Ab exercises are important to develop your abdominal muscles but keep in mind that your number one priority is to lose belly fat so that your abs can show. You can read my post with more tips and tricks on how to lose weight and how to get six pack abs.

Losing fat is doable for everyone if you use the right diet, exercise in moderation and get enough sleep and water. Having said that, lets talk about ab exercises!

If you go to the gym regularly you already have well developed abs but they are not showing yet. Manny exercises that you do in the gym develop your abs because these muscles are used to stabilize your torso. Squats, dead lifts and standing exercises are all great for the abs.

Remember that doing hundreds of crunches to define your abs is a myth. You can’t lose localized fat with specific exercises – fat is lost progressively throughout your body and it does not burn of or melt near the muscles that you are working on with high reps.

Belly fat is also the most stubborn fat to lose and will be the last to go. To know more about this you can read the post on how to lose belly fat.

Crunches

Crunches are very popular and they are one of the best ab exercises. I will give you some tips on how to do crunches properly so you get the best results from your workout:

• Lie down and put your hand on your chest or behind your head for a little bit more resistance. When you put your arms behind your head you shouldn’t pull on your head… the arms are there to give you some more weight and not to forcefully bend your neck.
• Then you have to elevate your shoulders from the floor so you feel your abs contracting. Typically people say you have to bend to bring your head towards your knees but I find it better to keep looking at the ceiling and not bending your neck. You will feel more burn in your abs and you won’t be cheating unintentionally with your arms and making a big curvature.
• When you reach full contraction you should hold it for a second before you go back down.
• You should not turn it into a sit up because it will work your hips and stress your back muscles.

The Mediterranean diet is also called the Cretan diet and is one of the best diets that people can follow for leading a healthy and long life.

You will learn why the Cretan diet can prolong life, increase quality of life and diminish chances of cancer and heart disease.

First of all there is a difference between the term Mediterranean diet and Cretan diet. A Mediterranean diet can be from the South and Southeast of Europe (Spain, France, Italy, Corsica, Croatia , Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus) and the North of Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria).

The Mediterranean diet is loosely defined as the diet of the people in the Mediterranean countries where they cultivated olive oil a few hundred years ago.

The term Mediterranean diet has become generalized and this has lead to the creation of many different versions of the diet to suit our modern lifestyle and the availability of many processed foods. In this article I will talk about the real Mediterranean and Cretan diet. The Cretan diet is the one that makes people live much longer without disease… let’s discover why!

The Cretan and Mediterranean diets have become known worldwide because a study showed that people on this diet outlived all other groups from all over the world. It was surprising that the people of Crete had the lowest incidence of cancer and heart disease and that the island was linked to good health and longevity. This test took more than 30 years when all the test subjects from all over the world were dead, 50% of the subjects from Crete were still alive! Crazy isn’t it?

The Cretan diet consists of foods that are produced in the island of Crete. When this research was done all the agriculture in Crete was organic and so were the foods. Food processing was kept to a minimum and there were no unhealthy processed foods with a refined sugar or fats. This paragraph sums it all up. The Cretan diet is based on natural and organic foods, encourages minimal food processing, no junk food, no refined grains or sugars.

If you apply these principles to any diet, you will become healthier and live longer. These factors are the foundation to living disease free and with the best health possible. So lets talk more about the principles of the Mediterranean diet and why it is healthy for most people.

Organic Food

When you eat fresh and organic food you will not be putting the toxins from pesticides and preservatives in your body. Eating the food of the season that is locally grown and avoiding processed foods will make you eat healthier than 95% of the population.

Your immune system will be stronger and you will feel more energetic and in a better mood.

Normal Portions

Eat healthy and organic food and you will be satisfied with less food. One of the reasons that people eat so much is because they eat foods full of sugar, fat, emptycarbs and salt. When you ingest these foods they fill you up but an hour later you are hungry for more. Why? Because your body did not get the nutrients that it was expecting.

Nowadays there are many foods that are so processed that people are malnourished even after eating big servings. The body needs real food with real micro nutrients, minerals and trace minerals. With empty foods you can’t stay healthy!

Healthy Fats

The Mediterranean diet doesn’t make you quit using fats. Fats are essential for good healthy because they help you metabolize nutrients that are essential for your body. There is a lot of fatty food available nowadays… but you need to be eating the right types of fats.

Mono-saturated and poly-saturated Omega 3 fats are essential for a healthy diet. The fats you should avoid are trans fats and other hydrogenated fats. These increase the risk of cancer and heart disease.

Olive Oil

The trademark of the Mediterranean diet is olive oil. It is used on almost everything and its the main fat in this diet. If you replace all butter, margarine and other fats with olive oil, you will feel much better.

Olive oil is a healthy fat and will give you some benefits. By replacing other bad fats with olive oil you will ingest less unhealthy fats.

Omega 3 Fats

When you eat a lot of fatty fish like sardines, salmon, trout and tuna and get fat from plant sources you ingest natural omega 3 fatty acids.

These nutrients have many positive effects on your body and they also improve your concentration and mental well being.

Whole Grains

Eating whole foods is always healthier than refined flours. Many nutrients are in the grains peel and all this is taken away in the refined flours. Nowadays the grains are refined to such a small powder that absorption of the nutrients is different causing constipation and other bowel problems.

