Spending long hours at the office combined with a sedentary lifestyle often result in the possession of an unsightly pot belly. What can you do? The standard options are there – jogging or resisting those ridiculously sinful desserts – but have you considered taking garlic, tea and sugar cane extracts? No? Exactly.
In this 592-page book the author claims to offer the solution to our weight, sleep and bedroom problems (if any). It comes complete with diagrams, pictures and detailed step-by-step instructions. You might know Ferriss from his earlier bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), which detailed the art of breaking free from a workaholic lifestyle.
Ferriss’s philosophy is simple: use minimum effort and time to achieve maximum gain. Want to lose weight? Follow a set of simple rules. Avoid certain foods and drinks. Eat the same meals. With so many instructions, you might think this book is a boring technical manual. Fortunately, Ferriss remedies this with cheeky little anecdotes – some perhaps a little too titillating to read openly in a public place or in the presence of children.
Approaching the book with a fair bit of scepticism, I found the weight loss sections to be particularly useful, though the part about sleeping just two hours a day was too good to be true (and downright dangerous if you drive). That said,
The 4-Hour Body does offer useful tidbits of unconventional wisdom, and its numerous internet resources make for hours of online exploration.
Rui Ming He
