Shortly after Epiphany I started doing the slow carb diet as outlined in the Tim Ferriss book The four Hour body. Basically slow carb is a high protein low carb diet. It seems friendly to fat in general, but I would say not as fat friendly as Paleo is. In the past I did paleo (the Primal version by Mark Sissan) and successfully lost a lot of weight, but I wanted something that I thought was a little more flexible. In the month and a half of slow carb I have lost 20 pounds. I think the rate of weight loss is slightly slower than doing paleo for me, but I think it is sustainable longer term. One interesting aspect of the diet is you can eat whatever you want on one day of the week (your cheat day). On my cheat day (Saturday) I tend to gain a pound or 2 but the weight loss the rest of the week eats this away and still leaves you with gains. I think it is an interesting aspect of the diet because now instead of saying I can’t eat X, it becomes I need to wait till Saturday to have this. Waiting a few days is much easier on the will power than saying I can’t eat this as eventually people tend to cheat. The other thing to note is even though I have been doing this diet on the weekend of my Wife’s birthday I ate whatever she wanted and we had Valentines where we ate fondue so I haven’t been entirely faithful to the diet like I was with Primal. Given how well it is working with all those aspects I will keep going with it, I would like to lose at least another 30 pounds so I am almost halfway to where I want to be.

The other change I have made is I purchased a new body scale. I went with the Withings Body Cardio. The key features I was looking for in a new scale included wifi or blutooth and integration with Apple’s Heath kit. My thinking is just tracking something like weight makes you more aware of it, which influences your decisions that you make. Now every morning I step on the scale and the data is downloaded to my phone. I have a very nice graph to look at of the last month of weight loss which is also great motivation to stick with something. Withings has their own app, but I just configured it to feed their data into Apple’s app as that is what I am interested in tracking. If anything were to ever get me into a smart watch it would probably be that app as I love all the stats rolling in there, and with the watch you would then have pulse data and other health metrics recorded. I would highly recommend the scale as it really is a game changer to have all that data fed into your phone.

Now back to the book. I would also recommend the 4 hour body book. Not only does it have some great data about diet, it has all sorts of other exercises based on experiments that the author has done with trainers. There is a body hack for using cold therapy to grown brown fat cells (which burn white fat). There are ideas on improving athletic performance, whether you are interested in running faster or getting stronger or putting on muscle mass it has all sorts of ideas. At this point I am only playing around with the diet ideas, and I may move on to some of the cold therapy ideas to see if that accelerates fat loss. All in all it is worth checking out and playing around with.