Refined grains are stripped of nutrients and transformed into empty calories that make you gain fat. Remember that each time you eat pizza, bread and pasta you are eating refined grains.

Red Wine

The Mediterranean diet recommends you drink a glass or two of red wine a day. Note that this is red wine and not white wine. Red wine has some anti oxidants that help against heart disease.

Anti oxidants like transresveratrol and oligomeric proanthocyanidin help dilute the blood and aid blood circulation. This prevents the formation of blood clots and subsequent strokes.

White wine doesn’t have these positive effects and is to be avoided. I don’t endorse alcohol consumption and think it is bad for the body. Drinking some red wine will do you more good than harm especially if you are following the whole Mediterranean diet.

Mediterranean Diet Tips

• Olive oil is the main fat and you should replace all other fats, oils, butter and margarine with it.
• Eat vegetables, grains, nuts, beans and seeds.
• Eat fresh organic fruit as a desert. Don’t eat processed foods because they contain a lot of sugar and saturated fat.
• Eat minimally processed food and don’t overcook your food. Cooking food can destroy its nutrients so don’t overcook until the meat is charred “to kill the germs”. No need for that. The more processed the food is the more sugar, saturated fat, salt, preservatives, color and flavor agents it contains. When eating organic food you don’t have to worry about this.
• Eat moderate amounts of organic cheese and organic yogurt. You can learn how to make yogurt easily if you want to!
• Drink water. Don’t drink sodas, sugared juices or energy drinks. Drink water. Check out he article on Are you Dehydrated to know how much water you should drink.
• Drink a glass or two of red wine per day with meals. This is optional and not mandatory.
• Eat fish 3 times a week, poultry 2 times a week and red meat 2 times a month. You can eat up to 7 eggs a week. Remember that everything should be organic and serving sizes vary on muscular development and gender. Men eat more than women.
• Eat organic food. Most specialists seem to forget that the people on the Mediterranean diet have a disease free live because they don’t eat processed food. When you eat industrialized food grown with pesticides, herbicides, anabolic steroids and antibiotics and stored in plastic or cans with preservatives, color agents, synthetic aromas and flavor agents… You think that junk gets into you after you eat the animal or the vegetable? Well… maybe (that’s me being sarcastic). Of course those toxins get into your body.
• Physical activity. Walk, go run or work in your garden.

The people that followed the Mediterranean diet lived so long because they were eating healthy and most of them had enough exercise by walking and working in their vegetable gardens.

Living a stress free life, eating organic food while exercising moderately are the 3 components for a healthy life. To know more about a healthy diet and exercise you can read the articles on how to get a six pack, how to lose belly fat and how to lose weight!

Exercises to lose belly fat are probably the number one myth in the fitness world. The fact is that ab exercises don’t make you lose belly fat. Exercises can only stimulate your muscle to growth. What makes you lose belly fat is doing exercise in general and the more calories you burn the more fat you will burn.

Doing ab crunches may be hard but it is an exercise that doesn’t burn a lot of calories, like most exercises that isolate just one muscle group.

The best type of exercise to do if you want o lose belly fat is to start weight training. Now I know what you are thinking… if you are a girl its “I don’t want to look like a bodybuilder and have a man’s voice!” and if you are a guy you are thinking “I don’t want to look like a bodybuilder, I just wanna look lean!“.

Don’t worry boys and girls, muscle is not that easy to grow and you only get too much muscle if you do a massive amount of anabolic steroids. Losing fat is also not easy and it doesn’t happen by magic or with magic pills.

The most important thing is to have the right mindset for six pack abs and be healthy. For this you need to realize that what most people tell you about losing weight is false. This goes for what your gym buddies say and this goes for what supplement companies say. Corporate America molds people into the mindset that you have to buy their products… over and over again. They don’t really have an interest in you getting healthier or thinner, they prefer repeat customers that come back and buy their products over and over with their hard earned cash.

You need to go past the marketing BS and start educating yourself about how to get healthy… and you will be surprised that you don’t need supplements to be healthy or look good.

Weight Training to Lose Belly Fat

Like I was saying, the best way to lose belly fat and other fat is to do weight training. Why weight training? What about cardio?

Cardio burns a little more calories during the workout, but it just accelerates your metabolism for just 2 hours after the workout. Weight lifting keeps your metabolic rate up for 48 to 72 hours after the workout. This means that after you do a good weight training workout you will be burning calories while you sleep, while you sit and while you go about your day. This goes on from 48 to 72 hours after the workout and you end up getting much more calories burnt that when you are running on the treadmill for an hour and a half 4 times a week.

Another interesting thing is that when you do a real weight training workout you can burn as more calories than the average person burns off in acardio session.

Another advantage of training with weights is that you will gain some muscle. That extra muscle will make you metabolic rate go up, because muscle requires calories to be maintained.

Lets get something strait: Muscle and fat don’t grow by themselves. Muscle grows when you exercise correctly and eat healthy. Fat grows when you eat junk and don’t exercise.

The myth of doing exercises to lose belly fat is related to the myth of losing localized fat with specific exercises. This is impossible and does not exist.

