I love HN, but damn the negativity and dismissal. The guy is opening up on some pretty personal stuff and I for one appreciate it.
[edit: I've explained why I think the original 34lb gain is possibly legitimate in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669680 (though you should note that wasn't the point of this comment.)]
Even gaining 34 pounds of weight in 4 weeks (not just muscle, but fat as well) would be a serious challenge: 34 pounds of weight equates to about 119,000 kilocalories[1], meaning you would have to eat 119k/28=4,250 kcal a day in addition to your "maintenance" calorie level (i.e. the caloric energy that you burn with everyday activity -- usually 1500-2500 kcal). So he would have to eat about 7,000 kcal a day in order to gain weight at that rate.
Furthermore, gaining weight and gaining muscle are very different beasts. Muscle is only "built" when muscle fibers are broken down through strenuous activity and then rebuilt. This is not a rapid process. It's widely accepted in the weight training community that without steroids, muscle can be built at a rate of a pound or two a week at most.
So either the author is lying about his muscle gain, which throws his other statements into doubt, or more likely he's simply confused about how to actually measure weight vs. muscle gain, and reporting erroneous conclusions. There are many fitness-related misconceptions out there.
I don't feel so good about him throwing about this manic depressive stuff, especially in the coffee table self help circle-jerk industry. Bipolar disorder is a serious goddamn illness and it ruins peoples lives.
The average age people are diagnosed with bipolar is around 30, and that's a lot of life to live flipping from left to right listening to whimsy advise like this. This is really dangerous.
You can't give a list of '10 things to do' to someone with bipolar and expect them to sort themselves out. If Tim is truly suffering from biploar, that 'list of things that work' changes from week to week, possibly even day to day and hour to hour. The drive he feels is from his hypomania (that leads to a post like this and incredulous books like the 4 hour body) that inevitably leads to an exhausted crash and period of debilitating depression. Hell, he might even have a mixed episode and in a manic 'clarity' moment of the depression he decided to hang himself. This isn't simple conjecture, these are the kinds of things that happen.
For what it's worth, if you want to see what the many sides of bipolar are like you should watch "The life of a Manic Depressive" with Steven Fry. He interviews many famous people and regular civilians regarding their illness, and you'll find that the sample there are mostly not living 'inspired lives' like Tim, and his advise isn't going to help them in the long run I fear, if anything I fear it'll cause more people suffering to delay that first visit to a psychiatrist to seek help.
EDIT: I'd like to point out that if Tim's writings are a product of his hypomania/mania you can't blame him for it. But whatever.
