The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life

I have NEVER read a book that has inspired me to become HEALTHY like this one has. I needed to diet and was in a major diet "rut!" The best thing about his plan is you really dont feel like you are on a diet. It is all about getting your body healthy. I am going on my third week of the plan and I have lost 6 pounds and my body feels much tighter. My whole outlook is better because I am not starving myself with some crazy diet or eating a bunch of crazy foods that other diets recommend. This is SO easy to follow that I will incorporate my entire eating lifestyle based on his plan. This is not just 6 weeks for me this is how I will live my life. If I can do this, please beleive me ANYONE can. Don't let the author being a Mens Health" editor deter any women from this plan, I am a woman who is enjoying this plan to its fullest extent and trying hard to get my husband to conform. All in all 6 STARS from me!

I'm a diet fanatic and buy just about any reasonably presented book on this subject. This is a sensible diet that makes sense and works for most people who are not metaboically resistant. Eating six small meals a day rather than 3 large ones is a good idea, and tends to match the Zone diet in this area. Balancing carbs with protein is also a good idea and matches several other diets out there. The author advises you to eat oatmeal in the morning for breakfast, but you need to be aware of something: first, make sure you buy the old fashioned kind that takes about 5 minutes to cook. Do not eat that instant stuff. Second, if you eat a massive dose of carbs, as oatmeal contains, for breakfast, you can count on being ravenously hungry witin about 2 hours as your body compensates for the spike in your sugar levels from the carbs.

Fianlly, this book is really not about developing great abs. It's just a catchy title. If you lose weight, your abs will naturaly look better. Buy this book if like me, you benefit from the constant encouragement found in reading new diet book--but overall, stick to a basic plan of sensible calorie consumption, avoiding stupid carbs found in sodas and candy, and get some exercise.

I think I have read every diet book written and I doubted that this book had anything more to add to my knowledge. Alas, I was wrong. This is a good book but if you are looking for instant magic, then this book or any other, will not help you. Covered here are basics that can help anyone, even someone that is not seeking to loose weight. Your food intake is composed of a balance of foods that are all good for you. Only the traditional junk is left out. There is an emphasis on fiber and protein that will keep you filled up without overeating. Sorry no bacon! I have religiously charted my progress in terms of calories, and clearly on the days that I follow the diet, I always consume less calories than I utilize, which equals weight loss. (and I do this without any agony) On the days that I stray, I tend to overeat! Duh!! Exercise is focused on the mid area (abs) but includes aerobic as well. You abs show by reducing fat (everywhere including the abs area) and building muscle. Basically adding muscle increases caloric demand. As we age we loose muscle etc. Additionally, the book has a great series of illustrated exercises, that can be done in a gym or at home. Too many books expect you to have access to a gym or have $5K worth of equipment in your home. Not required here. A worthwhile read for sure!! Oh by the way, I have actually read this book cover to cover several times, unlike some of the reviews posted here. It works, what more can be said.

Calorie controlled diets are the most scientifically valid diets. Less calories in, plus cardio = weight loss. The problem with this is that we generally loose fat and muscle at the same time. However, very low-calorie diets are beaten by the body after two to three weeks. The body learns that you are starving down and so starts to conserve fat. You can even eat half the allotted calories per day and watch as you stay the same weight and look like you have the same fat (and you do). Combine cardio and you can loose it all eventually (fat and muscle) but at least you lost the fat. Hard, but it can be done. Although this backbone of dieting is important, actually very important, and works, you can't start eating bad again or else you will put it all back on. You can't stick with a very low-calorie diet forever either without repeating this process every time you put on fat. In general this isn't a bad way to go about getting fit, especially if you are obese and fed up with that fat. This traditional method will rip the fat off for at least 3 weeks and get you down a bit. Then the low-carbohydrate diet is the next obvious choice to get down even more, like the Atkins diet. Low-carb diets limit what you eat so that you find it hard to eat and what you do eat doesn't convert to fat quickly. Lots of foods with medium to high carbohydrate levels vanish from your menu and so if you don't eat fatty foods on this controlled diet your body will continue to loose more weight. Combine this with the traditional method of a very low-calorie intake with cardio and you have a diet on rocket fuel. The problem though is that low-carb diets are very limiting, remove healthy carbohydrate foods that your body needs, and may even be considered dangerous by some experts. Shopping for low-carb foods is not as fun, or as easy, as it sounds. Even health stores and low-carb sections do not have such a great range of foods for low-carb diets. Even food producers have tried to corner this market by adding hidden ingredients to the low-carb foods. You will tend to eat the same things over and over. You can't do it forever. If you want something you can do forever then the Abs Diet is the way to go.

