disproving.
And when you come down to it, when I affected my own testosterone and sperm count, these are non-trivial changes.
I mean, doubling my, not only sperm count, but improving the morphology, the motility, everything.
That changes everything in my life.
Your girlfriend's now pregnant.
Super sperm.
I have to be careful.
But when people are able to impact their reproductive health in that fashion, even to a much lesser extent, it affects...
Self-reported well-being, how you feel, how you interact with people, your relationship, your marriage.
I mean, it's a very big variable.
It's a huge area of life, as you said earlier.
So I felt absolutely compelled to include a number of chapters on sex.
I mean, we have the 15-minute female orgasm as well, which has been received very positively.
Actually, with pictures, by the way.
With pictures.
Go to the 15-minute orgasm before I come back to muscle building.
Okay.
I have pictures, by the way.
I was showing my mom.
I said, should I get Dad this diet book for Christmas?
And she just randomly opened it, and there's this very graphic diagram.
So just a note on the random opening.
This worked out completely by accident that the diagrams, which are very detailed, for the 15-minute female orgasm are right in the middle of the book.
It was a complete accident.
It's like the page breaks.
So if you flip it open, that's the first thing you see.
Yeah.
Which has been, has some hysterical outcomes.
So the 15 minute female orgasm, or just the topic of female orgasm, was actually a request by female friends of mine.
Because I was looking at testosterone, I was reporting all these amazing results.
And going into all these fantastic results of my sex life related to testosterone, they said, what is this?
Is this a boys club?
They're like, why don't we have anything for the girls?
And I said, well, okay, you name it.
What should I cover?
And there were a number of very specific things that they felt I should cover.
One of which was female orgasm because it's viewed as very nebulous, this elusive, the analogy I use in the book is, you know, the snow leopard.
That's very good.
That's true.
And does it exist?
Maybe it doesn't.
You know, is it like Bin Laden?
Is he alive?
Is he dead?
Where is he?
On the television show, we have a warm-up conversation.
A comedian who keeps the audience engaged in between segments.
So a very, very funny line he came up with recently.
He said, we did a show, actually, on the female orgasm.
No, it was on the G-Spot.
I know, and we were focusing on the G-Spot.
But he said, unfortunately, we can't air it.
We can't find it.
Right.
And then the boom is...
You know, we also did one on the male orgasm.
Was it the male orgasm?
No, it's...
It was the male orgasm.
It was the male orgasm, but the problem with that is it's too short.
I was going to say, we just handed index cards out to the audience.
You never have to buy Cosmo again.
But the frequency, or I should say infrequency with which some women experience sexual climax of any type really surprised me.
I mean, the percentage of women who really just have never experienced what they believe to be an orgasm.
I had no idea that it was as problematic as it is.
So I wanted to look at it in a very systematic, and this sounds sterile and scientific, but I wanted it to be.
Because I wanted people to be able to replicate the results if I got any.
And I didn't know if I would.
But met with sex educators, MDs, but I went to the fringes too.
So I met people who run...
So effectively, orgasm meditation communes would be one way to describe it, where all they focus on is manual stimulation of the clitoris.
There's some guy that does that here in New York.
Oh, yeah.
Like once a week, you can go.
Yeah, go have coaching classes or group sessions.
Absolutely.
So I went to explain.
Warren was going to have him on our podcast.
At least you just shot a pilot for a television program.
It's crazy.
We saw the footage of it.
It's kind of weird.
You sit in a big class and you do it on yourself.
No, you either bring a male partner or a female partner or they can assign you someone.
I don't know these guys that show up with nobody.
I'll give you a little background here.
To me, it is...
I wouldn't call it because now I've been exposed to it and I've seen the benefit of it.
There are strange aspects to it.
Have you gone to one of the classes to volunteer?
Have you volunteered?
In the name of science, I had to sacrifice.
Some chapters were more fun to research than others.
But I went to a group class as an example.
This is for an organization called One Taste.
Is this manual stimulation you said?
Yes.
The objective of Nicole's objective, let me work on my grammar as a writer, was to teach women about orgasm in a well-lit...
Non-creepy environment, effectively.
So you go in and you practice.
It's just like yoga.
Breathe in, breathe out.
It's 15 minutes, hence the name of the chapter, of direct clitoral stimulation with some very, very strict guidelines.
And what this does, which is very, very...
Very valuable.
It uncouples the orgasm from sex.
So you take away a lot of the distraction, a lot of the expectation.
There's no disrobing.