The body stores fat in its own way, when you gain fat it is stored all around your body; around your mid section, legs, buttocks, neck, arms, etc. Men get fatter around the midsection and women get more fat on the hips. The bad news for all the people that want to know how to lose weight and fat is that the belly flab is the last fat to go and it is the most stubborn one.

I have talked about how to get a six pack and how to lose belly fat in other articles and there you can read some more information on the subject.

What Exercises to Lose Fat?

The best exercises to increase your metabolic rate are compound exercises. Compound exercises are the ones that use more than one group of muscles at the same time, these will make breathing like you are doingcardio.

Manny people have the idea that they need to do thousands of crunches to have good abs. While crunches are good to develop the ab muscles they are not going to take care of the fat that is hiding your abs. Most people already have developed abs under the fat layer, and if you have been doing compound exercises then you have well developed abs underneath your fat for sure!

The cabbage soup diet is one of the most well know fad diets… some people even say that it’s not a fad diet because its been around for so long. So lets examine the cabbage soup diet and figure out its pros and cons and possible side effects.

It is said that you can lose up 10 pounds in 1 week with this low calorie diet… First of all lets hype things down a little bit. It is physically impossible to lose 10 lbs of fat in 2 weeks, and in one week its even more ridiculous. The only way you will lose that much weight is with an abdominoplasty or a heavy big liposuction. The human body can burn up to 2 pounds of fat per week if everything from diet to exercise is done in the right way.

It is however possible to lose weight in other ways. When you start such low calorie diets you body will enter in a catabolic state, this means that you are burning up more calories than you are ingesting and your body needs to go into its reserves. The human body can extract energy from food, muscles and fat deposits.

Lose 10 pounds in 7 days?

I think that 10 pounds in 7 days is possible and I will describe that “best case” scenario now.

Imagine Jane, she is 32 years old, 5’5, and she weight in at 170 pounds. In her opinion Jane eats a relatively healthy diet, she doesn’t eat a lot of fast food, eats some vegetables, drinks soda and juice here and there, eats pasta and pizza a few times a week and she goes to the toilet about 3 to 4 times a week.

Se wants to know how to lose weight and finds the cabbage soup diet on the internet and gives it a try. What she doesn’t know is that she his constipated and has a bowel inflammation like manny of the people. Sometimes she feels a little bit bloated and constipated. This is very normal for people that have an average American diet, especially in women because they have much more sensitive digestive systems. The diet she described doesn’t seem so bad for American standards but it’s a clinical fact that those factors put together lead to constipation and an inflamed bowel because of all the excess sugar and refined flours she consumes. This is made worse because she drinks soda and sugared drinks instead of flat water. If she drank alcohol it would be even worse.

So when she gets on the cabbage soup diet (which many dietitians and doctors say is a suicide mission) she is actually eating something that her bowels find easier to digest than the normal crap she eats, although it is very low calories and nutrient deficient.

The cabbage soup diet says she can eat as much fruits and vegetables as she wants, so she is hungry every day and stuffs that soup in until she is totally full. The cabbage soup diet also says that it is imperative to drink a lot of water and hydrate because it will help to flush out toxins.

Until now everything is going great because she is eating less calories, she is drinking more water and staying hydrated, she is eating vegetables instead of the usual junk food or refined flour foods she normally consumes every day. This is giving her digestive system a chance to play catch up and clean the bowels. She then goes to the toilet every day and has normal bowel movements everyday. Because her bowels are cleaned up the bowel inflammation is diminishing. Do you see where the weight loss is coming from?

Because she poops everyday like a healthy person should she is “dumping” off some serious weight. Because her digestion was normalized the bowel is not inflamed anymore and the water and liquid retention of the inflammation also goes away… that is some more pounds right there. Normal bowel movements and no bowel inflammation make her lose a lot of weight and make her feel better.

She is so pumped up because she is doing the diet and goes walking 15 to 30 minutes a day, which helps her to lose some fat also.

If you put these factors together it may be possible to lose 10 pounds in 7 days… but you need a seriously inflamed bowel for that. Losing 5 or 6 pounds with this diet is very doable, depending on your current diet.

Cabbage Soup Diet vs. American Diet

The weight loss results of the cabbage soup diet are inversely proportional to the quality of your day to day diet. If you know you have an unhealthy diet then the cabbage soup diet won’t do you much harm because it is a week long detox and colon cleanse diet. The cabbage soup diet instructs you to drink a lot of water and avoid sodas and refined carbs it will actually do you some good because you won’t be ingesting your usual poisons.

The cabbage soup diet will help you clean your bowels out and detox your body and if you think you need it… then your usual diet is not good and you should think about adapting your lifestyle to be healthier.

If you are already pretty healthy and just want to lose a few pounds the cabbage soup diet is not a good choice. When on such low calorie diets with deficient nutrition it is not a good idea to do moderate or heavy exercise because you will be going in a catabolic state and you body will literally feed on its own muscle. More than feeding on its own muscle you might be deficient in some minerals and vitamins and that is not good for your health.

A colon cleanse or a detox diet are still recommended but I would never recommend you the cabbage soup diet. To know a little more about this you can read the articles on the detox diet and on a healthy diet.

