

“Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me) - eroded
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2013/11/03/productivity-hacks/

======
ryan-allen
So in this post, Tim mentions that he has seen a therapist "for the first time
ever" because he was possibly doomed to life long pessimism, yet he implies
that he is manic depressive, which may well be true, but then he wraps up his
post with some 'tips' on how to manage, and if they work for him, great... or
maybe not.

I don't feel so good about him throwing about this manic depressive stuff,
especially in the coffee table self help circle-jerk industry. Bipolar
disorder is a serious goddamn illness and it ruins peoples lives.

The average age people are diagnosed with bipolar is around 30, and that's a
lot of life to live flipping from left to right listening to whimsy advise
like this. This is really dangerous.

You can't give a list of '10 things to do' to someone with bipolar and expect
them to sort themselves out. If Tim is truly suffering from biploar, that
'list of things that work' changes from week to week, possibly even day to day
and hour to hour. The drive he feels is from his hypomania (that leads to a
post like this and incredulous books like the 4 hour body) that inevitably
leads to an exhausted crash and period of debilitating depression. Hell, he
might even have a mixed episode and in a manic 'clarity' moment of the
depression he decided to hang himself. This isn't simple conjecture, these are
the kinds of things that happen.

For what it's worth, if you want to see what the many sides of bipolar are
like you should watch "The life of a Manic Depressive" with Steven Fry. He
interviews many famous people and regular civilians regarding their illness,
and you'll find that the sample there are mostly not living 'inspired lives'
like Tim, and his advise isn't going to help them in the long run I fear, if
anything I fear it'll cause more people suffering to delay that first visit to
a psychiatrist to seek help.

EDIT: I'd like to point out that if Tim's writings are a product of his
hypomania/mania you can't blame him for it. But whatever.

------
ledge
Here this guy claims to have put on 20 pounds of muscle in 8 weeks, and in
another article he claims 34 pounds in 4 weeks. Hmm... I wouldn't invest in
anything he was associated with, he is clearly full of shit.

~~~
jere
So what? The previous 34lb gain happened about _8 years_ ago and that was
probably his main focus at the time. Then, he was in his late 20s. Now, he's
in his late 30s and obviously spread thin.

I love HN, but damn the negativity and dismissal. The guy is opening up on
some pretty personal stuff and I for one appreciate it.

[edit: I've explained why I think the original 34lb gain is possibly
legitimate in this comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669680)
(though you should note that wasn't the point of _this_ comment.)]

~~~
delluminatus
Gaining 34 lbs of muscle in 4 weeks is impossible, even for a young man.

Even gaining 34 pounds of weight in 4 weeks (not just muscle, but fat as well)
would be a serious challenge: 34 pounds of weight equates to about 119,000
kilocalories[1], meaning you would have to eat 119k/28=4,250 kcal a day in
addition to your "maintenance" calorie level (i.e. the caloric energy that you
burn with everyday activity -- usually 1500-2500 kcal). So he would have to
eat about 7,000 kcal a day in order to gain weight at that rate.

Furthermore, gaining weight and gaining muscle are very different beasts.
Muscle is only "built" when muscle fibers are broken down through strenuous
activity and then rebuilt. This is not a rapid process. It's widely accepted
in the weight training community that without steroids, muscle can be built at
a rate of a pound or two a week at most.

So either the author is lying about his muscle gain, which throws his other
statements into doubt, or more likely he's simply confused about how to
actually measure weight vs. muscle gain, and reporting erroneous conclusions.
There are many fitness-related misconceptions out there.

