My experience with 'The 4 Hour Body'

Some 10-12 weeks ago, I heard of Timothy Ferriss' new book 'The 4 Hour Body'. Having read his first book, 'The 4 Hour Work Week' I knew I had to expect something which screams 'marketing' in my face. On the other hand, the extreme, hacking like approach of Tim Ferriss somehow appeals to me because of his playfulness and openness. And, Tim's writing is quite motivating and eye opening. I didn't quite like his first book, simply because I very well believe that the 'tricks' he is offering are surely working for him, but wouldn't work for everyone. I guess he knows that, but he's selling those tricks as though they'd be working out for all of his readers. Anyway.

In his new book, rather than describing life hacking, he describes how to hack your body in several ways. He starts off with how he's always looking for the minimal effective dose for anything: How much training do I have to do, to get a certain effect? How few do I have to change my habits to get rid of body fat? How much training do I need for running 50k rather than 5k, etc. Although in most aspects I do not share the search for the minimal effective dose as an aim in itself, I share the search for it as a means to understand certain effects. Regarding running I do not want to limit my efforts to the minmal effective dose, as I am looking for other things in running, like calmness, flow, quality of life etc. But to understand how to improve certain aspects of my training, I do like the idea of understanding effects of isolated aspects of training physiology and thus minimal effective doses of certain training forms.

The first two chapters cover body recomposition. Then come other interesting chapters on how to hold your breath for 3:30 mins with one day of training, the female 15 minute orgasm, etc. I will only talk about body recomposition and especially body fat reduction. Tim suggests you should do a body recomposition programme of e.g. 20 pound, which might mean losing 10 pound of body fat and gaining 10 pound of muscle mass (core strength, ideally). I'm not short of muscle mass at all, but I had gained a certain overdose of body fat through empathizing w/ my wife during pregnancies and not having the chance to breast feed my kids afterwards to lose some pounds again. So after stepping onto the scale after some ten years, my weight was not at 78 kg but at 94 last October. After buying a Withings scale my weight dropped by 5 kg down to 89kg in 3 months by changing nothing. That was fine! But reading 4HB gave me the idea that it might be possible to do the weight time warp and come back to my loved 78 kg.

The suggested diet reads extreme, because it has an extreme goal, which is to reduce as much body fat as fast as possible. It's not a fun diet. So I was hesitating to start:

• No 'white' carbohydrates: Short chained carbs (sugar, flour, pasta, bread) mostly appear in white form or could be white. The problem with these carbs is that they get into the blood quickly (high glycemic index GI). They serve only one purpose physiologically, which is to deliver energy quickly. If they are not needed, they get transformed into body fat. Worse, high peaks in blood sugar lead to emission of insuline, which reduces the body fat metabolism. So you do not only take in stuff you don't need, but taking in that stuff also leads to not getting rid of it again. Bad deal. White carbs only make you fat. They give you nothing you need :-/
• Eat the same meals over and over again: This is just so that you don't start thinking in the super market and so that staying in the diet is easy.
• Don't drink calories: Water contains all you need, everything else is fun to drink but does not serve the extreme effect and purpose of this diet.
• Don't eat fruits: Fruit gets transformed to body fat storage in general. there are some exceptions, but they are complicated, so don't bother. This is another simplicity rule.
• One cheat or binge day per week: Not only is the diet hard and for most people the inflicted changes are hard to maintain. But in the first weeks most people start craving for sweets, nice deserts, a fresh coke, some orange juice ... whatever. This rue has two aims: a) Have one day off of the strict regime of the diet, b) Although you can eat as much as you want, as long as it is mainly proteins, vegetables etc., there is an effect to it tat reduces overall metabolism. The binge day trains the bodies metabolism and keeps it at a high level, which is good, as we want to have a high rate of base metabolism when we want to reduce weight (body fat). 