Nowadays detoxifying your body is more important than ever! We eat a high quantity of processed foods with sugar and hydrogenated fats… and most of the food is grown with pesticides, herbicides, hormones and antibiotics and when it is processed its filled with color agents and preservatives to lengthen the shelf life.

When we eat these foods all these toxins end up in our body. So what detox diet should we follow?

In the long term these toxins are what cause our immune system to weaken and collapse to diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. More common symptoms are feeling bloated, tired, constipation, frequent colds, sore throat, etc.

90% of all diseases start in the gut.

Knowing how to detox your body naturally will help clean out all these waste materials that you ingested and boost your immune system by cleaning your gut and other organs of their toxin overload.

Even when we do an effort to eat healthy food it can be hard to find if you have a busy lifestyle or travel. It certainly costs more to eat healthy than to go toMacDonalds.

To detox you have to avoid eating junk food and sugared or caffeinated drinks.

Drinking Water to Detox

The most important thing to detox your body is drinking enough water. As I already mentioned in the article on dehydration, water is important for your well being and health. Drinking clean water detoxifies your body like nothing else. It is so beneficial because you are replacing your soda and coffee with water. Removing a big source of toxins like sugared drinks, coffee, tea, alcoholic beverages will greatly increase your health and vitality.

Caffeinated and sugared drinks like soda and juices are non-foods. Non-foods require more nutrients than they contain, so that your body can process them… They steal the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that your body can use for other things like keeping your immune system strong and fight diseases.

Medical tests have shown that when people drink less water their addictions are augmented (addictions of sugar, fats, alcohol, tobacco, medication and recreational drugs). So if you drink enough water you will do yourself a favor, because it will make you healthier and it will make it easier to change your diet and lifestyle for six pack abs.

If I had to give you one piece of advice to feel better, lose weight, lose belly fat, feel more energetic, detox, solve digestive problems, get more mental clarity and concentration it would be to drink enough water.

Detox Diet and Six Pack Abs

A detox diet can accelerate your journey to getting a good looking six pack. Most people walk around with inflamed guts or constipation… or both. The obvious side effect is that your belly looks bigger because it is inflamed and because you have a bunch of undigested food lodged in your intestines.

From the moment that you stop taxing your digestive system with toxins, your body starts using its resources to continue detoxing your body and cleaning the whole mess up. This leads to less undigested food in your digestive system and it doesn’t get inflamed. This also leads to a healthy digestive system without constipation.

In reality you body doesn’t start detoxing. Your body is always detoxing to its maximum potential. The problem is that it can’t keep up with all the sugar, hydrogenated fats, preservatives, antibiotics, steroids and other trash that is in the industrialized food that you eat.

How to Lose 10 Pounds in 2 Weeks

I have seen women loosing 10 pounds in 2 weeks because they started eating right. This looks like its an ad for a weight loss product… how is this possible? First of all they don’t really lose weight, they are lose water weight.

Second… most women are constipated. When you start eating right and actually start going to the toilet regularly… those things add up to some weight. When they start evacuating their bowel the capillary beds start tightening up and the gut is less and less inflamed. When the bowel inflammation goes away the water retention in the intestine tissues has disappeared and that is a few extra pounds that are lost.

All this weight loss is due to defecation and water retention that goes away because the body starts functioning like its supposed to!

This happens mostly with women, because women are much more sensitive to constipation and bowel inflammation.

Healthy Diet and Exercise Response

If you don’t feel good and have digestive or health problems you should not start to do heavy exercise. Manny people go to the gym to get fit and spend an hour on the treadmill or stepping machine.

Cardiovascular exercise puts an enormous strain on your body and if you have digestive problems and are not eating healthy you are doing more damage than good.

Detox Diet or Untoxic Lifestyle?

Doing a special detox diet now and then is a good thing and it is a great start for a healthier life. Doing these exceptional efforts once in a while is not going to give you the quality of life and well being that you are looking for. If you want to live disease free, look better, age gracefully and save on doctor visits you need to start adapting your lifestyle.

So to sum up, these are the things you should do to detoxify and keep the toxin intake to a minimum:

• Drink a lot of water. The skin is the largest organ of excretion of the body. If the liver and kidneys can’t handle the toxic load your skin will show you. Zits come from the inside and they are nothing but toxins that couldn’t leave the body through the kidneys and urine or through the bowels and fecal material. If you look at the people that are putting these expensive acne treatments on their face you will see that almost every one of them is constipated and has a poor diet. If you start eating right and clear up your food allergies your skin can clear up like its magic. The problem is coming from the inside, not the outside.
• Don’t drink sodas and other artificial drinks, this includes sugar “juices”. They overload you bodies pathways of detoxification, dehydrate you and clog your body up. Caffeine is a dehydrating substance, when you drink a lot of sugar your body has to suck the water out of your digestive system and muscles to be able to break it down. The combination of sugar and caffeinated drinks is highly addictive so if you drop those you get a double whammy of good results!
• Get your digestive system working properly. Getting your digestion working normally is essential to keeping the body clean and healthy. If you have digestive problems your liver will be overloaded and you will not be able to detox at a normal rate.
• Know your food intolerances. You need to go to access what kind of food intolerances you have because they inflame your bowels and don’t allow your digestive system to work properly.
• Stay away form deep fried foods. Most of these fats and oils are bad for you.
• Prescription drugs are a major cause of toxification. When you apply all the principles for a healthier life you will start seeing results and can start using less prescription drugs.

