Losing Weight and Building 6-Pack Abs

Losing weight is a billion dollar industry in America, there are thousands of devices and programs you can buy that promise to get you "6-pack abs fast" but they don't work!  If it were as easy as buying a pill, shake, or ab machine then the shopping malls across America would be filled with men who have rippling washboard abs-of-death but what do we see instead?  Obesity everywhere!

You can't buy 6-pack abs!

I'll let you in on the secret of getting 6-pack abs for free - are you ready?  Here it is, its a two step process: step 1: exercise more and step 2: eat less !  Lets clear up one huge misconception right now, ab machines and ab exercises will NOT get you 6-pack abs!  95% of the work in getting 6-pack washboard abs is losing bodyfat and no ab machine will do that.  If you have a beer belly, you could do ab exercises all year long and still never get 6-pack abs. You can have rippling muscular abs but if they are covered with an inner tube of fat then nobody is going see them.
A common sense approach involving exercise and nutrition is all that is required to get ripped, washboard abs.  Just a warning though, there is nothing fast about losing weight and getting ripped, it's simple but takes time and dedication. When most people think about losing weight, what comes to mind is words like "hunger", "deprivation", "diet", and "agony". No! Losing weight properly will not result in any of these, the key is in the above two words "common sense". Most of the fad diets out there are unhealthy, dangerous or both and lead to deprivation and hunger which eventually leads to binging - the typical unhealthy yo-yo weight loss pattern. What we want is permanent weight loss! Yo-yo dieting is way too much work, just learn to make smart nutritional choices and and the weight comes off and stays off for good!

Smart nutritional choices + exercise = ripped abs

There is no such thing as spot fat removal despite what the late night infomercials try to sell you. You cant 'target' fat removal unless you are using a machete or liposuction.  All you can do is lose weight and let the body decide where the fat is coming off.  When you have lost enough weight, the belly and love handles will disappear.  Lets talk about expectations, you cant get ripped in 10 days or even 30 days.  A good weight loss program will let you lose the weight gradually, a pound a week is a good rate - 2 pounds a week max.  If you are 50lbs overweight count on 6 months to a year to remove it.  Losing fat at this gradual rate means you will never be hungry or feel deprived. Another reason to lose the weight gradually is so that you don't burn off muscle - who wants to lose muscle? Nobody!
By the way, I've tried hard here to give you all the information you need to know in order to lose bodyfat and get 6-pack abs in one single, concise page. If for some reason it doesnt make sense to you, then consider buying the excellent book from Tom Venuto Burn The Fat - Its a well written book which you can read in 6 hours which covers this topic in much more detail than I do here.
Its important to note that there are reasons that some people may not want visible 6-pack abs as their top priority.

Step 1 for fat loss: Exercise More

Lets look at what its going to take to lose that bodyfat and get abs, remember I said "eat less and exercise more", lets start with the 'exercise more' part.  You lose fat by burning off more calories than you eat, pretty simple huh?. To burn off the calories you need to do at least 30 min of cardiovascular exercise every day. Why every day? Well for one, the American Heart Association says its what you should do to help avoid heart disease - very boring reason. The real reason you should exercise every day is much more exciting. You obviously burn off lots of calories while you are exercising, what isn't so obvious is that even this small amount of cardio elevates your metabolic rate so that your body burns off more calories the other 23 hours of the day too! What a bargain! Exercise 30 minutes and you get the next 23 hours of fat loss at no additional charge! What constitutes cardiovascular exercise, good question. Good cardio is anything that elevates your heart rate to 70%-85% of your maximum for 30-60 minutes:

Age	75%	85%	Max Heart Rate
20	150 BPM	170 BPM	200 BPM
30	142 BPM	161 BPM	190 BPM
40	135 BPM	153 BPM	180 BPM
50	127 BPM	144 BPM	170 BPM
60	120 BPM	136 BPM	160 BPM
70	113 BPM	127 BPM	150 BPM