There are some things which are somehow mentioned but not made explicit enough in the book for my taste: 

1. It is important to understand that protein is the main ingredient, because protein is split up into amino acids, which are again the building stones of muscle. By increasing fat metabolism and at the same time feeding the muscles with amino acids we make sure that good muscle mass is not reduced. 
2. The diet works by avoiding blood sugar peaks, thus avoiding insulin emission, thus increasing fat metabolism. many people don't believe this is possible, there are lots of rumors that fat metabolism can not be influenced by which food you eat. Bit is now widely scientifically accepted that you can increase fat metabolism by at least 35% by changing what you eat.
3. As I said, the other effect is that you don't eat any useless carbs.

Understanding these principles helped me a lot in improvising through my work days and conferences. It shows that mexican, indian and thai food are good if you leave out the carbs (rice, noodles). 

My normal day looked like this: 

Breakfast: Green tea (good effect on general metabolism), Soy protein shake ('cause I couldn't stand eggs three times a day).

Snacks: A handful of nuts

Lunch: Salad with lots of eggs and legumes

Snacks: A handful of nuts

Dinner: omelette w/ tomato, vegetables and legumes

Lots of green tea and water. You need to drink a lot, as the rapid fat loss is bad for your liver (body fat stores lots of bad stuff).

After starting the diet, as I was a white carb junkie before, the first days felt veeerrrry strange to me and only my enthusiasm kept me going. I felt hollow and weak, but very light. I couldn't concentrate very well, to be honest. But I already lost up to a pound / day. On day 3 I went to OOP 2011 in Munich. My experience, waiting at the airport was enlightening. OK, I go to Starbucks - not possible, all drinks there contain calories. Well, then I go and grab something at the baker - not possible, all white carbs. Etc. You get the strange impression that the food industry is only selling useless carbs, and I now come to the conclusion that this works because they are selling it for the kicks. Human beings LOVE the kick they get out of the blood sugar peaks (but they don't know it, still: they're craving for it). After being on 4HB for a week, it gets completely clear to you that white carbs and the blood sugar peak they produce are the most archaic form of an addiction. And the industry out there is not selling via nutrition and health, it is selling via this kick. I am absolutely sure of it now. 

If you think a little further, white carbs are responsible for diabetes, all kinds of inflammatory diseases up to cancer, rheumatism etc., they are responsible for body fat, heart problems, they make you overweight, obese, which leads to joint an back problems etc. All modern diseases are somehow depending on a constant flow of white carbs.

I don't want to go into too much depth, but here are the effects 4HB had on me:

I started the diet on 24 January 2011, at 89.5 kg. I ended the first phase last week at 80.5 kg. These are 9kg weight loss in 7 weeks. Out of the 9kg, I lost 7kg body fat. 

This had several secondary effects: 

• I was suffering of lower back pain since about 30 months. It's gone. Completely. 
• I was heavily into running until the birth of our first child w/ a PB on the half marathon sub 1:30 hrs. In the last years I couldn't catch up running regularly, as whenever I got into a regular training mode, either my achilles tendon got inflamed or my knee hurt. Now, my tendon is fine and my knee only hurts a little. I think this is the effect of body weight reduction. This allowed me to come back to my old high cadence running style,  in which I am going for 180 steps per minute, reducing my stride length and thus reducing the impact on my knees.
• My training pace reduced immediately from 5:45 to 5:15, a training pace I didn't reach since 5 years.

As we are now going to Spain for 3 weeks, I have stopped 4HB to better blend in w/ my family on vacation. After the vacation I will pick up 4HB again to either reduce my weight to 78kg (nearly ideal running weight) or 12% body fat (even more ideal ;) I will also pick up some of the core strength exercises mentioned in the 4HB book to further reduce the impact of running on my core strength chain of muscles and tendons.

If you're interested in my further 4HB success I'll happily keep you updated. Don't hesitate to post comments or questions on details.

