PUBLISHED 12/29/2005
Part 2: Your Abs Diet
To get great abs you need to lose body fat while maintaining your lean muscle mass. That means consuming just enough calories to nourish your muscles without expanding your waistline. To do that, imagine you've already achieved a lean body, and your goal now is to keep it. If you currently weigh 160 pounds, but you'd like to drop 10 pounds, you should eat enough calories each day (about 2,400 for an active person) to sustain 150 pounds of body weight. Because it takes just two calories to sustain a pound of body fat for one day, you just need to trim two calories a day for every pound of excess body fat you're now carrying (or 20 calories daily to go from 160 to 150).
Easy, yes. Fast, no. By following this formula you'll eventually lose 10 pounds of body fat, but it could take more than two years. To speed up the rate of return, you'll need to cut more calories. Not too many, or you'll begin to deplete your muscle carbohydrate stores and compromise your postworkout recovery. But with the strategies on the following page, you can trim anywhere from 100 to 700 calories per day without hurting your running or constantly listening to your stomach growl?and see results in three months. And yes, chocolate is involved.