Once you are over the sugar and caffeine cravings it will all be very easy. You will feel better, your body will work like its supposed to and you will wonder why you didn’t do it before. To know more on how to get a six pack and how to lose belly fat check out the other articles on that! I hope you enjoyed this articles and if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

If you want to lose weight, get a six pack and feel healthy you have to use everything to your advantage, from eating healthy to exercise and something that most people forget is to sleep enough.

I did some research and found some studies that show a connection between lack of sleep and obesity. So why does low quantity and quality of sleep affect your weight?

Sleep Hormones and Weight

What researches concluded is that not sleeping enough or having a poor quality sleep affects 2 key hormones that regulate your appetite. These two hormones are Leptin and Grehlin and they control your appetite, therefore influencing your weight gain or weight loss.

The hormone Grehlin increases your appetite and hunger. Leptin does the opposite, it calms and decreases your appetite.

Chronic lack of sleep or increases the levels of Grehlin and decreases the amount of Leptin. This makes your appetite increase and you get more cravings that are hard to handle. The lack of sleep increases appetite and is one of the factors that increases weight gain and obesity.

Keep in mind that poor quality sleep can be linked to other factors that also increase weight like medication, stress, eating unhealthy, irritability, lack of energy, etc. When more than one of these factors work against you they can be responsible for starting a downward spiral to more severe health problems and not only obesity.

Imagine someone that doesn’t sleep enough, takes medication, eats unhealthy, is dehydrated and feels insecure about their appearance. This persons appetite is augmented by the lack of sleep and the dehydration. Dehydration also increases the desire to eat empty foods and empty calories. Because that person doesn’t eat what the body needs he or she always feels hungry a short time after eating some foods with no nutrition.

Because of all the sugar and lack of water, digestive problems develop which give more stress and make it even harder to sleep… See where this is going? Its a downward spiral, from bad to worse.

Normalizing sleep patterns and making sure that you sleep long enough will make it easier to lose weight because you can control your cravings better. Those cravings for sugar and fat that seem uncontrollable can be weakened by sleeping better. When you feel well rested your immune system and hormonal levels are kept under control because it is during the night that these systems are restored and recharged.

Paul Check has a system called The Last 4 Doctors you Will Ever Need. The four doctors are: Dr. Quiet, Dr. Diet, Dr. Movement and Dr. Happiness. Dr. Quiet, which is sleep and introspection (meditation and so on) is the first part you need to get working on. This has more benefits that normalizing your Leptin and Grehlin levels and controlling your appetite. When you are well rested you can handle more stress and problems, your immunity is stronger and you feel much better. This leads to more brain power and motivation to achieve your goals, from getting healthy to pursuing your other dreams.

How to Sleep Better

Here are some tips to sleep better:

• Don’t consume caffeine, alcohol or nicotine in the evening. These substances will interfere with your healthy sleep pattern and sleep quality.
• Do relaxing things in the evening; read a book and listen to calm music. Do not do stressful things like trying to solve your problems, pay bills or any other things that make you worry.
• If you exercise or eat, do it at least 3 hours before you go to sleep. Digestion and exercise elevate your body temperature and make you go to the toilet, which will disrupt your sleep pattern.
• Dim the lights and wind down in a silent and calm environment. Setting the mood to sleep is very important to be able to fall asleep fast.

There are many diets and tips on how to lose weight and how to get a six pack, some of them don’t work but many do. The biggest problem that people face when getting fit is lack of motivation and quitting. The most important thing in weight loss is the mindset because it will make you hang on and follow a healthy eating plan, do your exercises and rest enough. Having a healthy sleeping pattern is crucial because it will diminish the “uncontrollable cravings” that some people have and can’t go up against.

Enough good sleep will give you mental clarity, less stress, more endurance, stronger immunity and a normal appetite. It will directly influence your mindset and motivation and that is why it is so important for your health and fitness! I hope you found this article helpful and if you have any comments or questions don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

There are tens of thousands of books on healthy diets and weight loss diets and every year there are more books coming out. What does this mean? Well it means that there is a lot of misinformation about the subject and most people don’t know what the hell they are talking about!

At any given moment there are always men and women on some diet… now ask yourself this question: did that person get results? Of 10 people you know that went on a diet, how many lost weight and kept it off? One in ten? Maybe even less! If you are wondering what is right in the world of dieting and are jumping from one diet to the other with no results and no quality of life then it is time to get this handled.

There are many popular diets… Atkins diet, zone diet, south beach diet, macrobiotic diet, Pritkin diet, vegetarian diet, raw food diet, Mediterranean diet, blood type diet… and the king of them all: the low fat and high carbs diet.

With so many literature on the subject and such poor results world wide… are these authors all stupid? Does nothing work? Do they all work?

The answer to that is simple: All the diets work… but you have to chose the right one.

