Who doesn't want a flat, wash board stomach? A "six-pack" as they say. It's a hallmark of youth. Something we enjoy before time and gravity work their mischief on our bodies. No one's immune. The little pot belly is as much a hallmark of age as gray hair and wrinkles. But David Zinczenko, editor-in-chief of Men'sHealth magazine has a solution - the Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep you Lean for Life. Or maybe it's the solution of his co-writer, Ted Spiker, it's hard to tell. They both get credit for writing it, but there are a lot of personal singular pronouns sprinkled throughout the book. At any rate, the solution is this: Fat is a slug. Muscle is a furnace. Increase your muscle mass and you'll burn more calories, thus losing weight and keeping it off - especially in that fat-hording belly area.

The writing is engaging and often witty (Zinczenko? Spiker?). Sentences such as "Commercial bread baking has followed the same path as Michael Jackson - the whiter it gets, the less wholesome it becomes" and "Like the mother-in-law who tries to tell you how to raise your kids, fructose screws up a system that was working perfectly fine without it." sprinkle the prose, making what has the potential to be a very dull subject almost interesting. Although no references are listed, many are mentioned to bolster the authors' nutritional claims, making it, unfortunately, impossible to check up on them.

The basics of the diet are sound: eating frequent, small meals each day rather than three large meals (the better to keep the munchies at bay), avoiding the empty calories of alcohol, and allowing yourself one diet-free day each week. The rest of the diet is on shakier ground - relegating foods to "power" groups, each of which is supposed to give you certain health benefits - building muscles, promoting weight loss, strengthening bone, fighting cancer, etc. While certain foods certainly enjoy the reputation of doing these things, their influence is small. No one should count on any one type of food to save them from pathology. The other centerpiece of the diet is the ingestion of something called "smoothies," a blended drink of yogurt, peanut butter, whey, and whatever else you can think of to give it some sort of flavor (berries, bananas, etc.) The authors say they're delicious. I'll take their word for it. Do they work? They probably do provide a certain sense of fullness that helps the dieter stick with their regimen - kind of like a homemade Slimfast.

But, of course, if a true six-pack abdomen is what you're looking for, diet alone won't do it. You need to exercise those muscles to make them firm and strong, and the Abs Diet has no shortage of exercises for strengthening and tightening those abdominal muscles. In fact, exercise is as key to the program as diet. And rightly so. The program calls for some sort of exercise daily, which is a sensible approach to losing weight and keeping it off.

Will the diet give you a six pack in six weeks, as one of its opening chapters claims? Will it increase your "staying power"? Maybe. But it's highly doubtful that the regimen, or any regimen, will turn this into this. Time's touch is not a gentle one, nor one so easily reversed.