How to Get 6 Pack Abs Realistically Nutrition Tips

Edit 1/29/11

The regurgitated material from my NASM handbook bored me to death while reading this a few days later. Dumping that junk and putting something else in. Don't know what that will be exactly, but you'll know when you see it!

For reference, that's the same bottle of oil in the first part of 6 pack abs series being realistic about 6 pack abs. Wait, what about my 6 pack abs? Did they go away?

Self explanatory. Most articles describe some grueling 20 minute, I don't even know the word for it, moving around like pinching the tips of the letter V together ab workout. Some lucky people who survive these insane crunch fests show results. Others end up coming to me for corrective exercise.  At this point the carb conversation comes up. They mistakenly attribute no-carb results to these outdated styles of thinking:

• Crunches make the fat burn around our waistline.
• These sideways, backwards, upside down, leg raising, lowering, figure eight loopy doopy, you name it maneuvers intended to make certain parts of our abs rise out of the sea of fat on our bellies make or break a six pack.
• Flab on the abs comes from carbs.
• A secret fat burning food selection coupled with super green mountain guru wisdom tea will burn away that belly fat (followed by 5 testimonials the author made up).

Well, in a way they do well to suggest that it takes more than just 1 secret trick to mold our gut into a washboard of steal.

All those ab exercises, that's a mixture of cardio and resistance training. Resistance and cardio training reduces body fat and increases metabolism. It doesn't have to be ab specific. Our abs don't grow or get that cut from doing a bunch of different exercises. Muscles like our butt, quads, chest, biceps - those grow. But abs? Not so much.

The fat burning tea contains caffeine. Caffeine reduces appetite and ups your heart rate a little bit. Result = burned fat. Anti-oxidants are a nice perk, but this stuff doesn't have something extra in it that you can't get from the grocery store. I just get green tea from TJ's.

But the big one we're after today:

CARBS.

At work I'm putting my boss through a workout and she laments some millimeter of fat on her waistline, "Omg carbs! Too many!" Really? No no no! Allow me to explain.

We can go about this two ways.

• Google scientific explanations, copy, paste, and paraphrase to try to just get more hub hits like these people I'm rallying against.
• Or report what worked and didn't worked when I applied these principles to myself.

How about a little of both?

*Edit 1/29/11 Hard way all the way.  Regurgitating what I learned from my books doesn't really do much for you as far as getting original information.  You can Google the chemistry, insulin, fat, polysaccharide, monosaccharide, glucose glycogen business and find 100's of articles offering the same information.  

We want to know what prompts the belief that carbs hinder our progress towards becoming lean and defined. The most difficult and deterring element with regards to carbohydrates isn't researching, it isn't selecting, it isn't eating, it isn't calorie counting.

It's preparing them. Enjoy the slide show and humor before we turn the serious button on again.

Sans big explanations, here's the skinny:

• All excess calories, regardless of their source whether it's protein (4 calories per gram), fat (9 calories per gram), carbs (4 calories per gram), and alcohol (7 calories per gram), turn into fat.
• Protein creates a feeling of satiety. When we feel sated, we eat less.  Eating less means we burn more calories than we consume.  That's one reason why protein diets work.
• Our body uses carbs for energy first. If we remove that, the theory goes something like our body has a hierarchy of using caloric sources to create energy begin with: then fat, then protein, then muscles, then our bones, then we die.
• Therefore, it seems getting rid of carbs would speed up getting rid of that fat!  I can see no way in which this plan could possibly fail.

Almost went scientific on you there. Sorry about that. Why do we need energy? Since this is about 6 pack abs, most of you will probably be doing some kind of exercise routine. Exercise nanny nags you to remember: never to compensate form in order to increase the quantity of or to increase difficulty of exercise!

This article here encourages a high protein, low carb diet. They also used ït's" incorrectly and my inner-nun does not approve.

Carb Dieting Low Has it's Benefits!"

Never mind the 100 grammar and spelling mistakes I make... Continuing!

http://hubpages.com/hub/Carb-Dieting-Low

Now, according to the ACE fitness manual and the NASM fitness manual, our bodies go right for the carbs during our workouts to create energy. Protein busies itself doing other important things and does not like to be agitated. As for fat, it's debatable whether or not the body turns on fat burning only after 20 minutes of exercise. I don't feel my body using fat when I exercise longer than 20 minutes. Plus, we don't really use fat anyway until we stop exercising. That's when we enter the ultimate "fat burning zone".

If you're going for a 6 pack, start a cardio and resistance training program. Full body. There's a hub article showing the difference between cardio and resistance training with regards to burning calories.

http://hubpages.com/hub/CardiovsStrengthTrainingWhichburnsmorefat

Well written. Final point in that one says that to burn more fat, do cardio instead of resistance training.

Some folks argue that resistance training works better because at rest, the more muscle mass on our bodies, the more calories we burn, the higher our metabolism, and the more we use fat as an energy source when sedentary.

