How To Reveal Your Abs

Imagine you are a Hollywood film star. One of the most famous actors in the world. You've just been offered the lead role in the latest blockbuster movie. It's the biggest film you've ever done and will make or break your career.

Last month, the producers told you to get in shape in preparation for the role. So, you've been going to the gym every day for the last four weeks in a bid to gain some muscle and burn off a few pounds of excess fat

But there's only one problem...

Filming starts in eight weeks... you feel under intense pressure to look the part... there are literally millions of dollars riding on the way you look... and you haven't lost a single pound of fat!

What's going on?

You've been following what you consider to be a "healthy" low-fat diet. You've cut out butter, red meat, coffee and whatever else the "food police" say is bad for you this week. You're eating 4-5 small meals a day, no carbohydrates after 7pm, and still... nothing.

Maybe something's wrong with you? Is it because your metabolism is slow? Are you getting older and burning calories at a slower rate? Is it in your genes? You stick to the plan, and still you don't lose weight.

Why isn't it working?

I get e-mails like this all the time. Not from movie stars, but from people who work hard in the gym, eat what they think is a "good" diet, but just don't see the results they were hoping for.

If you're not making progress toward your goal, be it fat loss or muscle gain, it's probably not your metabolism, your age, your workout, or your genetics that are causing the problem. It's your diet.

The food that you put in your mouth each day is the real key to success. Even if you're eating the “right” food all day long you can not be losing weight simply because you're eating too much of it. And more exercise isn't always the answer. For most people, lack of time makes it extremely difficult to out-exercise a poor diet.

With all the confusing (and often conflicting) information about what to eat, it's easy to make the mistake of focusing on qualitative issues (like not eating late at night, eating 4-5 meals a day and so forth) while ignoring the quantitative issue of total calorie intake.

And many people get bogged down in the details while ignoring the big picture — if you want to lose weight, you need to create a calorie deficit. This means burning more calories than you're taking in.

Let me say that again...

It's possible for your weight to stay exactly where it is, even if you're exercising regularly and following all "the rules" about what to eat, simply because you're eating too many calories.

That’s not to say that the quality of your diet doesn’t matter, because it does. Putting genetic factors to one side, the quantity of calories in your diet will dictate how much weight you lose, while the source or quality of those calories will dictate whether the lost weight comes from muscle or fat.

So, that's the problem. What's the solution?

When it comes to deciding what to eat, I've found that most people fall into one of two categories.

• The Instinctive Eater

• The Calorie Counter

Instinctive Eaters are those annoying people who can maintain a low level of body fat while appearing to pay little or no attention to their diet. They tend to be either genetically gifted, or have a finely tuned "instinct" for the foods and portion sizes that help them lose weight and keep it off.

Most people are very poor at estimating how many calories they eat each day. One of the reasons you'll often see odd results in weight loss studies, where people fail to lose (or even gain) weight on low-calorie diets is that the study used self-reported food intake to measure calorie intake. And what you find is that these people are simply under-reporting the amount of calories they eat each day [1].

In other words, someone who says they're eating 1500 calories per day may be eating anywhere up to 3000 calories.

The rest of us, me included, need to be Calorie Counters. This means keeping a food diary and recording how many grams of protein, fat, and carbohydrate you're eating each day.

Let's be clear about one thing. Keeping a food diary can be a royal pain in the butt at first! Weighing food, measuring serving sizes and reading labels is tedious, dull and very boring. But the chances are it’s something you’ll need to do if you’re serious about reaching your goals.

I might be wrong, but I'm guessing that most people reading this will decide that their diet "isn't bad" and continue the search for the "magic bullet" — that special diet, weight loss supplement or secret combination of exercises — that will help them lose weight. "Men stumble over the truth from time to time," as Winston Churchill once said, "but most pick themselves up and hurry off as nothing happened."

Others will accept that their diet needs changing, but will decide that keeping a food diary sounds too much like hard work. If you are one of these people, chances are you'll never really achieve what you want. You might as well stop reading now.

But if you are one of the rare few who recognizes the fact that your diet is the main reason you're not reaching your goals AND you're prepared to do something about it, here's an example of what a food diary might look like, and the information I think you need to record.

PDF Format Food Diary (Example)

PDF Format Food Diary (Blank)

One alternative to keeping a daily food diary is to follow the advice of Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle author Tom Venuto and create a menu using an Excel spreadsheet or your favorite nutrition software. Once you have your daily menu, print it, stick it on your refrigerator and you now have an eating "goal" for the day.

