Look at the bottom set of pictures, the head on ones. Look at his face. The ratio of how wide it is to how tall it is, is different. The after shot has a wider looking face. What they did was a simple photo manipulation of reducing the height without reducing the width. I tried it with the before shot and by reducing the height only to 85% he looks far more muscular.

This is the opposite of what they do with fashion models to make them look thinner or to make their legs and arms look longer. In small doses the eye does not notice this trick.

It was 34lbs of lean body mass. Combination of muscle, fat and water. That is a big difference.

Still impressive without a doubt but what gets me about skinny guys is that they slam all this lean body weight on in 30 days, 5 months, 1 year, or whatever,

and then you see them 3 years later and they are the same.

The real hard part of bodybuilding isn’t the newbie gains. It’s building muscle year after year.

Taking a look at the Tim Ferries updated blog in March 2008, he looks to me like he lost all that size and he’s back to square one. Where he started off before he hit the weights and got serious.

All he figured out was that newbie gains come quick and fast. Almost anybody who’s not organized and eating right can pack on lean body mass quickly and think “Eureka, this is it.”

Unfortunately he just found his plateau and now the HARD work begins. From his latest picture, looks like he didn’t make the cut.

But he’s still an in-shape individual and he probably managed to inspire a lot of people to better themselves which is fascinating and good by itself.

I find it slightly deceptive that he mentions he was 152 lbs for 4 years then 146 lbs more recently, without mentioning he was 193 lbs originally.