Kids still have small batch size instincts

Today I was at a carnival party with my two kids. Like me, they had been disappointed, so my mind mind started wandering and I wasn't really into it. But at a certain point I received a wake up call:

The kids were playing a game where they had to collect as many admission cards as possible from the grown ups. The kids had been called onto the stage to get explained the task: Go and collect as many cards as you can from all the grown ups in the room (admission for kids was free, so only grown ups had tickets). I guess it was by mistake that no time limit was explicitly given and no end signal was told when "collecting time" would be over. Music started and the kids started collecting. And collecting. And collecting. And they collected. And so on. Now every kid was already laden with tickets. But none of them brought their tickets to the "referee" of the game. It was a perfect raw at the time. No one had delivered any tickets (value). Now the hosts realized that they hadn't really explained the main rules to the kids:

1. Only those tickets that are delivered to the referee are counted.
2. Only those tickets that are delivered to the referee in time are counted. But no knows in advance when time is over. The signal of time over is simply that the music stops. Uncertainty is brought into the game.

As soon as the hosts explained those rules (while the kids where still collecting ... and collecting ... and collecting .... and so on), the kids completely changed their way of work from large batches to small batches. All of them instantly delivered their goods to the referee to mitigate the risk of not delivering anything before the music stops. During the remainder of the simple game, all of the kids delivered the goods in small batch sizes, further mitigating the risk of not delivering enough (value) in time.

I was quite happy watching this and it was great to see that these kids hadn't been consciously making a trade off between higher set up (or delivery) time for commuting between the audience and the referee and delivering value to the referee. They just knew they'd be sacked if they didn't deliver value. It was also great to see that they didn't even have to think about the need to reduce batch size.

What a diference to our industry, where it is still at times had to convince individuals and teams and Management of the manifold of advantages of small batch sizes like

• risk management, 
• early feedback, 
• low coordination cost, 
• lead time etc.

It was also interesting to watch that none of he kids chose single piece flow, as they felt that in tis setting it makes no economical sense. The holding cost was low, but the transaction cost too high for a batch size of one. They rather chose batch sizes in the sweet spots between 4-10 to manage risk. As the time went on, they reduced the batch size to further reduce the risk of being too late with too many tickets.

For a long time I will remember this game as a perfect example of the value of small batch sizes in risk management while delivering value.

Kanban - german edition of David Anderson's classic published

This post is refererring to Arne Roock's Blog Post on the publishing of David Anderson's already classic 'Kanban' wich is now also released in german. The book was translated into German by Arne and Henning Wolf. The publishing was celebrated at the OOP 2011 in Munich with some events and talks on the topic and David made no secret out of the German edition being updated in some chapters and containing an additional chapter by me.

The German cover - quite different

I can only imagine how hard a task this was, as to me the original is already a nice, soft read focusing on the purpose and motivation of Kanban and reflecting this in a very soft and understanding way. I followed the translation from the beginning and have to take my hat off on how well this book was transferred into German. If you get hold of the book, just after a few pages you will realize how good the translation is - especially compared to other books in our industry.

As mentioned before, I contributed one chapter to this book, the last chapter in fact. In this chapter, I describe how we apply Kanban to Portfolio Management at my work at mobile.international GmbH, owner of Europe's largest car classified site. My latest view on what we're doing with this is that we are managing demand load on the system that is provided by our PD department. Actually, we are managing the waiting queue for our department. From a distance, every project needs to wait in two waiting queues. One is more simple but has more impact. This queue is the portfolio management. The second queue is the actual PD workflow, in which every committed project is realized. The whole system is roughly the equivalent of a shop where you also have to manage two queues (if you're in bad luck ;): First you have to stand in line to enter the shop (if demand is high enough - or actually: too high) an then you have to manage the queues in front of the till. You don't want to have customers waiting in any of these two queues for two long. But for this not to happen you have to actively manage the queue length - and give it all you got. (The better metaphore might be an airport, where you mostly have to queue up twice: check-in and security - basically quick ckck-in machines are then a better way of portfolio management with less overhead and security, well ... let's not think of the TSA nowadays ...)