"If you get bored eating the same thing every day," says Tom, "you can create multiple menus, or just exchange foods using your one menu as a template. Using this method, you really only need to count calories once when you create your menus."

"After you've got a knack for calories from this initial discipline of menu planning," Tom adds, "you can estimate portions in the future and get a pretty good (and more educated) ballpark figure."

You might start off by creating six meals — two breakfasts, two lunches and two dinners. Then come up with a few different snacks that are portable, quick and easy to make and can be eaten “on the run.”

Put the list somewhere you can see it every day. Now, all you need to do is “pick and mix” from your meal plans and you can eat according to your goals without getting bored of eating the same old stuff every day.

Here are some fantastic resources you'll find extremely useful when planning and recording your diet.

Fit Day
FitDay is a food journal, calorie counter, exercise log, weight loss tracker, and nutrition facts book all rolled into one. It lets you record your nutrient intake each day.

Nutrition Data
Nutrition Data is an incredibly useful site for anyone wanting to find out more about the food they eat. It generates nutrition facts labels and provides simplified nutritional analyses for all foods and recipes. It beats both Calorie King and Food Count for ease of use and the sheer amount of information it supplies. However, this just scratches the surface of what the site has to offer. You can quickly and easily create lists of foods low in carbohydrate, high in protein, or that match any other dietary restrictions or goals. The caloric ratio pyramid lets you find foods with a specific ratio of carbohydrate, fats, and protein, while the pantry helps you keep track of your daily calorie intake.

Online Conversion
Lets you convert anything into anything else (such as grams to ounces).

Food Count
Ever want to know what vegetables have the most vitamin A? Or what fish has the most protein? The FoodCount diet planner lets you find out quickly and easily.

Meals For You
Wouldn't it be great if you had your own personal chef? Forget all this planning and preparation. You simply tell your chef that you want a meal high in protein and low in fat, for example, and he prepares it all for you.

While a personal chef is not realistic for most people, I've found a site that's the next best thing. Rather than list all of the features on the site, I'll tell you how I used it.

First, I told the search engine that I wanted a list of meals that were low in carbohydrate, low in fat, and high in protein. Because I'm also lazy, I told the search engine that I didn't want to spend more than 15 minutes preparing a meal (there are a range of times you can specify to suit your own needs).

Once I'd spent a minute or two deciding what I wanted (it's as easy as selecting a few check boxes), I simply hit the "search" button. A few seconds later, the powerful search engine gave me 28 delicious recipes that met the criteria I requested.

But that's really only the tip of the iceberg. The search engine has many more powerful capabilities. For example, you can tell it to exclude all meals that include dairy products, gluten or meat. With a collection of more than 8,000 recipes, you'll always find something new.

The site also tells you exactly how many calories are in each meal, together with a full breakdown of protein, carbohydrate and fat grams. What's more, you'll also learn precisely what vitamins and minerals are contained per serving.

The icing on the cake is the shopping list feature. The site remembers all your favorite recipes, and works out exactly how much of each ingredient you need to buy the next time you visit the supermarket. It doesn't matter where in the world you live. You can easily customize the site to present the data in a number of different formats.

Spark Recipes Recipe Calculator
This powerful tool lets you quickly and easily create your own recipes and see instantly how much protein, carbohydrate and fat is in there.

The bottom line

Although keeping tabs on your daily calorie intake can be time-consuming at first, it’s something most people will need to do if they're serious about reaching their goals. But it's not something you'll need to do forever. With a bit of practice, you'll be able to "eyeball" portions of food and get a pretty good idea about how many calories you're taking in without having to write it all down.

About The Author
Christian Finn holds a master's degree in exercise science, is a certified personal trainer and has been featured on BBC TV and radio, as well as in Men's Health, Men's Fitness, Muscle & Fitness, Fit Pro, Zest and other popular fitness magazines.

If you're stuck in a rut with your current exercise and diet plan... fed up with only losing a pound here and there... or still skinny after months (or even years) of trying to build muscle and gain weight... click here now for instant access to his step-by-step muscle-building and fat-burning workout routines.

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• How Many Calories Do You Need To Lose Weight? (Members Only)
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• Q&A: Do Simple Carbohydrates Make You Fat? (Members Only)

Reference
1. Lichtman, S.W., Pisarska, K., Berman, E.R., Pestone, M., Dowling, H., Offenbacher, E., Weisel, H., Heshka, S., Matthews, D.E., & Heymsfield, S.B. (1992). Discrepancy between self-reported and actual caloric intake and exercise in obese subjects. New England Journal of Medicine, 327, 1893-1898