A real diet for men | The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life |...

Nice exercise book, but a middling diet | The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life | David Zinczenko, Ted Spiker

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	• The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life David Zinczenko, Ted Spiker Rodale Books, 2004 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 226 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Lifestyle that Works!

I have been following this lifestyle for about 5 months now (it's not a diet, as others have said before). I've lost 40 pounds and 4 inches off my waist so far. It is hard to get used to eating so much, and at first you might feel like it's impossible to lose weight when you are eating so much.

Be prepared to go to the grocery store about twice a week to stay stocked up on fresh fruit and other foods that don't keep very well. Also be prepared to spend a lot of money on new clothes. I have had to either tailor or replace everything in my closet. A small price to pay I guess for increased health.

Please read this book, for under $10, isn't it worth the chance that it might just work for you?

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A real diet for men

This book was definitely worth buying. I've been on the plan for 5 weeks now, and I feel stronger, I feel full (more than before I started the diet), I eat a big fatty pizza once a week, and amazingly, my fat has been slowly draining away. The author is editor of Men's Health magazine; part of his job is to read all of the studies anywhere that have been done about nutrition, health, weight loss, and strength gain. He basically took all that information and made up his own diet plan.

I really like the plan. It's got two components: food, and exercise, mostly weight lifting. The food component relatively simple to implement, and he gives a lot of good examples of how it works out in practice, and how it can be fit into every day life. It's designed to be something you can keep up for the next 50 years, not something you "go on" until you're down to the weight you want. The best thing is that I feel full most of the day. (As he explains in the book, feeling really hungry and then eating a big meal is really counter-productive for losing weight.) I also really enjoy weight lifting. I had done lifting before, but his emphasis on gaining "lean muscle mass" is nice.

And yes, he also has 36 different exercises for the abdominal region; but no matter how toned your abs are, they're not very sexy if they're under a 2-inch layer of fat. The total-body workout is to help with the weight-loss part.

The writing is good too - fun and informative. Other reviewers complained that he kept trying to "sell" the diet instead of just getting to it. I think that "selling" the diet itself was still a key component in motivating people to actually stick with it. It's not over-done at all; if you're already 100% sold, you can just skip those chapters.

Overall, a great book; I wish I'd found it 5 years ago.

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Nice exercise book, but a middling diet

I got this book after having great success losing weight with Dr. Shapiro's Picture Perfect Weight Loss: The Visual Program for Permanent Weight Loss, but finding I wasn't doing much on the exercise front and had lost a lot of muscle as well as fat. I had also picked up David Zinczenko's Eat This Not That!: Thousands of Simple Food Swaps That Can Save You 10, 20, 30 Pounds-or More!, which I felt had a practical approach similar to Dr. Shapiro's.

One thing that really bothers me about a diet book is when I see something in it that's just an oft-repeated myth, without vetting it. For example, the Abs Diet recommends that we drink at least eight cups of water a day. Google "eight cups water myth" and you'll see that that's pretty much a myth - check the link from [...]. That makes me even more concerned about downing whey powder, which the Abs Diet recommends, along with a recommendation to take in a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight a day - a really large amount of protein. I haven't seen good medical evidence on this one, but I do know that it's heavily promoted by every whey powder manufacturer in existence, and I bet you the original science is lost in the shuffle. Finally, we're told that a pound of muscle burns "up to" 50 additional calories per day. Even bodybuilding sites question this (maybe it depends on what is meant by "up to"), and there are studies that say the additional metabolic effect of muscle is very minimal. Those last two points throw the entire diet into question in my mind, since the diet is all about eating more protein to build more muscle to burn off more calories.

As a recommendation - just because one scientific study or a thousand different websites say something about diet or exercise doesn't mean it's true. Scientific studies about diet and exercise are often contradictory and confusing, and there are often tens or hundreds for one particular area, making it easy for someone wanting to make an argument to cherry-pick. Websites (and people) often repeat misinformation. David Zinczenko's problem is that he repeats a lot of what he has heard without doing much vetting.