I may expand on that in a future blog post or article. I actually gave myself the task to try to find out which queue has what impact on the whole system.

If you have a closer look on the 2nd queue, the PD department itself, you can see that this queuing system consists of quite a few queues itself - from requirements to delivery. And this makes clear the task of the PD department - apart from just delivering projects the task is trying to deliver the projects in a way that the queues are short and the 'customers' are happy because the queues are short and stuff is delivered with short wait cycles. And, oh boy, here we find livers the dime a dozen ;)

Actually with the publish of the German edition of David's Epic I was humbled twice. First, in the foreword Arne and Henning mention me in a way that is just too kind - but one should never should say no to compliments. And second, I was quite stunned and humbled when I was asked by David, Arne and Henning if I would like to contribute a chapter to this book. The idea came up after I visited the Lean Kanban Belgium 2010 conference (quite well organized by Agile Minds Belgium - I will come back to this great conference as well as the LESS 2010 in Helsinki in my conference summary of 2010 later in this blog), where I held a talk just on this topic, which was attended by David and some other smart guys and where we had a lively discussion on the topic. So, in fact, the topic actually hit a nerve and resonated well with this great audience so that the idea stuck to write the whole thing down. Thanks again for giving me the chance, guys :-)

So there you have it - grab a copy, read the book, read my chapter, give it some reviews on amazon and give me or the other guys involved some feedback via Email or twitter. We would be happy!

Edit: A great in depth description of a Kanban introduction given by Henning and Arne to celebrate the publish of their translation is given here by Markus Gärtner.

The (success of the) iPhone will be a midget to (that of the) the iPad

Edit: This is just a reporting of an old blog post of mine from another blog. I haven't been that wrong - which is ok, given the blog and press reaction of the skeptics at the time. But Ibhave to say that Android adoption goes up at my workplace and that Honeycomb still isn't my cup of tea, UI and UX wise but it might work well on the tablet market.

Years ago, early in the morning I stood in from of our offices. I work at a geek place definitely. I, a geek myself, work at a geek place, definitely. The evening before I just received my iPhone.

The clumsy procedure involved me having to drive to an ugly customs office with depressed and demotivated customs guys having a ball on trying to make me feel illegal because the iPhone was still supposed to be illegal when you unlock it. Yes, and I tried to save the import tax ;-) Anyway, I drove home and had the iPhone set up in 5 minutes time, I had it unlocked and jailbreaked in another 5 minutes. And I had all the music I needed synced in another 5 minutes, I guess.

Standing in the cold in the front of my office it didn’t take long and other geeks working at my place came along. the iPhone thing was quite new and I still an early adopter. The other early adopter syndrome plagued guy, my brother, didn’t yet have it. I knew right away what would happen: Hide or be bashed. And so it was: All the gees at work were so smart: Oh, you don’t know there’s no copy and paste? You surely know, it’s only Edge, no 3G, do you? You know the camera is crap compared to my 5MB Ericsson/Nokia, you name it bla bla device - and so on and so on.

What was bothering me right away was the fact that all the guys were working for  the same company as I did - an internet company making a fortune on an internet product. So, I guess they shouldn’t be blind to the fact that all the shortcomings of the iPhone were more than compensated by the incredible and before unseen simplicity and elegance of the User Interface - and that despite of all the innovation behind it.

At the time they were all waiting for some new fancy linux based PDA or this and that or the newset fancy Nokia with any useless navigation on it and god knows what.

You know what happened. Today they all have iPhones. All of them. They even disrespect it (some of them) by placing it in a strange dock beneath their work station. Sure, the new cool thing for a developer is the Android (the good vs. the bad - again, so it’s good that google makes a statement towards China so that they are bit more ‘good’ again ;-)

And now - dejá vu - the whole geek planet is again complaining about the things the iPad is *not* and thus being blind to see what the iPad is and what its potential is. (And all the opportunities it will open for geeks and developers as well).

