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.
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Article comments
1 - Gautam Patel
Excellent blog! I particularly liked the last line about time's touch not being gentle or so easily reversed. That's one thing almost all these diet books have in common: they each have a strong undercurrent of fear. That may seem like an odd thing to say, but it's there -- perhaps even in just the odd line, but that's a dead giveaway (pun intended). This is a fear of aging, and of death, and I find it totally inexplicable. It's almost a clinic morbidity, a phobic state, and it makes people pathological devotees of one diet after another.
There's an exhausting sameness to these books and I'm starting to wonder about the audience. Does anyone go out and read them one after another, trying them all? Who are the Linda's and the Rosalyn's and the Marsha's who invariably fill the interstices with their "personal" experiences? I suspect they're probably entirely imaginary.
What none of these books tell you is the most obvious: cut out the junk food, exercise *regularly* (and that doesn't mean violent games of squash once a week) and just make sure your diet is something you can live with. None of these fad diets can give you that -- it's impossible to live forever on high-protein-high-fat-no-carb or vice-versa.
The historical evidence also doesn't support this kind of skewed eating. The point is to achieve permanent weight loss *if you have a clinical obesity condition*. Otherwise it may not be necessary, medically speaking. It's just that our society is now quickly turning body fat into a taboo, somewhere below incest and patricide. Our self-image is increasingly determined by our perception of others' perceptions of us rather than logic.
Most diet and health books also don't allow for human frailty. Everyone is bound to fall off the wagon once in a while. I mean, for how long can you resist that burger, fries and coke meal? I like Zinczenko's advice to allow yourself one off-day every week. Agatston (the South Beach diet, so far the most sensible of the lot) says something similar. That is probably the one thing you can grow old with -- gracefully.
2 - Amy W
While I agree with the last poster, the eating advice is really good in this book. For people who don't want to think about food groups, serving sizes, mess with recipes that take 30-60 minutes to cook let alone shop for: then this is the book to read. You get 12 foods (really groups of food, S for spinach includes all green veggies and W for whole grains - well, you get the point) with which all your meals should include at least 3 and your snacks 2.
It's hard to eat an unhealthy meal when you are making sure your groups are covered. And yes, he is a proponent of eating 1 meal a week of a cheeseburger, fries, and a coke. But, after reading about what the high fructose corn syrup in the coke and the trans fat in the fries do to your body, you may just stick with a cheeseburger.
3 - Dr. G DDS
David zinczenko is king!