Joe Fresh.

Yours truly is one of a “kaleidoscope of New York personalities” who will be walking the runway to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Canadian clothing company Joe Fresh. Dani Stahl, Steven Rojas, Mickey Boardman, Cory Kennedy, May Kwok, Fiona Byrne, Ari Seth Cohen, Va$htie Kola, gossip guru Michael Musto and Jordan Bradfield are among the catwalkers who will be styled by Zanna Roberts Rassi, the super-connected, chic wife of Milk Studio’s main man Mazdack Rassi. It-couple Brendan Fallis and Hannah Bronfman are deejaying together (adorbz!), and we have already perfected our icy Zoolander stare and Naomi Campbell strut.

Joe Fresh flagship store, 510 Fifth Avenue, (212) 366-0960, 8pm-10pm, by invitation only.

And in the second “look at how fabulous we are” item of the night, The Observer is partnering with Core Real Estate for the launch of our new lifestyle section, NYO, which debuts today with an exclusive Q&A with lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss. Core is opening its UES office this week, and we’ll be celebrating together.

Rouge Tomate 10 East 60th Street, 7pm-10pm, by invitation only.

Tim Ferriss is the kind of guy who’d be easy to hate—speaks five languages, won a national kickboxing title, ranked seventh on Newsweek’s Digital 100 Power Index for 2012, everything he touches sells a million copies, does it all working just a few hours a week, and he’s great-looking to boot—if he weren’t so damn likeable. The author of The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef, the native New Yorker spoke to The Observer about NYC’s emergence at the epicenter of America’s public health debate.

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Q: You’ve written all of these books, and you’re all about self-discipline—that’s your shtick, really. So I thought you could weigh in on Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed soda ban. To me, the problem is that it takes the decision out of it; it infantilizes us by having the government make decisions for us. You’re all about fitness—is there a way we can reap the benefits of the soda ban without having the government force us to behave?

A: I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control. The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control. These types of constraints don’t have to be legislated, but I do think that the proposed drink ban is a good idea. I doubt sugar would pass FDA standards to be on the “Generally Recognized As Safe” (GRAS) list, if it were to be put through the process now.

This is really interesting—there are those who are sort of libertarians, and then those who are nanny-state types, and you’re in this interesting middle ground, where you think the soda ban is a good idea, but maybe not the most effective way to get people healthy.

If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: “Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?” From what I’ve seen, it’s not likely. I’m not sure you can get the occasional helpful “nanny state” legislature (16-ounce-plus bans) without giving governments the latitude to pass restrictive laws that aren’t based on good science.

Certain aspects of the proposed soda ban were so goofy. For example, 7-Eleven was entitled to sell Big Gulps, because it’s regulated by the state, but right next to it, a fast food restaurant was not entitled to, because it’s regulated by the city. Now Mayor Bloomberg has proposed banning the public display of cigarettes in bodegas and other stores. Is this a good idea?

There are always loopholes. The question is whether or not there’s a net positive effect, and what the magnitude of that effect is. The standard Body Mass Index (BMI), used by physicians worldwide, is fundamentally flawed. That said, it’s simple and useful for most obese people on the Standard American Diet (SAD), even those poor bastards who get it as an import. Ultrasound bodyfat percentage is infinitely more accurate, so I use it, but it’s more expensive and inconvenient. It doesn’t scale for a hobbled health care system.

As for the cigarettes, I don’t have enough data to have an opinion.

So what would you do? Let’s say you were made not just mayor, but Czar of New York, and you could enact a bunch of rules by fiat. What would be a more effective rule than a ban on cigarette displays or ultra-sugar soft drinks?

In my model of behavioral change (borrowed heavily from researchers, Nike+ data, and more), results are always better with scheduled misbehavior: in other words, follow the rules 90 percent of the time, and then enjoy yourself in excess the other 10 percent of the time. Everyone is going to binge on a diet, for instance, so plan for it, schedule it, and contain the damage. In the Slow-Carb Diet—which is this diet that I tested and vetted through all the experimentations in The 4-Hour Body, and have tracked with 2,000-plus people—allows for one cheat day a week. On that cheat day (often called “Faturday” or “Dieters Gone Wild (DGW) Day”), people can consume five whole pizzas, they can have ice cream until it comes out their ears, whatever. It doesn’t matter—the body can’t metabolize the excess calories into body fat effectively over that short a period of time. But—this psychological release valve is critically helpful to adherence. No one is giving up their favorite foods forever, just for six days at a time. Thousands of people now keep a “to-eat” list for their cheat day, which I recommend as Saturday for social reasons; every time they get an urge during the week, they put the item (I like bear claws) on their “to-eat” list. This format creates unbelievable results—84 percent of people who comply lose an average of eight-plus pounds in the first four weeks. There are people who have lost 120 to 140 pounds in six to 12 months and now kept it all off for two to three years. The stats are unreal.