But guess what: It is a mass market device. Apple does not enter markets anymore with niche products to gain momentum. They have momentum and can directly address the large crowds.

Geeks may be disappointed by the iPad not having USB, exchangeable battery (again), no real keys, no extendable memory, still a closed environment, no camera!!!, etc. And yes, they are all shortcomings.

But my mum will be delighted. She doesn’t even want to know what USB is. the doctors running around in hospitals, using the iPad for documentation will not care about battery life, the sales forces don’t care about the keys and so on and so on.

The content providers will be more happy about the new revenue stream provided by the new marketing channels than they will be unhappy of the camera being added in v 2.0 of the iPad and concurrency in OS 4.0.

And guess what, all my geek colleagues will love to surf, watch movies on the couch, chips and beer on the side, an iPad in their hands in just some months.

The iPad will be Apples biggest success ever, whatever its current limitations are, because it defines several completely new markets and revenue streams.

(From an agile perspective: We always drive business to be content with a very minimal product to enter the markets, learn on the market and only add the features that are absolutely necessary to drive demand. It seems that many, as customers, do not like what the preach as those crafting the products ;-)

Where have I been?

Oh my, I don't actually know what happened.
Yeah, you know - if you watched, which I wouldn't expect from after having been neglected for a loooong long time: Nothing happened :-(
I guess, the reasons for not updating this blog were manyfold:

• I have a new role at my job, which meant quite a change and distraction from things that happen here
• I was busy writing articles, reviewing articles and books, working on talks on conferences (see my - ummm - last post - and even that post is soooo mid 2010 that it does not reflect where have really been. Excuses, excuses - bla bla bla and so on.
• I was not satisfied with the format of this blog and am looking for a new template (might even switch to WordPress). Just look at this small writing - disgusting. I still like the picture and stuff, though.

But guess what, I am in a fresh mode now and have collected a couple of topics I want to write about in the next weeks:

• My conference year (as a visitor)
• My year as a speaker
• My reading year (fiction and non-fiction)
• My learning year
• What is my focus for improvement at work
• A posting on 'The 4 hour body' by Tim Ferris and my application of it
• My summary of my kindle experiences and what I want to make of it
• On paranoia driven development
• What do I see in Lean: A summary
• Things I don't understand, like: making simple things really complicated (or the other way around, or: Behavioral patterns in the agile coaching community
• My new model of queue management on several layers - duuuh!

Well, even thinking of it is lots of fun for me ;)

See you soon, right here.

Appeareances

Just a quick update on my next talks:


1) Seacon 2010, HH, June 28

Pecha Kucha "The Why and How of Kanban"

2) it-agile, Munich, July 2, Opening Unconference
Pecha Kucha "Unsere reise ins agile Land"

3) Lean, Agile & Scrum, Zurich, September 7

"Enterprise Kanban at mobile.de", Session 45 minutes, together w/ Stefan Roock

I am quite proud on this one: Second time I'm talking in the context of the Poppendieck's, Henrik Knieberg is there and it's a very small and very high quality conference.

4) Lean & Kanban 2010, Antwerp, September 23 - 24

"Enterprise Kanban at mobile.de" 

I am  - again - very proud to be part of this, have a look at the program: David Anderson (unfortunately in parallel to me, Al Shalloway, John Seddon, again the Poppendiecks, Karl Scotland etc - blush!)

Additionally, I am currently submitting talks for:
LESS 2010, October 17-20, Helsinki, Finland
XP-Days Germany 2010 (one on my own, one with Roman Pichler, one with Bernd Schiffer)
OOP 2011 (as above)

Lean Pasta Manufacturing - at Famiglia Martelli in Lari (Toscana)

This time I want to talk a little about pasta. And how to produce pasta in a lean way. But in a very personal, traditional and - yes - strange way too.