I'll side with the American Diabetes Association. Do both cardio and resistance training for drastic results.

http://professional.diabetes.org/News_Display.aspx?CID=82955&TYP=9

And to supply energy during exercise, our body works best with carbs. Alternatively it can use protein whose primary role is to repair and support tissues, bones, hair, nails, etc. But like I said, protein's kind of busy, not exactly the perfect candidate for the job.

Not ideal, not one bit. We want to burn calories using the best source possible. We're going to use fat as our energy source the most when we rest, so I suggest supplying our body with the best energy source possible to do exercise. Just watch the calories, don't eat junk food, and burn more than you consume.

A well educated diabetic would be someone worth getting to know if you want to learn the ins and outs of carbohydrates. For now, you're stuck with me.  

Short Version: If you want 6 pack abs, avoid sweets and sodas.

Simple Carbohydrates aka Polysaccharides:

• Dangerous to our body, break down fast, and our body creates excess insulin.
• After the sugar rush, our body's excess insulin takes glucose already in our blood to convert into glycogen and fat for later use.
• Sugary, soda, juice pops, shiny wrapping, and sweeteners. They can usually be found in the kids isle of the grocery store or at the checkout counter.
• This is what your digestion might think to itself if you feed it simple carbs: "Crack? Crack? Is this crack? Crack! Hyper! Wow! Fun! Yes! THIS... IS...AWESO... Zzzzzzzzzzz."
• When they're gone, like bad relatives, they leave their crap everywhere. In this case, the liver just produces insulin without knowing when to stop. It's like "Holy... wow, ok, go go go go go go go go... Oh, hey, where'd you go? I still have all this insulin!" Now you're going to need to detox for a few days and rehydrate.

Complex Carbohydrates aka Monosaccharides:

• Time-release energy pill.  Think of them that way.  Just like protein, they create a feeling of satiety.
• Because they take longer to break down, our body can create appropriate amounts of insulin and allocate energy carefully.
• Look for them in the produce isle, farmer's market, and your neighbor's garden. That's the place to find most of these. You can Google them or look at the pictures I posted.
• If we personified our digestive system into a thinking organism,it would say to us when we feed it complex carbs, "These, these might take me a minute. Hold on. Let me plan this out because you're giving me a lot of useful information here... Oh wow this is good stuff. Let me give you some energy as I process this stuff!"

Forget about abs for one minute. Thinking requires us to use energy. If we don't feed ourselves properly, we will deprive our brain of glucose, the sugar that we use from complex carbohydrates. Complex carbs for our brain are like a timed-release thinking pill.

Who would have thought?  Our brains, our complex thinking machines, work best when we feed them complex carbohydrates.  Deprive them of those, and our memory, attention, and executive functions decline.  Basically, skipping healthy carbs dumbs us down.

It makes sense then why the Atkins diet, Southbeach diet, and other low carb diets seem idiotic. Optimum mental functioning requires complex carbohydrates. By omitting all carbs from our diet, our brains decline in functionality. During this state of mental impairment, the creators of these diets whom are completely deprived of any form of carbohydrates, made these genius plans for success...

And kidney failure.

And brain deadedness (is that even a word?  I must not be eating enough carbs).

Your abs are not at risk. In fact, you will be able to do

• more exercise which,
• creates more muscle tissue (provided you eat a balanced diet with protein),
• which raises your metabolism,
• which makes you burn more calories than you consume,
• which makes you lose fat,
• and as a consequence your abs will begin to show.

Our body stores fat in the same places which vary from person to person. Tummy, butt, thighs, etc., "hard to reach" areas aren't hard to reach, we're just doing it wrong. In order to reduce that fat, exercising those specific areas will NOT reduce fat in those specific areas.  It's going to convert any excess calories to fat regardless of the source.

To reduce fat, we must incorporate a full body exercise routine including cardiovascular, resistance training, and flexibility where we prioritize form above difficulty and quantity. Muscular hypertrophy is an altogether different form of resistance training. If it's something you're interested in, I recommend it only after a corrective series of exercises that establish a baseline of balance, stability, flexibility, and strength.

Consume 45%-65% of your number that could be greater than or less than a 2000 calorie diet.  The FDA said this so it must be true.

For those of you hyper-sensitive to sugars, even some complex carbohydrates are tricky. Check with your doctor and with your own body's feedback before committing to a change in your diet plan. The glycemic index can help you learn about which foods are more sugary than others. http://www.glycemicindex.com/

Everything we do points to 6 pack abs if we do it effectively.  At this point in the series, we can assume 6 pack abs to be synonymous with the meaning, "something very healthy we derive from a complicated, yet reasonable and thoughtful way of dieting and exercising."

Complex Carbohydrates - they're complicated.  Yet simple in the sense that to acquire most of them we can either pick them off a tree, barter with China and India for non-wheat grains, or dig them up from a vegetable garden.  That middle step might be the most complicated step in the process of acquiring complex carbohydrates.

I've noticed significant changes in my moods, my energy, and the way my body looks by changing my diet to a more natural balance of all aspects of nutrition.  Speaking of nutrition and over emphasizing, protein's coming up next.  Stay tuned!