In your book, The 4-Hour Body, you give an example in which Michael Phelps claims to be eating 12,000 calories a day. And you say, either he’s a liar or something else is at work burning those calories. And you determine that the effort it takes his body to keep his temperature up while swimming in cold water is sort of an ultra metabolism machine. So as Czar, would you also prescribe smarter exercise than what people are currently doing?

Oh, for sure. I’d prescribe smarter exercise. But first, I would prescribe that people over a certain body weight—or rather, body fat percentage—focus exclusively on diet for the first eight to 12 weeks, and not exercise at all. Exercise is overrated. Many of my readers are like Travis Heryford; he’s lost 130 pounds with ZERO exercise. Just Slow-Carb Diet and a few supplements. The problem with New Year’s resolutions—and resolutions to “get in better shape” in general, which are very amorphous—is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn’t work. I don’t care if you’re a world-class CEO—you’ll quit. So start with one—the key here is really diet—that’s 99 percent of fat loss. Forget about fancy workouts, expensive gyms, impossible schedules, and all the crap that everyone ditches after two weeks.

Are you using that metaphorically or is it truly 99 percent?

It’s not far off. I’ll debate anyone on this. You just can’t out-exercise your mouth. The physics don’t work. Ray Cronise, a former NASA scientist who I worked with on the Phelps anecdote you mentioned, sent me an email a couple of days ago where he said something like, “You know, we were right when we estimated that something like 24 flights of stairs burns a third of an Oreo.” Now, I have my issues with the calories in, calories out model—but I don’t want to digress too far. The main point: you can lose 120 pounds with zero additional exercise in a year, no problem … If you try to lose 120 pounds through exercise and don’t fix your diet, you will fail. It just takes one injury or calendaring problem to lead you to back to your fat self. Diet travels with you, in sickness and in health. Food tends to be more bulletproof to the winds and storms of lifestyle change, if that makes sense. That doesn’t mean you can’t exercise, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise; it just means that you shouldn’t view it as priority #1.

You grew up on Long Island. Why do you think New York City has become America’s center of gravity when it comes to public health policy and the debate between personal liberty and public health?

I think it’s a combination of things:

A) New York City is the U.S. media epicenter. It just broadcasts itself more loudly than any other city on Earth.

B) New York City is full of extremely rich people (including billionaires) in two camps: “I’m basically a socialist but can’t say that” liberals and “I think I’m a character in Atlas Shrugged” libertarian types. This creates a real turf war in the political and PR soapbox arenas. And it provides great opportunities for social jockeying and public speeches. Not that I look down at this game; there is huge value in being good at it. New Yorkers are more incentivized and better positioned for it.

San Francisco, where I live now, comes in a close second to New York City, but it doesn’t satisfy A, and instead of B, it’s mostly unemployed—and often crazy—aging hippies running amok. There are a handful of changemakers (e.g. Peter Thiel), but it doesn’t have the power-broadcast dynamic of NYC.

Any final plans for your hypothetical reign as Czar of New York?

I’d outlaw tight pants with “Juicy” written on the ass for anyone with more than 20 percent body fat.

What does Lena Dunham have that her fans want for themselves? We’re going to rule out her fashion sense and her strange and limited love life, as well as her self-described “Fat Upper Pussy Area.”

Aside from her charmed artsy childhood, what her admirers envy most about Ms. Dunham are her writing talent and commercial success. Yet these are the very topics that will get short shrift in Not That Kind of Girl the book, while she is otherwise occupied itemizing her 1,459-calorie-a-day intake. At least, to judge by the proposal, which is not public and therefore emphatically not for review. But what the hell—it’s Lena Dunham!

Laced with her familiar self-deprecating wit and done up in colorful cupcake doodles, the proposal organizes her musings into six chapters: Work, Friendship, Body, Sex, Love, Big Picture.

More memoir than strict advice, the outline is long on anecdote and light on takeaway.

There are pages and pages devoted to her variously indifferent, degrading or just plain boring sexual encounters, punctuated by admonitions to the reader, along the lines of: Don’t you go and try that now. You deserve better!