Well, there's disrobing, of course, in the beginning.
But there's no fondling.
Once you're naked, there's no disrobing anymore.
Right, exactly.
The male has to stay clothed or it's game over.
Speaking for myself, very little self-control.
And you can, women can train themselves and men can facilitate repeated contractions over a 15 minute period.
But what you realize, the one common characteristic of inorgasmic women is they've never masturbated.
And it very typically also corresponds to being raised in a religious environment where And one I did not expect is many of the women are the oldest daughters in their families.
And they view themselves as the role model.
And so in many cases, even if their younger sisters were raised in the same family, they're perfectly orgasmic.
But the oldest sisters tend to not be orgasmic.
So, very important topic.
So far, at least, from the data, the real-world experimentation, 95% plus hit rate, I mean, success rate.
Just so clear on this, there's a little bit of a science education about how you stimulate the clitoris.
There's an art to it.
You practice it on the...
One o'clock.
Yeah, yeah.
I can be specific, right?
Yeah, please do.
Actually, you know what?
We're going to have to wait because we're going to take a quick break.
We're going to get to a lot more questions after the break.
All right, Tim Ferriss, talk to us about the female orgasm.
All right, so the specifics.
One tip that is immediately actionable for people and very specific is the most sensitive area of the clitoris for most women.
If you're facing the clitoris from between the legs, It would be from the, let's just say we're dealing with a heterosexual couple, from the male's perspective, at between 1 and 1.30 on the clock face, if the very top of the clitoris is 12 o'clock.
That is where most women will be most sensitive.
So to your left side a tiny bit, up center.
So to my...
To the female.
To the female's left side.
So you can reach it easily.
Right, upper left hand quadrant.
Use your left hand.
Exactly.
No, you use your right hand.
It's the left side.
Yeah, you use your right hand.
And then you turn your wrist so it looks like you're...
That's another fine-tuning technique.
You turn your wrist as if you're looking at your watch.
But if you practice very...
And the touch is also important here.
It's not erratic.
It's a very small movement.
So we're talking about...
A quarter of an inch of back and forth movement and the pressure would be two sheets of paper or so of pressure.
It's very light and it's continual.
You can change the speed, let's say, every two to three minutes, but otherwise it's just 15 minutes of direct stimulation.
And a lot of the insecurities or fears related to sex come to the surface with this type of practice, and it is a practice.
And so one of the objectives is for the woman to notice the self-talk.
What type of self-talk surfaces?
Is there unnecessary shame?
Is there unnecessary guilt?
And to let that pass through, it's very much like meditation.
And the therapeutic effects come very quickly.
You see women who have never experienced the involuntary contractions associated with orgasm, the word orgasm, after a few sessions of this.
So we're talking about 15 minutes each, three or four sessions, experience their first orgasm.
It's really quite remarkable.
Why do you think that these techniques have not been more broadly discussed?
I think there are a few reasons that the techniques have not been more broadly discussed.
The first, unfortunately, is that we live in a fairly puritanical society.
I'm not going to name names, but there were a number of morning shows that would not have me on the shows.
I've been on their shows.
They like me as a guest, but because the subtitle included the word sex, they would not have me on their shows.
And so number one, I think because there's a bias against open discussion of sex in the United States, except for in circles that most people don't want to go into.
So for most people, the idea of going to a group clitoral stimulation session is out of the question.
Name one taste.
Right.
And it's unfortunate, but I recognize why that would be the case.
So...
What I'm hoping to do, since I have the benefit of access to these various people, whether it's Olympic strength coaches or people who lead organizations like OneTaste, is to bring the best practices into the mainstream in a way that is unintimidating.
But I'm hoping very much that this is just the beginning of the conversation.
I want to just spark the conversation and get people started, but I hope there's much more of it.
I understand the puritanical elements of this, but let's just move out of sex because it's true in other areas as well.
I sense, just glancing through the book, and Lisa again, I can't get the book out of our hands.
I really like it.
There's a gap that you believe exists between the hard science approach to looking at these things and the more experiential approach that you've been using.
Right.
And it's an intriguing one because it's one that actually challenges most medicine.
When you try to take, and a scientist will do this, one specific aspect of a program and tease it out, you often don't get the results that you'll appreciate.
It's the ecosystem you create around yourself that allows you to raise your testosterone, your sperm count, and maybe deal with more muscle mass.
I just love to understand your take as a layman who studied this stuff better than most physicians have, where you think those gaps exist.
And I just used your orgasm, but you can pick any other topic.
