Time for experiment #2! Even though results from the last experiment turned out to be inconclusive with respect to the hypothesis that was asked, they would serve just fine as a control for this experiment.

After I finished experiment #1 I got very sick with a nasty flu that was making its rounds in Seattle. While sick I decided to eat pretty much anything I wanted with no restrictions and I’m sure I gained some weight as a result. Now that I’m feeling much better, it’s time to get back on the track to improving my body one experiment at a time.

So, what is the hypothesis that we will challenge this time? While I was down with the flu, I started reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4 Hour Body book, which I highly recommend if not for its multiple nuggets of interesting nutrition and exercise advice,  then for its funny anecdotes from Tim’s life that accompany almost every chapter. Tim is also a body hacker like me but on a whole different scale. He’s been doing experiments on his body and keeping track of the different body measurements for many years before he started working on the book. I was very pleased to find out that I’m not the only crazy food and nutrition “scientist” on this planet. His book not only inspired me to keep going with these experiments but also gave me some excellent advice, including using Saturdays as an “eat whatever you want” day to jump start your metabolism and reset hormonal changes.

One of the first things Tim advocates in his book is the “Slow Carb” diet, which works like this: you can eat anything you want as long as it does not contain “fast carbs”. What is a “fast carb”? It’s basically a carbohydrate than hits your bloodstream very shortly after being ingested. The scientific way of formulating this diet is: do not eat any high Glycemic Index (GI) carbs. After reading about this diet, I realized that this would make a perfect second experiment for this blog.

So what have we? We will use experiment #1 as a base to create the conditions for this new experiment so that we can use its results as a control. Here is the new experiment design:

  • Eat 200-400 calories more than I spend every day.
  • Aim for 20/40/40 percentage distribution of fats/carbs/protein.
  • No sugars or other high GI carbs allowed at all.

The hypothesis we will be proving/rejecting is the following:

All else being the same as in control experiment #1, I will achieve more fat loss by replacing all high GI carb calories with low GI carb calories.

The control experiment is experiment #1. Throughout this experiment I will still be eating the same number of extra calories daily, it’s just that these calories will not come from high GI carbs. As simple as that and off we go…