But why should Ms. Dunham have all the fun?

She says her hope in writing the book is to inspire others to learn from her mistakes and tell their own stories. “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman,” she writes.

Assuming her book is geared toward young, urban, underfunded creatives much like Hannah Horvath, more self-expression is hardly what’s called for. These are the folks who devote Tumblr blogs to their own facial hair, can’t make mac and cheese without Instagramming it, and post every dress on Pinterest as though it came straight from the Vogue fashion closet.

What this generation really needs is jobs that pay off their student debt. To that end, here’s a more useful piece of professional advice than anything one is likely to glean from Ms. Dunham’s eventual book: go learn Ruby on Rails.

Of course, Ms. Dunham is not a career coach but an entertainer. As such, she’s funny, wincingly candid and supremely relatable. She really does have the BFF thing down.

But there’s a way that people who mine their lives for material wind up saying everything in a stage whisper. Some of her tales begin to feel like dispatches of a life overly examined, of a brain that insta-converts every moment into a tweet if not a line of script or a paragraph in her next essay. At an S&M club in Japan, Ms. Dunham dons a vinyl nurse’s outfit because “interesting people need to have stories like this.”

TV shows and books—and book proposals—certainly do.

Too much "help"?

Three days after we picked up The Secret, we won the lottery. It was a Friday night in Williamsburg, and we were drunkenly blinking into the fluorescent lights of a local bodega, waiting for our dinner—also, technically, a late lunch and tomorrow's early breakfast—of a beef patty with cheese, when we decided to feed two dollars into a machine to purchase an Instant Take 5 ticket, which enticed us with a promise that we could "Win Up To $5,555!"

We used a quarter to scratch the ticket, revealing our win of $5, not five grand, but more than double the amount we had paid for the privilege of entering. It didn't matter that we would have to wait until the next day to retrieve our winnings, or that we would inevitably forget to do so and continue to hold the prize-winning piece of paper in our wallet for the rest of the week before we remembered that we had hit it big in an alcoholic stupor. At the time it was a sign: that if we could win money just from reading The Secret, than one week of piling on the self-help books would lead to bigger and better things (and hopefully give us the tools to keep track of our earnings).

We were so wrong.

By Friday afternoon, we had speed-read (or at least skimmed through) Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, the aforementioned Oprah-certified The Secret, the celebrity-smattered Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self, Marina Spence's Make Every Day a Friday, and Russell Simmons’ Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success. Every day, we took one more "self-help" suggestion from each of the books and added it on to our daily schedule.

At least we know we're in good company: in the year 2008 alone, according to Forbes, Americans spent more than $11 billion improving themselves through classes, seminars, CDs, and books. (Ironically, the majority of the self-help books you'll find in a Barnes & Noble will have a chapter on managing your finances. The other half will involve a Real Housewife telling you how to lose weight.) Because we are cynical non-believers, we decided to start with The Secret, which didn't cost us a penny since we already owned it as a gag gift we were planning to give a friend for a birthday.

Sunday

We begin with the positive thinking exercises outlined in Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (Atria Books/Beyond Worlds, 2006). We get a kick out of reading passages out loud to our siblings like an over-eager guidance counselor, or zealous Tony Robbins-esque figure. Stuff like: "If you see it in your mind, you're going to hold it in your hand!" and "In fact, parts of our body are literally replaced every day!" For those out there who have never read The Secret—which has sold more than 21 million copies by promoting "the laws of attraction"—the idea is simple. You want something, you think hard enough about it (while keeping the rest of your thoughts positive), and you will get it.

This is so shammy and hokey that we can't believe Oprah promoted it, until we remember that Oprah promoted James Frey as well. Two for two, Oprah.

As an experiment, waiting for coffee in Starbucks, we decide to will a cupcake into our possession. We focus on the idea of a cupcake; how we will come to own and then enjoy it. While we're thinking about how stupid this whole process is, we notice a Starbucks employee replacing the breakfast items in the counter with afternoon snacks. Including...yes! Cupcakes! We buy one while pondering the miracle of The Secret, which we had finished in a record two days—What? It's a small book—and attracting positivity into our lives, which lasts approximately four minutes until we remember that we are supposed to be on diet anyway and discard the entirety of our tasty, magical treat. Money down the drain! This is probably why we need financial self-improvement books.

