Tim Ferriss (the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Work Week) has released another bestseller - The 4-Hour Body. It is an interesting recount of his years of personal experimentation with dieting, fat loss, muscle gain, injuries, rehabilitation, and more. It is backed up with scientific research, expert advice, and data from previous studies. From the horse's mouth:

The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation.

Sounds like the perfect thing for me to test and as such my first personal challenge to track here will be my attempt to achieve my very own 4 hour body. I will be following two parts of the book in particular - the Slow-Carb Diet and Geek To Freak, tracking all progress along the way.

Goals

At this stage my goals are pretty simple:

Lose Fat - Cut my body fat percentage to under 10% and drop 2cm on waist and hips
Gain Muscle - Add at least 2cm to Biceps, Chest, Quads,

Measuring for Success

"What gets measured gets managed" is the call of the day for this plan. Any diet and exercise plan needs to be monitored properly to ensure motivation is maintained and the best way to do that is by measuring everything. That way during any times of weakness or self-doubt, the cold hard facts are there to give unwavering encouragement. My measurements will include:

Body Fat Percentage
Body Weight
Bicep size
Chest size
Waist size
Hips size
Quadricep size

The diet officially starts tomorrow (although I did a trial run for dinner - ground mince, lentils, capsicum, all wrapped in lettuce) and the exercise routine will kickoff later on this week. Keep an eye out for more updates to come soon including all my starting measurements, and outline of my diet rules, and my exercise plan.

Side note: If you don't know how Tim Ferriss is then I suggest checking out his blog and the above mentioned books. A very interesting character who has achieved so much in his life so far.

Update (2/2/11): You can now read the 6 week wrap-up of my 4-Hour Body journey in this article.