Actually about one month ago, we wanted to have a family vacation on Sardinia. But Eyjafjallajökull , that in the beginning seemed to be a bad joke we wouldn't have to fear, after some time became a real threat and finally the killer to that plan. So instead we improvised for Tuscany.  Out of several coincidences we ended up in the small and beautiful village of Lari.


Größere Kartenansicht

In Lari, we lived at a beautiful agriculture that I can only recommend: Il Frutetto, a quiet, peaceful place where Fabio and Tatiana produce exquisite olive oil and some wine. They can not sell too much of it to each family though, as they have only little capacities which need to last for the full year. We are sad already that we do not have too much of the wine left. Olive oil will last for another 6 months, but then what ...?

Anyway, the Frutetto brought me closer to the very traditional craftsmanship of the whole of Tuscany. You do not see a lot of supermarkets there and although it is obviously getting harder to withstand the market pressure of large chains and brands, the Tuscany has impressively held up small stores, small agricultures etc. It is a total different quality of living: You know where the meet, the cheese, the fruits come from - if you want to. And you can taste that!

Soon we were invited to visit the pasta manufactory of the Martelli family in Lari. And now I am getting closer to the point: Following the Tuscany tradition, this family has business objectives that completely differ from anything I have seen and experienced in any of the companies I have yet worked: This business does not want to grow. Rather than that, they want to stand out for all times as the best pasta makers delivering the highest quality ready made pasta available. They don't even want to get that much more efficient until now, as the whole staff consists of family members. (Who knows, maybe one day they get tired of doing that and they will have external staff and everything changes. But to this day, the business feeds the two families of the brothers Martelli).

This leads to interesting effects, as at all the places I have seen lean efforts, it was about savings and lead time optimizations etc. So lean was completely driven by getting faster and quicker and lowering inventory as a proxy for savings by still having quality in place.

The (not so) secret behind the Martelli pasta (and the business model) is that the pasta is produced very slowly on a ca. 50 years old machine and then veery slowly dried at a certain temperature (it is terribly hot in there). So with your whole product drying for 50 hours come to me and talk about reducing WiP!

Another secret ingredient is that the pasta is relatively rough, thus better taking up any sauce that comes with it - this is a feature that is especially liked by the Maitre's of the world as it helps amplify any subtle touch of your sauce.

The Martelli's only sell their pasta in 1 kg packets rather than in 500gr. I forgot the number, but it goes along the line of: What the Martelli's produce in one day, Barilla produces in 5 minutes (whatever).

I guarantee to you that there is no obvious optimization that came to my mind when I looked at the production place. Any further optimization would have compromized the quality and thus the business concept of the Martelli's. Any stupid excel geek would tell them: Let the machines run faster, only dry your pasta for 20 hours and is still good enough. But no, the Martelli's don't buy that. They rather keep their process and win one pasta "championship" after the other and are one of the most sought after pastas of the world.

I hope this will go on for a long time. Why this so interesting to me is because the business goals are so different. And this leads to an example which makes Don Reinertsen's approach to PD much clearer to me, again: There are no rules and no lean rules. There are several dimensions to look at your problem and domain and then come up with the suitable solution rather than a recipe: Large WiP must not be bad or waste - here it even is your secret ingredient for quality.

But again: Don't use this exception as an excuse for your "unnecessary" WiP! This is different to most environments but again: It explains that you have to take a closer look beyond the "common" rules - they might not always fit you.

I can only recommend to have a look at Don Reinertsen's (minboggling!) talk on some common fallacies which goes by the great title of "The easy road to FLOW goes through a town called LEAN".

Have fun!

P.S.: Oh, I forgot to mention why the business model works: The price of the pasta has increased from 0,80 EUR to 3,30 EUR in about 10 years. And that's if you buy in Lari. if you buy anywhere else, the pasta is sold at prices up to more than 10,00 EUR. The quality does pay off - if you do not plan to grow!