Muscle building, weight loss.
I think there are a few, and you've had exposure to so many different facets of medicine, both on the clinical side and on the popular side through the media, etc.
So you're very aware of this.
There are a few issues, I would say, that produce these gaps.
The first is that published literature has its limitations.
And as one example...
People don't work for free.
So these studies need to be funded.
And I'm not going to paint a conspiracy theory because I think a lot of it is overblown.
But the fact of the matter is, if you want to study, let's just say, the effect of removing dairy from your diet on acne...
Or if you want to study that across 20 or 100 subjects, that costs money to do.
And it is going to be easier to study something like a drug such as tetracycline as opposed to removing dairy from the diet.
And many of the studies that would be most actionable, or the results of which would be most actionable, will never ever get funded for a host of different reasons, whether logistics or otherwise.
And I think that's part of the reason, is that there are few funding sources.
Not only that, but...
So Dr. Seth Roberts, who's a professor emeritus from UC Berkeley, is a good friend of mine and wrote a number of the chapters, two of the chapters in the book.
Oh no, one was unfortunately had to be removed due to length, but...
It was a big book.
Once you're up to 600 pages, why would you bother?
I know.
We had to cut about 150 pages.
Are you kidding me?
No.
How can folks find that?
Do you put it on your website?
I'm going to put it on the website.
One of the chapters he wrote was called The Value of Self-Experimentation.
He's published and he's critiqued published literature.
He's a very knowledgeable guy.
He understands the statistics.
The other issue is that in the publish or perish world of academia, The studies that could be most useful are oftentimes the least prestigious.
It's very unusual, but that's the reality that exists.
So it's much more respectable in certain facets of whether it's medicine or psychology to study the abstract, the big, the broad, as opposed to the really specific.
And so that's one reason I think the gaps exist.
Another reason the gaps exist I would say, is that the technology hasn't existed up until the last, really the last 24 months I would say, for the average person to gather data and really parse it intelligently.
But I don't think the average person will ever gather data on themselves the way you do.
I mean, you inserted one of those little diabetic things into your side.
You put a glucose monitoring system inside his body.
So I wouldn't expect people to do that.
But, for example, there's a device called the Zeo.
It's a sleep monitoring device.
And it's effectively an EEG. Is this the thing you wear on your head?
Yeah, and it tracks your...
You got a little...
Oh, it does.
It does leave a mark on the forehead.
I did an even more advanced one.
There's a sleep apnea device.
Oh, all right.
So you take the Zeo test, which is a nice little way of figuring out how you're sleeping, and then you add to it a device that actually monitors oxygen coming in and out of your nose.
Sounds comfortable.
But it's actually not bad.
I love this device.
And it's wonderful because it helps people figure out not only how they sleep during the evening, but do they have any element at all of sleep apnea?
And I'm interested in it because sleep apnea is one of the biggest problems we have in America.
It's one of the biggest reasons we don't sleep well.
And this would help folks very inexpensively in the comfort of their own home.
They don't have to go to the sleep lab, figure it out if they've got a problem.
He put it on wrong and bruised his head.
I didn't put it on wrong.
Sometimes you put it on too tightly.
I was testing it.
The device didn't exist when I did it.
I was curious.
Right.
With the Zeo, I was always afraid that I would toss and turn and knock it off my head, so I tightened it like Rambo, and it was a little lift, a little mark.
How often do you take your blood?
Well, it depends.
If I was doing a test, again, I'm a strange bird, but in some cases I was doing every two to four weeks, depending.
But just to come back to the...
The Xeo, or this device for sleep apnea, that just did not exist five years ago.
And I think that's part of the reason that these gaps exist, because there are sites like PatientsLikeMe that have replicated clinical studies across hundreds of people and displayed the data intelligently.
They just didn't exist.
And that's so exciting to me.
I really think 2011 is going to be a huge year for looking at how medical discoveries can come out of this collective wisdom.
But I think that's another reason.
Since you've already chronicled this in yourself, and I just love talking about this stuff because I think it is practical.
Because it worked on one person.
It might work on many of our listeners and viewers for the show.
Walk us through some of the strength advice you give.
For folks who...
Elevating your testosterone is one.
I must say, you know, I'm still a little bit suspect of bursting myself in cold baths.
Right.
We can definitely talk more about that.
I want to go that way.
Talk to you more broadly about how you, I mean, Tim has these pictures of himself where you look pretty cut and then you look a lot more cut and it's only a few weeks later.
It's his kettlebell.