Do you think an Irishman, a Mexican, a Spaniard, a Moroccan, a Chinese, an Eskimo, an African and an Indian all have the same nutritional requirements? Do they all have the same metabolism? No they don’t. Over hundreds of thousands of years people have evolved in order to adapt to their environment and that has changed their nutritional requirements. This is called biochemical individuality.

There is no healthy diet that fits everyone. The nutrition requirements that you need to feel your best and have a disease free life are as individual as your personality!

Metabolic Typing Diet

This is called metabolic typing and it was researched by a man called Dr. Weston A. Price. For more than a decade he travelled through the whole world looking for the healthiest people and indigenous societies and he then compared the effects of the modern white man’s diet to their traditional diets.

He looked for siblings and in some cases twins, where one of them had a traditional diet and another one a modern diet. This research showed the changes that can occur in one generation of an unhealthy diet.

These are some of the mysteries that can be solved by having the right diet for each person:

• Have you ever wondered why a friend of yours tried a new diet and had great results. He or she lost weight and had energy and vitality… but when you tried the diet you felt like crap and you were even gaining weight?
• Why do some people always feel tired and have a lack of energy when they are eating healthy and sleeping enough?
• Why can’t some people control cholesterol levels with a low fat diet? Instead of lowering their cholesterol it goes up? Why?
• Some people eat the most high quality organic foods that money can buy, take the most expensive supplements, sleep enough and do exercise but don’t see any results?
• Why do some people never get colds, sore throats, the flu or other diseases and why do others have such a weak immune system?

Different people react to diets differently because everyone needs to eat food that matches their own genetic requirements to achieve optimal health. Optimal health means being disease free, not being overweight and feeling and looking great.

There are many factors that dictate each person’s dietary requirements and the most important is your ancestral heritage. Different peoples have developed different adaptation systems according to their habitats and type of lifestyle. This was dictated by the available foods, climate and geography.

For example: people that live close to the equator have a diet with more vegetables and less proteins and fats because they have fruits and vegetable foods available all year round and they don’t have big game to hunt.

On the other hand, when you got cold regions people have relied more on animal protein and fat. This is because that was the main food source available when everything is full of snow.

Being Healthy, Loosing Weight Getting a Six Pack

Different people have different nutritional requirements and when you find your own diet you will feel better, have more energy and be sick less. People have different metabolism types and they react in different ways to the same foods. That is what biochemical individuality is all about.

When you find your balance you will find it much easier to lose weight and get a six pack. I hope you enjoyed this article and that you made some sense of why there are so many contradictory theories in the diet and weight loss world. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Belly fat is one of the most frustrating things when you are trying to lose weight… it seems like progress is always so slow and the fat is so stubborn!

Today I want to talk to you on how to lose belly fat so that you can improve you appearance and start working on that new and healthy look.

There is no natural way to lose belly fat fast… and there are no localized exercises to lose belly fat, love handles or any fat in a specific location. The human body as a natural way of storing and burning fat and you can’t decide which fat reserves you target when you want to loose weight. You loose fat gradually over all your body and no exercises can impact that. Exercise helps you develop muscles and burn calories.

The only way to remove fat quickly is through plastic surgery, with a tummy tuck, a liposuction or a non invasive liposuction… and I don’t recommend that!

Going crazy on the treadmill and doing weighted crunches until you are dizzy also does not help! You have other things to do first!

You want to avoid thinking too much about loosing belly fat! Instead of thinking about the results invest as much time as you can learning how to eat healthy, how to detox you body and start doing some light exercise to feel better. To lose belly fat and get a six pack you have no other choice than adopting a healthy lifestyle. This will make you feel more energetic, healthy and you will lose weight naturally.

Do not believe the celebrity diets and the catch lines of weight loss infomercials. All that crap is hyped up and false, it is just used to sell magazines, pills and products that you don’t really need. Before you start thinking about using weight loss supplements you need to get enough rest, eat right, detox and start exercising. I will guarantee that you will be seeing results without the need of supplements.

Eating like you are supposed to

The 2 main differences between a big belly and an athletic six pack are two things: belly fat and a bloated stomach and intestines.

Bloating, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, acne, headaches and many more common problems are caused by digestive problems and those can be solved by eating right and drinking enough water.

If you want to eat healthy and start detoxifying your body these are the first things you should do:

No sodas, juices or coffee

Sugar is one of the biggest enemies of a healthy body and thanks to big companies like Coca Cola and MacDonalds we ingest hundreds of pounds of sugar a year. There is an article on the site about sugar addiction and how you can go through it.

You will be very happy after you do this. You will have more vitality, more concentration and feel better.

If you suffer from constipation, headaches and lack of energy you can attribute that to excessive sugar intake.

Drink water

Water is the most abundant element in the human body and it helps to control your appetite. Most people do not drink enough water and that leads to a whole array of problems of physiological and psychic nature.

To know more about water and why you should avoid drinking diluted sugar beverages read Are you Dehydrated?

No fast food or fat food

If you go to fast food restaurants you get what you pay for. Cheap food made with cheap ingredients, lots of sugar, trans fats, saturated fats and all the toxins and free radicals that go with the processing and preservation of these garbage foods.

These foods give you constipation, bloating and an inflamed bowel.