The Abs Diet has the right ideas, and really that is the bottom line. It is quite humorous at times too and is easy to read. Modern medicine tells us that the human body can use food to burn fat if we eat the right foods in the right proportions. When we eat certain foods our body's metabolism increases. The very activity of our digestion can use more energy than what we are ingesting. This is the way our bodies where always supposed to act. By avoiding appetite suppressants (the type that stops you feeling full!) food additives (like HFSC) we can eat healthy and feel full like we should, not drinking 2 litres of soda containing appetite suppressants and then want to snack out on a candy bar containing the same appetite suppressants, an endless spiral of overeating. Trans-fats, which are coming under fire only now in the 21st century with the new "dangerous fats" label on the way in means that it should be easier for us to learn about and identify problem foods like trans-fats, hydrogenated oils, HFSC, high GI-foods. The Abs Diet does a good job of telling you the stuff that is really bad for you. What you then discover is that there are medium to high carbohydrate foods that do not have this stuff in them. Meaning a low-carb food with these danger ingredients is worse than a high-carb food without these danger ingredients. If we exclude these danger ingredients in with our low-carb diet then good luck in finding food that you can eat - but if you can do it you will loose weight... but you can't do low-carb forever. The Abs Diet uses the principle that there are foods that can increase metabolic rates and that these foods can also be medium-high carb and should also be included in a diet for health reasons. This inclusion of medium-high carb foods suddenly opens up a wave of food options for your diet. You can shop this stuff probably anywhere. Next, the Abs Diet tells you that you need to move to six meals a day. 8am breakfast, 11am snack, 1pm lunch, 4pm snack, 6pm dinner, 8pm snack. This is a major component of the metabolic diet that bodybuilder's will already know (the Abs Diet borrows heavily from the bodybuilding world). You can cheat on one day a week (wow). Most of the foods contain high protein (this is also borrowed from bodybuilding) and so nearly every meal has vitamins, high protein and some carbs. There are even some meals with good fats in them. It is all very healthy. Nuts and berries are high on the list, veg, whey protein, beans, poultry, skimmed milk and low-dairy, oats, eggs, peanut butter (yep, a little can combat fat), olive oil and wholegrain breads. The Abs Diet asks that you get a blender to make some `smoothies' that are like health drinks you can use throughout the day. These are great and tasty additions to your diet. You even have full lunches and dinners with steak and chicken and tortillas. In essence you haven't seen a diet that looks as tasty as the Abs Diet. The blender allows for unprecedented creation of all sorts of metabolic foods. Although protein concentration is very high, so what, the meals are great and that is what counts. Watch out that you actually calculate for servings (per person) as some of the smoothies are enough for 2 servings and the lunches/dinners can serve 4 people sometimes. Metabolic dieting of six meals a day, which are high in protein and low in danger foods, will make you loose fat. The Abs Diet is a pretty valuable cook book. Lots of very good recipes are in here (I had to copy the recipes onto my PC because my pages are already worn from cooking with it) and they allow for a lot of variation when you have worked with them. You get the general idea and can even advance on to making up your own. Once you get the idea you can continue it for life. In short, the Abs Diet works, but there are some major drawbacks that are more side issues than the diet itself, but you need to know about them. The Abs Diet talks you out of cardio saying that you only burn a couple of hundred calories for every 30 minutes to 1 hour doing it. Fine, this is true, but you also get cardio-vascular exercise which promotes a body that can produce a better metabolic system. Never walk away from cardio. The Abs Diet tells you to stop counting calories. This is also a bad idea. The basic traditional calorie counts are important because if you are consuming more than you can burn then you are going to get fat. However it would be better to see these calories in light of their metabolic effect so don't get too worried if you see some bigger figures. At the same time, they should not get too big or else, so will you! These food amounts advocated by the Abs Diet need to be cautioned against. If you are gaining weight then check to see what could be responsible for it. Next up is the biggest lie of them all - that you can gain muscle and loose fat. You can't build muscle and loose fat at the same time. As any bodybuilder will tell you, this is a strategic impossibility. In order to build muscle you need a bulk diet which gains muscle and some fat and then you move to a cut diet which looses a little muscle but lots of fat. Bulk and Cut. That is how it is done. The Abs Diet tries to tell you that you can cut fat and gain muscle together. You can't. The worst part is yet to come. Pages 200 to 300 are dedicated to a four day a week gym exercise. Do not even read this section. The book has ended at page 200. To ask people to train four days a week is horrible overtraining advice and the exercise examples are horrible form. Only steroid users train this way four times a week or more and some of the examples will injure you. Forget about all the weight lifting information in here and concern yourself with cardio, like an exercise bike or biking. I suggest you look for better weight lifting exercises through manuals that are dedicated to natural bodybuilding that is responsibly taught. Search around. Now with that out of the way, if you have gym experience then the Abs Diet works super wonders but for the average person, who doesn't lift weights, don't waste time learning weights yet, and instead get your cardio in order first. The other thing this book lacks is sources. It really needs to cite its sources. The exercise and cardio claims are wrong for the above reasons. The writer knows nothing about weight training properly. I would be suspect of lots of the claims he makes but the general ideas are good and most importantly, the metabolic diet works... and it works really well, for as long as you want. Overall this is a great book because of its core message - Metabolic dieting on foods you can live with forever and that is why it is highly recommended. This could be the best diet book you could own.
*Updates*
- Always eat at those 6 times in a day. Even if you break the diet with a bad meal keep to the plan. Cardio always help if you mess up.
- Try not to snack between snacks. Keep the meals to 6 per day.
- The calorie calculations for the recipes are far from accurate.
- Turns out when you add up the meals that this is a pretty low calory diet for men but maybe high for women.
- The meals have massive variations in the calorie differences. One dinner recipe is 700kcal while another is 300kcal.
- You need to add about 3 tsp of olive oil to the non-stick pan if you dont want to burn your food.
- Drink plenty of water.
- I think the meals run a little too late for me. Better is 12pm lunch, 3pm snack, 4:30-5pm dinner, 7pm snack. I try to have the last sizable meal before 7pm. I eat something small with protein before I go to bed to prevent catabolism.
- Don't worry if the diet doesn't work right away. You need to get rid of the all the metabolism inhibiting chemicals that you have in your system. It can take awhile for the diet to kick in because of that.
- If you find that the diet is not working after all of the above then have a higher calory dinner for lunch and a lower calory lunch for dinner. That way you eat bigger midday and less in the evening. Two lower calory lunches for lunch and dinner are more extreme but if that is what you need to do then that is what you need to do.
- Get a digital weighing scales. You will drop down and go up and drop down and go up. The key here is to create a decline of dropping down and going up.
**I have gone from 220lbs to 207lbs in 1 month on this diet.**
*** I am now 181lbs** 8th May 2007 *** Slow, but getting there! Cardio is a must!!!!

