Mastering Health with Minimum Effective Dose

Simplify Your Diet, Exercise, Sleep, and Stress Management

Have you ever heard of Tim Ferriss? If not, you probably live under a rock.

Ferriss was the author of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body, two of the most influential self-improvement books of the 2000s.

While the idea of “minimum effective dose” has been around for a while, Ferriss repopularized the concept with these two books. The basic premise is this: do as little as possible to make a living and live a healthy life.

This principle works very well when it comes to your health. Let’s discuss how you can, and should, utilize it.

Diet

There are some very complicated diets out there. Diets like the Mediterranean diet, Paleo, carbohydrate cycling, and more. There are hundreds of diets out there. Once you master them, they probably work and can be followed. But if you don’t enjoy learning and adhering to intricate diets, you won’t follow it.

Most people do very well with a simple diet. Low-carb diets are easy to follow once you learn what foods have carbs. The same goes for ketogenic diets. A carnivore diet is very easy to follow conceptually; you just eat meat.

As I’ve spoken about before, I prefer the Whole Food Diet. You simply only at foods that have one ingredient. Chicken, beef, potato, apple, broccoli, etc. This eliminates all processed foods, sugary drinks, and so on.

You can also create your own diet plan. Figure out what your ideal macronutrient ratio is. I usually recommend 25% fats, meeting your protein goals (0.8-1.5 g/lb body weight), and then filling the rest with carbohydrates. From there, create rules that you know and are simple to follow. Here are some examples:

• No eating after 7pm

• No drinking calories

• No snacking

• Majority of carbs before/after exercise

• High protein for breakfast

You get the idea. Stick to the basics and don’t overcomplicate your diet.

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Exercise

There are as many exercise plans are there are stars in the sky. Seriously, you can find hundreds of thousands of exercise plans online. You can then tweak them to fit your unique needs, making them an individualized routine.

This can be incredibly overwhelming. Everyone has a different point of view, experience, body type, incentive, and so on. There’s also no end to the modifications you can make. Slow reps, single sets to failure, supersets, drop sets, rest-pause sets, it never ends!