[1]
[http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/calories/WT00011](http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/calories/WT00011)

~~~
jere
Original article for reference:
[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/29/from-geek-
to...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/29/from-geek-to-freak-how-
i-gained-34-lbs-of-muscle-in-4-weeks/)

>Gaining 34 lbs of muscle in 4 weeks is impossible

I'm not so sure it's impossible. Claiming such seems like black swan fallacy.
Lots of people were skeptical about it of course and I don't blame you for
being skeptical. My original comment above was mainly in response to the
divergent 2 numbers being clearly bullshit... they're not. I'll try to tackle
what you said below:

The calorie part isn't much of an argument. With enough exertion and access to
calorically dense, highly palatable foods, it's not that hard to eat several
thousands calories in excess daily. A large pizza can easily be 2500 calories;
a cheesecake can easily be 3000 calories.

But... your calculation is actually a straw man, since fat requires more
calories than muscle. I can't find an exact number, but taking just knowing
that caloric density of dietary protein is less than half that of dietary fat
and that muscle mass is mostly water, I'm guessing at least half as much as
fat, so closer to 1500 calories than 3500. Add a small detail to that in that
he lost 3lb of fat during the same time period and the calculation is more
like ((34 X 1500 kcal)-(3 X 3500 kcal))/28 = 1446 kcal a day in excess. So
he'd be eating about 3500 calories per day. That's actually a fairly typical
number for an American.

I really don't think he was confused about how to measure... he went to a
human performance lab and used hydrostatic weighing, one of the most accurate
methods.

Finally, call me naive, but I don't think he's lying either. I've read a lot
of Ferriss's stuff and one theme that has come out is he's really good at
finding loopholes that allow him to win by just barely staying within the
rules. I'm no expert, but I've noticed that improvements in body composition
are rapidly achievable for people who had a similar composition in the past
and only temporarily deviated. I'm pretty sure Ferriss was jacked when younger
(he used to wrestle).

Ferriss also references the Colorado experiment and the same point is brought
up on the wikipedia page (the claim here by the way is a _63lb_ gain in one
month... so you must really think that is BS):

>These claims are considered controversial because it was only performed with
two subjects who were not "average," but regaining pre-existing muscle mass.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Experiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Experiment)

He may very well not have "built" the muscle, but simply regained the existing
mass.

~~~
delluminatus
Good point about the caloric density of fat vs. muscle. It's kind of
embarrassing to have forgotten about that point.

However, that still doesn't address the question of how someone could
seriously put on 34 lb of muscle in one month... I think even if you're
regaining "lost muscle," this still strikes me as implausible or at the very
least unreproducible. I am not convinced that having some historical muscle
suddenly entitles you to a ten-times-normal rate of muscle growth.

Also, I can tell you right away that the Colorado Experiment was BS. It would
take a remarkably naive reader to think that the reported results of the
"experiment" are legitimate.

I think you might be right about the "finding a loophole" type of thinking. In
my mind, if someone uses a loophole to achieve a metric like "pounds of muscle
gained," the accomplishment is nullified in the sense that it becomes useless
as a learning tool, and as an anecdote it is downright dangerous... even if he
actually gained 63 pounds of muscle by abusing "the rules," that's not useful
(although it may still be rather impressive).

Well, I haven't read anything else Ferriss has written, so I don't have any
background. But the claim itself is pretty outrageous.

~~~
jere
Just because I find it interesting, let me just point out a couple examples
Ferriss gives (and is up front about) to elaborate on "loopholes":

-Winning a kickboxing championship by 1) pretty drastic water loss to fit into a lower division and 2) TKO by repeatedly knocking his opponent out of the ring.

-Winning a world record in tango by getting the most consecutive spins in a minute.

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efbenson
If he really is bipolar (manic-depressive is an outdated term that most of us
don't use) this sounds like a very manic period after coming out of
depression. The truth is somewhere in the middle. If he sustains this for more
than 6 months it might be sustainable, otherwise his mania will run out and
the depression will set back in.

------
eterm
Are these really tips that are applicable to others or is blogging like this
just another form of humble-bragging?

~~~
elag
It's Tim Ferriss, man. (In my RSS feed this post is just above 'Startup snake
oil').

------
iSnow
Humble bragging meets survivor bias.