With that said I did start following the exercise plan - which I like a lot - and got a few decent diet ideas out of the book. The exercise plan is written so you can do it with dumbbells or in a gym. You're put through a total-body circuit very quickly. The net effect is that you get cardio and strength training in a single workout.

And the diet as a whole doesn't seem horrible depending on how you interpret it - but I think there are better diet ideas out there, including the Dr. Shapiro one above.

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The Ab's diet works

This book is I believe the most common sense eating plan I have ever read. It's informative, and obviously backed up by good research. In Three month's with a moderate workout, I am down almost a total of 20 pounds, from 210 getting close to 190. It's great reading and fun reading which is rare in a book like this. Anyone who gives less than a 5 star review needs to get off their Butt and get to work. Sorry, can't stand the complainers.

Great-looking abs are more than just a way to support the mirror industry. In fact, strong abs and flat stomachs are the ultimate indicator of overall health-for both men and women. Great abs will help you live longer, sleep better, prevent back pain, and significantly improve your sex life! (And, hey, they don't look half-bad in the mirror, either.) Unfortunately, you could spend years on starvation diets and extreme exercise programs that never unearth those elusive stomach muscles.

Or you could spend just six weeks with David Zinczenko, Editor-in-Chief of Men's Health magazine, on THE ABS DIET-an easy and effective program for everyone that is helping thousands of people lose weight, flatten their guts, banish post-pregnancy bellies, and become healthier than they ever thought possible.
What's more, once on this revolutionary new diet you'll look and feel better than ever without deprivation dieting, counting calories, measuring foods, worrying about confusing phases-or ever feeling hungry!
Sound impossible? Let David Zinczenko prove it to you. As editor-in-chief of the world's most important men's magazine, Zinczenko has devoted his career to helping people improve their lives through the latest and most well-researched health, nutrition, and exercise information available.
Now, in the national bestseller THE ABS DIET, Zinczenko reveals his infallible formula that works for both men and women:
>>The ABS DIET POWER foods: the 12 best foods (all part of an easy-to-remember acronym) that will naturally boost your metabolism so that you can strip away fat, build muscle, and look and feel great for life. (Bonus: Many of the Abs Diet Powerfoods are even-gasp-carbs!)
>>SIMPLICITY: This low-maintenance program is easy to follow because there are no scales, no phases, no calculus-like formulas to compute, and no recipes that take a culinary degree to make. (One of the secret weapons: Satiating smoothies.) In fact, many of the dozens and dozens of delicious meals you can make take no more than a few minutes to prepare!
INCENTIVE: The plan never leaves you hungry. Instead, it encourages you to eat (a whopping six times a day!), stokes your metabolism, and even lets you cheat now and then.
ENERGY: Designed to help you build the lean muscle that and melt away that pesky belly fat, this full-body exercise program can be done at home in only 20 minutes, 3 times a week, with nothing more than a set of dumbbells!
LONGEVITY: An easy-to-remember maintenance plan will help you maintain your flat stomach forever.
Thousands of people are on THE ABS DIET, which can help you lose up to 20 pounds in six weeks-all while gaining pounds of muscle!-because it's easy to follow and even easier to stick to. THE ABS DIET also describes some of the stories of people who went on the program and had amazing successes. In those cases, these people ended up changing their waistlines-and their lives.
THE ABS DIET is the best, last and only diet and nutrition plan that you will ever need.

Read about how low-carb diets are making you fat, about how the food industry is putting secret fat bombs in your favorite foods, and about how you can fight back. You'll find out why 95 percent of all diets fail, and why THE ABS DIET is different.

So how about joining on for a six-pack? Yours.

- 12 "superfoods" that will change your life.

- A simple maintenance plan to keep your abs from disappearing

Six weeks to superior strength and sexy symmetry every man-and woman! -lusts after. Men's Health can show you how.

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