Ricardo Arias – 410 pounds to 211.6 pounds, for a loss of 198.4 pounds. But is he an anomaly? Sidenote: the black pants in the after pic (56 portly-long/60+ inch waist) fit him tightly at 410.
How many “how-to” books actually get read?
Historically, no one has known. Now, it’s possible to get an idea by looking at how many digital highlights a book has, and perhaps Amazon will someday provide data on how many people finish Kindle editions.
Taking it a step further: how many of the books actually get used?
This is tricky. Patients routinely ignore prescribed drugs, estimated to result in 125,000 deaths a year from cardiovascular disease alone, so it’s hard to imagine books are better followed. But how to know for sure?
The answer is: you have to track it.
When The 4-Hour Body (4HB) was published, it was met with sharp criticism, including:
– It’s impossible to lose more than 2 pounds of fat per week!
– It’s impossible to gain 20+ pounds of muscle in a month!
– It’s impossible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time!
Fortunately, the “impossible” (circling the globe, breaking the 4-minute mile, reaching the moon, etc.) needs just one exception to be proven possible.
Since late 2010, new research and publications have supported many of the 4HB chapters that started with self-experiments (e.g. The New York Times and “brown fat,” cold exposure for fat loss, etc.). For all chapters, readers have outpaced my successes with their own. Here are several 100+ pound case studies.
But, the skeptics will rightly ask: Does it work for the general public, not just a handful of standouts?
This post will cover the first wide-scale distributed studies of The 4-Hour Body, which involved 3,500 people over 4 weeks. I’ll also include a few individual examples and measurements.
Here’s our rough table of contents:
– Case Study: 200 Pounds Lost
– The 4-Hour Body – Summary of Results with 3,500 People
– The Winner of The 4-Week Challenge: Female Before-and-After
– An Opportunity: Win Money By Losing Weight… Read More