Eat vegetables, fruit and meat

The biggest recommendation that I can give you is to eat organic food. Organic food has more than 8 times the nutritional value of their industrial farmed counterparts and you are not ingesting toxins from pesticides and the preservation process.

Most fruit, vegetables and meats are radiated to have a long shelf life, they are colored and sprayed with chemicals to make them look and smell better…

These products have also been grown with synthetic hormones, antibiotics and pesticides… and all that goes into your body when you eat it. Not ingesting these toxins will help your body to restore its normal state and your immunity will become much stronger.

Nowadays people become fat because of all the empty foods they eat. When you eat all this garbage food with a lot of fat and sugar you just keep eating and eating… and you feel hungry a little later.

You eat so much because your body is asking for the nutrients that it was expecting from real food!

When you ingest this toxin rich garbage the body needs to isolate these toxins and poisons because they can’t go running around in your system… so guess what it does? These toxins are stored in fat so that they stay isolated and away of your blood stream.

Start doing some exercise

Doing some exercise and burning some extra calories is great if you want to lose belly fat. You don’t need to go to the gym and run on the treadmill for 2 hours. Start out by walking for 15 to 30 minutes each day. When you get used to that and implemented some better food habits you can start to go to the gym and do some workouts.

I already talked a little bit about aerobic versus anaerobic exercise in the article on how to get a six pack. It is more efficient to do weight training workouts that will burn more calories because of increased metabolic rate, than it is to be running on a treadmill for an hour.

The extra muscle mass will also increase your metabolic rate permanently because muscles require calories to be maintained. More on that in other articles!

Don’t focus too much on belly fat

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t be measuring everyday to see if you lost half an inch of belly fat. Concentrate on implementing measures to make your diet and fitness better and before you know it you will be looking much better and feeling healthier, without constipation, bowel problems, bad skin, headaches or lack of energy!

If you want to know how to lose belly fat then you need to look at your body as a whole. When you start taking care of your body great things will happen. Your immunity will grow stronger, you will look better… and most important of all: you will feel happier and more energetic!

Dehydration is one of the most underestimated problems of today. There are many things that cause dehydration and not drinking enough water is the obvious reason… But why?

People drink a lot of coffee, coke, juices and other liquids… There is water in that right? Yes, there is water in those drinks… and toxins… and sugar… and caffeine.

We also eat a lot of processed foods that are full of chemicals, toxins and low nutritional value. Do you think that carbonated,caffeinated and sugared drinks have no toxins and waste? Do you think that these factors interact with our body functions? Yes they do.

When your body gives you the signal of being thirsty you are already dehydrated. You need to hydrate with clean water… and not with coke (sugar, carbon dioxide, preservatives, etc) coffee, or some packaged juice. The body needs water to cleanse itself from toxins and other waste. If you add more toxins to the mix you are defeating the purpose of hydration.

We need to drink water to cleanse the toxins that we have in our body.

Water and it is vital to our body functions because:

• Regulates body temperature
• Affects how nutrients and oxygen is transported
• Removes waste and toxins

How much water should I drink?

Most people don’t drink enough water… so how much should you drink? It is said that you need to drink about 8 glasses of water a day, but that is not very accurate. How big are the glasses, how hot is it where you live, how active are you and how heavy are you?

If you are in a warm climate, are very active, exercise hard or go to the sauna you need to drink more.

To calculate how much water you have to drink divide your weight by 2, that number in ounces is what you need to drink daily.

So if you weigh 140 pounds you need to drink 70 ounces of water a day. The rule of 8 glasses a day would get you up to 64 ounces of water…

Some people may be drinking enough water but they are not spreading it out enough. If you drink some water every hour then you are spreading it out better. You can do this by having a bottle of water at work, in the living room and taking water with you when you drive around.

Water Drinking Tips

• Drink through the day. When you feel thirsty you are already dehydrated. So don’t let it get that far!
• Don’t drink when you eat. This dilutes the digestive process and will make it harder for your digestive system. You won’t be thirsty during your meals if you hydrate properly.
• Drink water. Not tea, not coffee, not sodas. No sugar or salt in it and no carbonated water either.
• Learn more about water. You need to drink good water, not everything that comes out of the tap. Water that has chlorine or other chemicals that are bad for your health are not good!

Dehydration Symptoms

The most common symptoms of dehydration are dark yellow urine and feeling thirsty often. When you are thirsty your body is already dehydrated so you should replenish yourself with water and drink consistently so that you don’t feel thirsty.

To avoid feeling thirsty and dehydrating create a habit of drinking water throughout the day.

Drink Water! Not Sugar, Caffeine or Salt…

Manny people drink fluids with sugar (coke, fruit juices and other sodas), coffee or other drinks with salt (isotonic drinks for the gym). These drinks won’t help you get hydrated and replenished. When you are thirsty always drink water… not tea, not coffee, not soda, not carbonated water… just water. Water also regulates your appetite, when you drink these other fluids with sugar and sodium you will feel more hungry and you won’t hydrate yourself with them.

If you drink soda or coffee you are being counter productive because you are pouring more toxins into your body… instead of cleansing your body with clean water.

