guys, i would encourage you to start somewhere! it doesnt matter if its with 4hb or something else...
you need to play with nutrition and exercise regimes. more importantly, retain self-control with respect to this endeavor and make it a part of daily life. as with everything, awareness increases as you deliberately practice.
join (or lurk in) other communities and access the enormous empirical data therein (bodybuilding.com, somethingawful's watch and woot forum).
feel free to get in touch if i can be of any help or guidance :)
I don't lurk there but my wife spends lots of time at BB. Almost everyone at bb.com think 4HB is a joke. I also agree with the playing with things but there needs to be boundaries and imho 4HB falls outside of what i would consider scientifically reasonable.
I've just read the Four-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss. It seems on the face of it like ridiculously valuable material, if true - like what the completed version of Michael Vassar's proposed reboot of dietary science would look like at the finish point if dieting turned out to be more susceptible to Munchkinism than in my wildest dreams. Ferriss also talks the rationalist talk quite well in this book, much more so than in Four-Hour Workweek; he cites the experiments and occasionally says things like "I spent a lot of money on this and I expected it to work and it didn't work at all" or "I tried this and it seemed to work and I have no idea why it worked and I think it was probably a placebo effect."
Does the LessWrong hivemind have an opinion about 4HB? Has anyone tried it and found that it doesn't work, or that it does work, or that it works but not as well as Ferriss thinks it should work?