Just like Goldilocks from the "Three Bears" children's tale, I finally found the perfect eating routine. My first diet (bed) was the Atkins' Diet. This diet was okay, but I got tired of the greasy food, and started missing carbs and vegetables. When I got off that diet I gained all the weight back with interest. My second diet (bed) was the "South Beach Diet" which was better than Atkins', but it was missing something but shared similar methods to the Abs diet. My third diet (bed) was the Abs Diet and it was the perfect fit for me! You are not deprived of anything and everything in the book makes perfect sense. The key to my success is what the author calls the "12 Powerfoods" which consist of high proteins, fiber, and "good" carbs. As a carb addict it's important for me to have carbs incorporated in my diet. This way I don't have to worry about carb binges and regaining weight.

Another factor that works for me are the recipes that are really good, I even enjoy eating ground turkey now. The books maps out how to combine flavors to what is perceive my some as bland food into cuisines that you could serve to your guest. My favorite recipes are:
Strawberry Field Marshall Smoothie (Life saver when you want something sweet)
Banana Split Smoothie
Yo Soup for you
Mas Macho Meatballs (FAVORITE!)
Chili Con Turkey (Great for those cold winter nights)


Even though the books states six weeks, for me it took six months to lose 25 pounds. I overindulged in both snacks and meals, didn't exercise much, and around the holiday ate like it was going out of style. With that being said, I still did well and went from a size 16 to a size 12. I still have 35 pounds to go, but now I'm exercise frequently, and eating less. Within two weeks, I noticed my skirts are fitting looser which encourages me to continue with exercising which will give me the results that I'm looking for sooner. The only thing I would change is the title of the book; I would change it to the "The Abs Lifestyle". I have changed everything about how I eat and carve the "Powerfoods" instead of junk food which is loaded with fat, dangerous carbs, and empty calories. I know I will become healthy and maintain the weight, this is truly my perfect bed (diet) and I hope it will be the same for you.