When you are well hydrated you will feel more energetic and more relaxed. It will be easier to handle stress and disease because your body functions are more efficient and over time your hormonal levels will be at their optimal level because you are dumping out more toxins (because you are drinking properly) and ingesting less toxins (because you are avoiding sodas and other sugar drinks).

Chronic Dehydration Symptoms

Chronic dehydration causes headaches, lack of energy, dizziness, rapid heartbeat, low blood pressure and dry mouth and eyes. This cripples your body’s immune system and makes you vulnerable to many other health problems to come.

If your urine is dark yellow then you should definitely drink more water… that is the most accurate indicator. Your urine should be from a light yellow and almost colorless.

Drink more water and you will feel better, have more energy and be stronger against disease and health problems.

In my opinion dehydration is one of the most underestimated problems in this age. Drinking beverages full of calories, sugars and toxins that you don’t need is a bigger problem than you might think. Over the years this adds up, and make no mistake: this will make you ill. It may take 30 years or it may take 15 years.

I also think this is easy and simple for any person to correct. Drinking water and letting go of sodas and coffee will give you benefits in health, weight loss, muscle gain, stress resistance and it will improve your overall quality of life!

Being well hydrated is also the beginning of detoxifying your body, which is an essential step for your well being, health and athletic performance.

Drinking enough water is the first step to be healthy and achieve your fitness goals. If you want to lose weight, gain muscle or detox you need to get this part of your diet in order… don’t read this lightly or overlook this issue. Drinking junk liquids and not enough water will sabotage your efforts to lose weight, gain definition, build muscle and will stress you out! To stay hydrated you just need to develop the habit of drinking water regularly and throughout the day… everyday! Its not as hard as you think and you will get used to it after a few days.

When people want to tips on how to get a six pack they associate it with a heavy training regime with cardio, crunches and other exercises for the abs until exhaustion… I have good news for you! You don’t need that.

In reality this can lead to weeks or months of exercise without seeing any results. It is likely that your abs are well developed enough if you have been going to the gym for some time.

The problem is that your abs are covered with fat. So in order to have a visible six pack you just need to reduce your body fat that is hiding your abs. You will need some muscle mass in your abdominal muscles so that you can have a good looking six pack, but that is easily achieved with some exercise. The main thing you have to worry about is lowering your body fat percentage.

Guys can see their abs when they go below 10% body fat and women can start seeing them when they go below 16%. Going lower will make the abs look really good, but it gets harder the lower you go. Everyone’s abs will start showing at different body fat percentages because the body fat distribution is different from person to person.

The fat distribution is also different in men and women, in women more fat tends to be stored in the thighs and the hips, men have more body fat in their abdominal area. You can get your body fat percentage measured to monitor your progress, it will give you motivation.

The Mindset for Six Pack Abs

On this blog I will also talk about the mindset that you should cultivate in order to stay motivated to achieve your goals. There are hundreds of diets, tips to lose weight, exercise plans, nutrition philosophies, etc. Most of these methods are written by health care professionals or nutritionists and this advice will work in almost every case. The biggest fight will be in your head.

People that can’t lose weight come up with excuses because they are lazy and are afraid to suffer. You have to take control of your senses and create the will power to achieve your weight loss objective and get your six pack visible. That is how to get a six pack! You do the right exercises, you eat right… and you keep doing it. Reading about it won’t help you… you actually have to apply it in the long term!

You have various tools at your disposal to create the right fat loss mindset. The first part is educating yourself about the subject so that you know that the process is worth it and that your six pack objective will give you a better life because you will look better, be more confident and be healthier.

Diet and Lifestyle for Ripped Abs

When you want to lose weight you need to make adjustments to your diet and workouts.

The most effective way to eat healthier is to learn the difference between a diet and a lifestyle adjustment. If you do a diet you will be in a restrictive mode… you want to finish your diet as fast as possible because it is something that gives you stress and limits your enjoyment of life.

By gradually incorporating changes to your eating habits that are compatible with you and that you can do without sacrifice, you start eating healthier with a positive attitude that makes it easy to keep it up.

You can find more information on how to lower your body fat, nutrition advice, exercise tips and everything you need to lower your body fat, make your abs visible and be healthier!

The same holds true for exercise. Exercise is healthy and it is possible to enjoy it, even if you are not a sporty person. You can adapt your mind to be able to tolerate and start to like doing exercise. You don’t need to suffer and train like professional athletes or bodybuilders to have a good looking physique. You can get healthy and look great with a moderate amount of exercise.

You have to test out different exercise types and sports until you find something that you enjoy doing so that you don’t have to sacrifice yourself and suffer while you do exercise.

How to Get a Six Pack Fast with Supplements

After you have applied the changes to your diet, exercise plan and created a healthier lifestyle you will start to see gradual results. The results will be greater with the amount of effort that you put in and you can get even quicker results by using supplements to make your fat loss faster.

People require different approaches to training and supplementation because they have different objectives and come from different places, some are bodybuilders, some are loosing weight, some just want to loose belly fat and don’t even want the ripped look. Throughout the site you can find more advanced articles explaining how to supplement and how to train for each objective.

I wish you good luck on having success in your weight loss and fat loss journey. Changing your lifestyle to become healthier, better looking and more confident will result in a longer and more happy life.