I bought you one for Christmas.
Kettlebell?
I've actually used a kettlebell, but I don't think you have to use it every hour.
I work out a fair mind as well, but it's more than that that you articulate in the book.
In this particular muscle gain chapter, I really wanted to demonstrate exercise, how exercise can be used like medicine.
And there's a gentleman named Doug McGuff, Dr. Doug McGuff, who talks about this extensively, but the minimal effective dose.
So what is the proper dose of exercise for the outcome that you want?
And much like medicine or any drug, if you overdo it, if you take too much, there are side effects.
Now, in this case, I did, and this was documented by a PhD at San Jose State University, did hydrostatic weighing, and had circumference measurements, photographs, it was very well documented, and I gained 34 pounds of muscle in four weeks.
That's crazy.
Which is crazy.
It is.
It's eight and a half pounds a week.
It's a lot.
And...
We could definitely dig into what that means in terms of what those 34 pounds consisted of, because there's a lot that goes into it.
But also lost 3 pounds of fat, and I don't fixate as much on cholesterol as I used to, but I decreased my cholesterol from 222 to 147. Total cholesterol, correct.
Which, as you know, doesn't give a complete picture at all, but that was the number.
So one also interesting number.
Now, the more fascinating part about this is that it was done with two 30-minute strength training workouts per week.
Did you get any cardio on top of that?
I did no cardio.
None?
None.
But we can definitely talk about this.
I did no cardio in the traditional sense.
What's really fascinating about weight training, and I did this using a very safe protocol, and for me, strength training is about injury prevention first, and performance strength enhancement second.
The cadence, so all the exercises were five seconds up, five seconds down.
Very, very slow lifting speed to eliminate momentum, which means you use weights that you can control.
One set to failure per exercise.
Very similar to what Arthur Jones did decades ago with Nautilus.
He did an experiment called the Colorado Experiment, which is very much more controversial than mine, where Casey Vieter, who is a bodybuilder, dieted down firsts and then gained 63 pounds of muscle in 28 days.
About 20 pounds of that was muscle regain.
He was also compensated per pound he gained and had super mutant genetics.
I gained 34 pounds.
The protocol is replicable.
I don't think that most people will gain 34 pounds.
I'm not going to even suggest that's the case.
The first 10 pounds of that, I would say for me, were also muscle regain.
Just like fat has a memory, muscle cells do as well due to satellite cells and other things.
But if you are, let's just say, a male who weighs more than 120 pounds, so you have more than 120 pounds of lean muscle, gaining 10 pounds in a month, even 15 pounds in a month, not that difficult to do.
If you consume enough food, assuming you don't have leaky gut syndrome or some type of digestive disorder, For the listeners who may not be picking up the four-hour body, walk us through basic principles, five seconds up, five seconds down, so there's no momentum, use controllable weights.
I could give two complete workouts in probably 60 seconds.
So let's say you do two workouts per week.
If you've had trouble gaining weight, Monday, Friday, let's just say your two workouts are going to be on Monday and on Friday.
And the first workout would be overhead press.
Second exercise is squat or using a machine.
Just make sure that you're controlling the cadence.
So five seconds up, five seconds down.
That's your entire workout.
All at overhead press and squat.
That's it?
That's it.
If we're going to keep this simple...
I'm sure that's not going to take you half an hour to do.
Not at all.
That's going to take you less than five minutes.
You're done.
And you're done.
So the second workout, just to finish up, because this is the second workout, if you wanted to add one more exercise, I would say, let's make it three.
So you would do overhead press, You would do bent row, so some type of rowing exercise where you're pulling, and then squat.
And then on Friday, you would do, let's just say, decline bench press.
Flat bench press can bother the shoulders, so decline or incline bench press.
Pull down, so another pulling movement, and then something like deadlift.
But if you don't have professional instruction to teach you the technique on the deadlift, Then you could do another leg exercise, just another variant of the squat.
And that's it.
That is your workout for the entire week.
And the other dietary component that is important here is protein intake.
And there's a lot of debate about protein.
There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about protein.
But if you're a healthy male, you don't have any pre-existing kidney issues or anything like that, I'm sorry, one gram of protein per pound of desired body weight.
And you would actually target 10 pounds above your current weight.
So it gets really specific.
In that regard, I think you'll have to buy the book because it is spectacular.
I can applaud you, Tim, for putting all the effort into it.
Thank you.
It is a wonderful treatise.
Setting your own body, but also expose the new way by which people learn about the human body.