Monday

Time to plunge into Mr. Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek (Crown Publishing Group, 2009). We avoided Mr. Ferriss' other tome, The 4-Hour Body, because we didn't want to exercise, and also because we didn't want to think about Mr. Ferriss giving women extended orgasms, which we know from a New York Times' article is in there somewhere. Plus, we were excited about the suggestion in Workweek that we completely ignore email except for two short windows per day: one at noon, and one at 4 p.m. But this immediately presents a problem for our editors, who were not aware of the "stay offline" portion of Mr. Ferriss' program when they suggested we look into it. Oh well! By 10 p.m., editors have found a loophole in our system and are now texting us notes about work whenever we're out of the office.

The problem with Ferriss' book, which promotes (among other things) the "80-20 principle"—i.e., that 80 percent of our benefits come from 20 percent of our work—is that the 4-Hour logic doesn’t hold water when you are doing field reporting. The concepts the author outlined in his D-E-A-L program (Definition, Elimination, Automation, Liberation) might work for would-be entrepreneurs or office slackers, but try "eliminating" your reading of the news to just two hours a week (which Mr. Ferriss claims to do) when your job is to be on top of the news cycle. Being fired can’t possibly be part of the game plan, right? Automation—which involves a sort of out-processing of most of your work so one can spend as little time as possible actually doing one's job—is also not an option if you work in a creative field, though we did appreciate Mr. Ferriss' sound financial advice and persuasive arguments for taking "mini-retirements" now, instead of saving it up until we are too old to travel.

As for the whole Definition part...we have trouble with that too. The "D"  is for defining in very specific terms what you want from your career and life. We begin to notice a disturbing trend in self-help literature, asking us to formulate a concrete example of our ideal lifestyle—the very thing we have been avoiding having to think about since we picked a major in college.

Tuesday

"Go Where the Action Is" is one of the crucial components laid out by Russell Simmons in Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power In You to Achieve Happiness and Success (Gotham, 2007). Though it has all of the literary heft of a fortune cookie, we assume that this book will have the most helpful, down-to-earth advice in our new library, something we belatedly acknowledge is due to our love of Def Comedy Jam.

Mr. Simmons gives a lot of lip service to moving to New York, L.A., or Atlanta, because, as he says: "...You ain't going to become a rapper or an actor living in Idaho...You can't wait for the action to come to you. You must go to the action."

We already live in New York, but as it stands, the "action" on Tuesday night seems to be in Zuccotti Park, where we park ourselves for the night in an attempt to sleep among the protesters. We've written enough about the movement, it's time to dive headfirst into the grimy late-night underbelly in order to live up to our full potential as an in-the-field reporter. Mr. Simmons, himself an Occupy-advocate—and a member in good standing of the 1%—spends most of his book talking about the lessons of Kanye, Jay-Z, and his own clothing brand, Phat Farms. Unfortunately the rules governing rapping and entrepreneurship are still far from those of journalism, and we spend half the night shivering, climbing in to share sleeping bags with drunk Canadians who make us recite lines from Good Will Hunting in a Boston accent. We're operating under the misguided premise that being close to the epicenter of "action" will somehow make our lives better. Instead, we get a sinus infection, and are two hours late for work the next day.

Wednesday

Humpday! We feel like the inside of a dirty hippie's sock (and probably smell just as bad) after trying to overnight it in Zuccotti the night before.There's nothing more we rather do than go home and shower, so what better book to read than Marina Spence's slight little number, Make Every Day a Friday! (Morgan James Publishing, 2009). The book touts itself as a "stress-free" system to "gently guide" you to change either your work, or your attitude towards your current job. Unfortunately, it doesn't take more than 10 pages to realize that Friday! is one those books: the ones that work under the presumption that your dream job is out there for you somewhere, or that you have the perfect job but you need to make some other life-shifts in order to appreciate it fully. Because our mood is so dark, we decide to embrace Ms. Spence's tip/sub-chapter that "Hating Your Job is a Gift!" from the "Taking Steps to Clarity" chapter. We make a list of all the things we don't like about our work.

We hate:

• Having to do assignments that involve trying to "better ourselves" in any way
• Getting up early in the mornings
• Long commute
• No good food places in Times Square

Now, Make Every Day a Friday tells us to look at our list and imagine the opposite of what we wrote in our "career hate" list. And we can imagine this life perfectly: working from home all day (when the "work day" starts at noon); eating MSG-laden Chinese food from the place on the corner; never taking any steps to get ourselves into a healthier, more social lifestyle. The thing is, we've already had that career before...it's called freelancing, and after a year and a half of it we went so stir-crazy we were begging friends to let us just come in and hang out in their offices, just to give us an excuse to brush our teeth and get dressed in the morning.

