WHY THE ABS DIET? AND WHY NOW?

EARLIER IN THIS BOOK, I OUTLINED
half a dozen ways the Abs
Diet will improve your life.
And I told you about the
unique and scientifically
proven promise of the Abs Diet, how it can strip off up to
20 pounds of fat in 6 weeks—starting with your belly.
But the next steps are up to you.
If you’re simply not interested in improving your
life—if the idea of becoming a slimmer, fitter, healthier,
pain-free, more successful, more sexually vital person
doesn’t appeal to you—then close this book right now,
and return it. (After you wipe off the Cheetos grease
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stains, of course.) If you’re not interested in achieving the greatest
possible results with the least possible effort, this book is not
for you.
But if you do want to make a change—one you can see, one you
can feel, one that will last a lifetime—then this book is for you.
The only one for you.
The Abs Diet is a simple plan built around 12 nutrient-packed
foods that, when moved to the head of your dietary table, will give
you all the vitamins, minerals, and fiber you need for optimum
health while triggering muscle growth and firing up your body’s
natural fat burners. I’ll tell you more about these foods in an upcoming
chapter, but here’s a quick overview. (Tell me this isn’t a
meal plan you can stick to!)
Almonds and other nuts
Beans and legumes
Spinach and other green vegetables
Dairy (fat-free or low-fat milk, yogurt, cheese)
Instant oatmeal (unsweetened, unflavored)
Eggs
Turkey and other lean meats
Peanut butter
Olive oil
Whole-grain breads and cereals
Extra-protein (whey) powder
Raspberries and other berries
12!
I’ve chosen these foods both for their nutritional content and
for their simplicity. See, every day, new diet books and weightloss
advice shuffle across my desk. (In fact, if you plug “diet” in
24 T H E A B S D I E T
to Amazon.com’s search engine, you’ll turn up more than 80,000
titles.) Some of these diet schemes are a little wacky: grapefruit
diets, cabbage soup diets, cottage cheese diets, raw-egg-and-Slim-
Jim diets. Some of them sound good—low-fat diets, low-carb
diets, low-salt diets. But most of them have one thing in common:
They are actually designed to make you fail in the long run.
That’s because even the diet plans that are based on sound
principles sometimes fail to acknowledge the realities of life—that
you’re too busy to whip up intricate meals like mango-flavored
shrimp kebabs. That you enjoy food too much to swear off pasta
and potatoes all the time. That eating is supposed to be a pleasure,
not a chore. That’s why I based the Abs Diet on common foods that
are easy to prepare and enjoy. The way I see it, most other diet
plans are too complicated and invite failure in three major ways.
1. They reduce calories too severely. With a strict—or
drastic—calorie reduction, you may lose weight at first,
but you’re left hungry. When you’re hungry, you’ve increased
the chances that you’ll gorge at some point during
the day. When you gorge, you feel as if you failed, then feel
guilty for failing, then drop off the plan and resume your
cold-pizza-for-breakfast habits. With the Abs Diet, however,
you’ll never go hungry—in fact, you’ll find yourself
eating much more often than you do now: six times a day!
2. They restrict too many foods. It would be easy to
build a plan that didn’t include cheeseburgers, pizza, or
beer. But if I did that, you’d ditch the plan on the first
Monday night of football season. Even though changing
your eating habits is a fundamental part of this program, I
think there’s a greater chance you’ll stick to the plan if you
don’t have to give up everything you like. It’s normal to
have steaks with clients, to have hot dogs at a barbecue, to
share a pitcher of beer after work. If you deprive yourself
W H Y T H E A B S D I E T ? A N D W H Y N O W ? 25
of every food that tastes good, there’s not much incentive
for even the most motivated person to stick to the plan for
longer than a few weeks. The Abs Diet is about eating the
foods you enjoy—and indulging yourself when need be.
3. They don’t take into account lifestyle. If we all had
a chef to prepare our meals—or even more than a few
minutes to do it ourselves—losing weight would be much
simpler. But when was the last time you had 2 hours to
prepare a meal? We’re all busy. We eat in restaurants. We
order in. We hit drive-throughs. We wish we had time to
tally fat-gram totals, or measure every ounce of food, or
prepare elaborate good-for-you dishes. But the reality is
that most of us won’t, no matter how much weight we
need to lose. We have commitments to jobs and families,
and we spend so much time doing everything from commuting
to fixing our home that a mango-shrimp masterpiece
is what slips down on our priority list. The Abs Diet
is what you need: a low-maintenance program, with lowmaintenance
foods and even lower-maintenance recipes.
Let’s take a look at a handful of today’s most popular diets, and
I’ll show you why many of them are designed to offer short-term
weight loss and long-term weight gain.