By the way, its a very good idea to consult your doctor before starting any exercise program, your target rates may differ from the chart above if you have medical conditions.  For a young person in good health, jogging or swimming is a great form of cardiovascular exercise.  Walking and cycling can be good cardio but you need to push yourself to walk really fast, no sauntering strolls - wearing a heart rate monitor while walking or cycling can help keep you from lollygagging.    At the gym, I shake my head every time I see people "exercising" on the stationary bikes using level 1 while chatting and reading the paper -what exactly do they think they are accomplishing? Their heart rate is about the same as if they were watching TV or sleeping! If you don't have a heart rate monitor, listening to high BPM music that you really like is a great way to keep your heart rate elevated too.
Now lets talk about HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), this is all the rage. There is research that its burns off more calories in a shorter time but I still don't like it, why? Because I have found that most people do interval training with running and that their incidence of injury skyrockets. When you are injured you cant do any cardio, so I don't recommend HIIT running workouts except for elite athletes. If you want to do interval training, I suggest you do it cycling or swimming rather than running. The other thing people fail to realize is although HIIT burns more calories per unit time, you still need to keep your heart rate elevated for 20-60 minutes a day. People often ask if they can do 10 minutes of intervals rather than 20 minutes of steady cardio - No! You must keep you heart rate elevated for 20-60min. If one woman can make a baby in nine months, does that mean that nine women can make a baby in 1 month? No! Good things just take time! Find a way to enjoy your cardio rather than looking for ways to get it over with!
Its not just cardiovascular exercise that is important, weight lifting is just as important in my opinion in the quest to lose bodyfat. Weight lifting burns off calories too but more importantly it helps increase your metabolic rate so you burn off more calories 24hrs a day. Muscle is very "expensive" for the body to maintain and the more muscle you have, the more calories that are burned off every hour maintaining it. The more muscular you become, the easier it is to stay ripped.

Caution: You can always out-eat your exercise!

A word of warning, don't fall into the trap of thinking that because you are exercising so much you can eat what you want - you cant.  No matter how much you exercise, you can eat more than you burn off and end up gaining fat rather than losing it unless you accompany your cardio program with good nutrition.
People often ask if they can skip the cardio if they have really, really good nutrition - NO! You need to do your daily cardio! Cardio is one of the most important things you can do to keep your body healthy, inside and out.

Step 2 for fat loss: Eat Less (Good Nutrition)

The second part of losing fat is eating less, and remember this does not mean hunger and deprivation! Most people fail at to achieve their weight loss goals not because they eat too much but because they don't eat enough! The starve themselves then end up binging! If you are hungry then you are doing something very wrong. If you have cravings for your favorite food, then you are human - I address how to handle cravings at the end of this section. The #1 easiest way to lose fat is to eat your calories rather then drinking them, this simple tip can help you lose 5lbs fat a month or more without any additional changes to your nutrition. There are many nutritional methods of weight loss and all of them will work, at least in the short term. Where they differ is in how healthy they are and if the results are long term and lasting or not. Here are some of them with the ones I recommend at the top:

Nutritional Methods for Losing Weight
Eating Healthy	Recommended	Education alone can help you lose weight. Learn what foods are healthy and eat them. This method is a lot of work, not only in study but at the store and in the kitchen. Eating healthy is a lot of work but it is the best method of all. If you can cut out all foods with artificial flavors, sugars, simple carbs, fat, and salt for one month your taste buds will recover so that natural foods like vegetables, legumes, and whole grains are flavorful and tasty again. For this technique to be effective, you need to become a nutritional expert. You need to be able to look at something in the store or on a plate in a restaurant and tell within 10% how many grams fat, how many grams carbohydrate, how many grams protein and how many calories. You have to be an expert at reading nutritional labels. Most people just have no idea where the calories are in their diets. This is a good option for bodybuilders and professional athletes who need to maximize their performance. Unfortunately this method is not a realistic option for the general public because of the work it requires :(
Smart Substitutions	Recommended	This technique can work for many and its the easiest of all. Its recommended by the American Heart Association and it works great for the general pubic (but not serious bodybuilders). This method doesn't result in any deprivation feelings or require any study or hard thinking, just simple substitutions. Just make one or two healthy substitutions in a day and in a year it will result in losing tens of pounds of fat! How easy is that? Have mashed potatoes instead of french fries. Have a grilled chicken sandwich instead of a cheeseburger. Drink water instead of coke. None of these sacrifices is too great but yet they have a powerful effect over time.
Calorie Counting (Portion Control)	Recommended	Calorie counting and portion control is a great technique that works for virtually everyone, the general public and bodybuilders alike. Portion control doesn't mean diet and deprivation, it means eating enough so that you are not hungry but not so much that you gain fat. One caveat here, simply calorie counting alone will not work. Although you will lose weight if you eat only Twinkies and stay within your calorie limits, you will lose lots of muscle too - not to mention the serious and potentially life threatening health issues this may cause. With the advent of smart phones and websites like mine, calorie counting has become easier than it used to be. Just go to my calorie calculator, answer 5 questions, and it will plan a perfect and healthy weight loss meal for you! There are great iPhone apps like "Lose It" where you just select the food item and quantity you ate and it tracks the calories.
Carb Cycling	Recommended	The carb cycling nutritional method can be as effective at burning fat off quickly as the low-carb diets with none of the harmful effects but its not for everyone. When done properly, this nutritional method has plenty of vegetables and fiber and is very healthy. It does contain more protein that I personally think is healthy for long term use though but its fine for short term weight loss. In my opinion, this technique is not appropriate for teens and people who are over 12% bodyfat - I would instead recommend the previous technique, calorie counting. I just did a book review of "Burn the Fat" by Tom Venuto and was kind of embarrassed. Although I present most of the same concepts here on my website, his book does a much, much better job. If you don't feel like the information I present here on losing fat makes sense to you, I highly recommend his book Burn the Fat.
Low Carb	Not recommended	Low carb diets are very effective in losing fat fast which is why they have been so popular in the past - people use these all the time to get ready for high school reunions and weddings. So why don't I recommend them? First, the poor long term results speak for themselves. 89% of people who lost weight with low carb diets have gained it back within 18 months. Second low carb diets are very unhealthy, the human body is not build for low carb nutrition and it causes an array of nasty health issues. Its about as healthy as feeding a cow hamburgers :)
Fasting	Not recommended	Yes, fasting results in very rapid weight loss but it is dangerous and can result in death. More important than death (at least to a bodybuilder) is that fasting results in muscle loss as much as fat loss - nobody wants to lose muscle, fat is what people want to remove. I am not referring to religious fasts here like Ramadan that are fasts from sunrise to sunset. What I am referring to here is total nutritional fasts where the person consumes no calories (or minimal calories) for days or weeks on end. I would define any diet where you consume less than your BMR (Basic Metabolic Rate) as a fast. To find out what your BMR is, use my calorie calculator. Most fad diets (like the grapefruit diet below) fall into this category.
Grapefruit Diet	Not recommended	A dangerous fad diet utilizing the "magical and mysterious" ingredients in grapefruit. The only magic here is figuring out how so many people were duped into this dangerous diet. Its a very low calorie diet (800-1000) which qualifies it as fasting in my book. The grapefruit has nothing to do with the weight loss, if you eat 800-1000 calories in Twinkies you will have the same results. Fasting is very dangerous and should only be done under a direct doctors supervision. Again, for those of you who care - fasting burns off as much muscle as fat.

Lets start with something basic that applies to all the above nutritional methods of fat loss - eat many small meals.  You cant lose weight eating one or two meals a day, it puts your body in starvation mode and lowers your metabolism.  You need 6 meals a day. I know your are thinking already, "I CANT eat 6 time a day, I don't have time!"   Well, I cant cook and even I can eat 6 healthy meals a day. Check out my quick healthy meals section for help with quick recipes or no cook recipes. If those dont appeal to you then consider buying this bodybuilding cookbook (read my review).
The 6 small meals a day you are eating need to be well balanced - what does that mean? It depends a bit on which nutritional plan above you are following but  the bulk of every meal will be probably veggies and whole grains, some form of lean protein (beans, dairy, meat), and a small amount of fruit.  Your body doesn't store protein, you cant just have a big steak at dinner and call that your daily protein.  This is especially important if you are doing a weightlifting program in conjunction with your weight loss program. Every one of you meals needs to have 1/6 of your daily protein! The below chart gives you the approximate amount of calories and protein you need in each of your six meals based on your current weight:

To lose 1 pound fat per week
Current Weight	Calories	Protein
280lbs (127kg)	610cals x 6 meals = 3700 cals	46g x 6 meals= 280g protein
260 lbs (118kg)	560 cals x 6 meals = 3400 cals	43g x 6 meals= 260g protein
240 lbs (109kg)	510 cals x 6 meals = 3100 cals	40g x 6 meals= 240g protein
220 lbs (100kg)	460 cals x 6 meals = 2800 cals	36g x 6 meals= 220g protein
200 lbs (91kg)	410 cals x 6 meals = 2500 cals	33g x 6 meals= 200g protein
180 lbs (81kg)	360 cals x 6 meals = 2200 cals	30g x 6 meals= 180g protein
160 lbs (72kg)	310 cals x 6 meals = 1900 cals	26g x 6 meals= 160g protein
140 lbs (63kg)	265 cals x 6 meals = 1600 cals	23g x 6 meals= 140g protein