So, the opposite of our current "career dislikes" is an even worse scenario. Great. Why can't any book just tell us what we want to hear...that things are perfect the way they are and maybe we should just take a nap?

Thursday

We do some of the time-traveling exercises encouraged by Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self (Simon & Schuster, 2009). Joseph Galliano’s book has a wide range of celebrities writing letters to their awkward, adolescent selves, which technically isn't "self-help" as much as "inspirational" and/or "somewhat terrifying." After all, who isn’t better off now than when they were 16? Certainly not Stephen King, though he does council his younger incarnation to "Stay away from recreational drugs." Hugh Jackman keeps it vague with "You've had many blessings in your life and will have many more...don't forget where those blessings came from." (Australia?)

Still, if James Franco and the guy who plays Fred on YouTube are qualified to give life advice to younger versions of themselves, certainly we must have some wisdom to impart as well. After many false starts, we eventually wind up with a piece of paper that sounds more like an evil twin's of King's:

Dear Us at 16,

You might think that all those psychedelic drugs you are currently taking will eventually have long-term consequences. To the best of our knowledge…you’re good. Ecstasy stops working when you are around 21, so do as much as possible now. Oh, and you’re not imagining things: mom and dad are getting a divorce.

Keep on truckin’,

Us at 27

The problem with writing a letter to ourselves after reading this book is that everyone in "Dear Me" is famous and living the dream, so their advice is applicable not only to their former selves, but to anyone who also wants to be Alice Cooper/William Shatner/J.K Rowling. Their advice (for the most part) is of the "It Gets Better" variety...because for them, it did. We can't offer that kind of solace to our former selves. Life is better in some ways...other ways, it's worse. (At 16, we probably would have loved to spend a night sleeping in a concrete park in New York, who are we dash our young dreams by whining about it now?)

We stared at the piece of paper for awhile, feeling depressed. Sort of wish we had eaten that cupcake when we had the chance; binge on carrots and hummus instead. Never have we felt so stressed out, overworked, underpaid, and unlovable as when we started taking the advice of other people on how to make our lives better.

Friday

During our last day of formal self-improvement, we go to Williamsburg to meet Anna Goldstein, a New York life coach who specializes in helping women in their 20s and 30s (she can be found online at Self In The City). Running late to the meeting, we quickly scarf down a(nother) beef patty while smoking a cigarette simultaneously, which we assume means that these programs have not been working the way they should.

Ms. Goldstein’s process revolves around the Model of Behavioral Function, a sort of thought-to-action guide to getting our shit together. As we sit in her home office, a huge, brightly lit studio space with a large-screen TV and wacky furniture that actually looks more like a well-funded tech start-up than a therapist’s office, we jot in a notebook as she instructs:

Think

Feel

Behavior

Results

Of course, Ms. Goldstein is not our therapist, but as we go over the events that immediately preceded our encounter—the rushed and greasy lunch when we really wanted sushi—we find ourselves venting a week’s worth of pent-up frustration. Ms. Goldstein prompts us occasionally on how we could alter our first line of thinking to create a different belief system about work, health, interpersonal relationships, and the rest. It’s harder than it seems, which we're beginning to realize is why the the self-help books haven’t done us much good. While books can encourage you to act differently, Ms. Goldstein helps us isolate those early negative thought patterns that feed into our pre-existing (but somewhat unconscious) belief system. For example: "We never exercise because our bike is in the shop and we can't find time to pick it up," which leads to the belief of "We never exercise." And if we take it as a given that we never exercise, why bother being proactive about picking up our bike?

Eventually, we cycle (so to speak) to the problem that's been plaguing us all week:

“What do you want to do?” asked Ms. Goldstein.

“We want to write comedy,” we tell her. And when we say it out loud, it sounds just as stupid as all the times we've thought about it while reading self-help books.

“And what would that look like?”

After we're done pragmatically laying out the details of our eventual “Shouts and Murmurs” piece, the hypothetical book we will write, and how to deal with obligations of fame and fortune, it doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea after all. It also seems like we've put a lot of subconscious thought into our Goal Lifestyle, despite floundering for weeks over the absurdity of answering the world’s vaguest question: “What do we want?”

Feeling better, we treat ourselves to sushi after meeting with Ms. Goldstein, and then break our “no e-mail” rule to send our boss a message: we'll be taking the rest of the day off.