If you want to calculate precisely your nutritional needs, use my calorie calculator and set the macronutrient values to those that your nutritional program uses, the above chart is just for illustrative purposes. From my calculator, you know how much protein and how many calories each of your 6 meals can have. Now, what to eat? Can you eat whatever you want as long as it has the protein required and doesn't exceed the calories in the above chart? No! The quality of every calorie counts!!! Again, it depends a bit on which nutritional weight loss play you are following but each meal should:

• should contain 1/6 of your daily protein requirement (calculated in the above paragraph)
• should contain lots of veggies without sauces (fresh or steamed), the more the better. Vegetables fill you up with just a few calories, this is the key to avoiding hunger!
• should have no more than 20% of the calories from fat (only good fats like flax, avocados, olives, nuts)
• should have whole grain carbs for energy like oats, brown rice, or quinoa. No simple carbs allowed like sugar or white flour products
• should have a small serving of fruit

Notice something really interesting in the above calorie chart, as you lose weight you need to eat less and less if you want to continue losing weight. If you plateau in your weight loss, its probably because you have not adjusted your caloric intake as the above table suggests.   If you weigh 300lbs and eat 410calories per meal, you will lose weight rapidly at first then your weight will stabilize at 200lbs and you wont lose any more unless you decrease your intake further.  Its very important that you recalculate your caloric needs every few weeks using my calorie calculator to avoid these weight loss plateaus.
People ask all the time what some healthy snacks are. Well, a healthy snack is anything that fits into your nutritional plan for the day without making you exceed your calorie allotment or the number of grams fat, protein and carbs that you have decided is appropriate. Only you can determine what is a good snack. There are very few things that are good snacks for every person on the planet but these would probably include: carrots, celery, and air-popped popcorn without butter or salt.
Lets talk about supplements and protein powders and their use in weight loss.  If you follow the nutritional suggestions on this page, you don't need any supplements or protein powders - you will get plenty of protein and vitamins in the meals suggested here.  If you have trouble eating 6 real meals a day then protein powder can be a valuable dietary aid because it lets you get the protein you need without any calories from fat or carbs. In a pinch, mix the protein powder (or organic protein powder) with nonfat milk, soy milk, rice milk or orange juice for an inexpensive meal replacement. Remember though, real food with all its fiber, vitamins, and minerals is always best! I am a pseudo-vegetarian -  I only eat meat/fish/chicken about once a week.  Because of my low meat consumption, protein powder in the form of dairy whey is my most important source of protein.  I like dairy whey without any artificial stuff in it, the product from optimum nutrition is the one I have been using for seven years.
Here are some easy nutritional meals, all these are really quick and have only two or three ingredients. If I can make these meals then you can too.

Cravings

Cravings are a very common problem when people try to lose bodyfat, almost everyone has them regardless of what nutritional plan they are using. Everyone has their own particular vice, mine is sugar. Lets talk about some methods you can use to effectively deal with cravings.

• Iron-will method. If you have the iron-will and devotion of a Monk, you can just repress your cravings. For the other 99.999% of this, this method will result in binging. We will be able to refrain from eating our favorite food a week or two then in one eating-orgy we will chow down so many calories that we will undo all of our progress to date. Not a recommended method.
• Temptation avoidance method. Do not allow any unhealthy food in your house or office. Swap chores with your spouse so that they do the shopping, don't allow yourself into any store or restaurant where there might be a temptation. This technique only works slightly better than the above "Monk" technique. The problem is that eventually you will be faced with a situation where your favorite bad-food is available to you. A work party, a restaurant meal with out of town relatives, etc. At least with this method, you only need to exercise your iron-will for very short periods and not 24hrs a day. This method will probably fail for 90% of the population, again not the best technique
• Cheat meal method. This is the best option and can work for almost everyone. You have your good nutrition and stick to your plan most of the week but have regularly scheduled cheat meals - maybe one or two a week. Several important points here. First they are regularly scheduled, you cant have one whenever you want. Pre-decide which meals on which days are cheat meals so you can look forward to them. Its easier to hold binging off when you know that in 36 hours you have your cheat meal coming. These are not cheat days, they are cheat meals. They are not license to pig out, they are a chance to have the foods you crave. Have a double cheeseburger a shake and fries but don't supersize it! The other key is to take your cheat meal even if you don't feel you need it. If you skip it then a few hours later you might get those cravings and then everything goes to pot. Last point, its best if the cheat meal is not dinner. Make it earlier in the day if you can so that you have a chance to burn those calories off before you go to bed