DozenDiets.com

 Weight today: 207.4

% Body Fat: 30%

Today is day one on The Abs Diet. This diet is pretty cool. First off, the book is available here from Amazon (click here).

The book is written by the editor of Men’s Health magazine (click here for the Men’s Health website)

Here is the website devoted solely to The Abs  Diet.

I subscribe to the Men’s Health magazine and it has lots of good advice on fitness, diet, sex, style and other stuff. I really enjoy it. The website also has lots of good info (for free).

Anyway, The basis of The Abs diet is to eat foods from 12 groups (called the Abs Diet power foods). These twelve foods are:

1. Almonds (and other nuts)
2. Beans and Other Legumes
3. Spinach and other green vegetables
4. Dairy Products
5. Instant Oatmeal
6. Eggs
7. Turkey and other lean meats
8. Peanut Butter
9. Olive Oil
10. Whole grain breads and cereals
11. Extra Whey Protein Powder
12. Raspberries and other berries

Notice the first letter of each group spells out the acronym “Abs Diet Power”. Cool, huh?

So the diet tells you to focus your diet on these foods (not exclude other foods). Most meals should be comprised of 4-5 of these power foods (again, not exclusively).

A couple of things I really like about this plan.

1. The book has a section on exercise. It talks a good deal about exercise (as one would expect from Men’s Health). One of the Dozen Diets “Diet Principles” is that exercise is critical to diet success. I love it when an expert agrees with me. It makes me feel smart.
2. The book encourages a “cheat” once a week. One of the goals of Dozen Diets was to find which diets could accomodate reasonable cheats and still be effective.

So the powerfoods seem kind of mundane, but the book and the website and some companion books have lots of cool ways to combine them and have some good meals. I will demonstrate a bunch of these over the next 30 days. My cheat day is going to be Fridays, though if I screw up on a different day, that one will (by default) be my cheat day.

The book tell you that you don’t have to exercise the first 2 weeks, but that if you do it will only make you more successful. Since I exercise already, I will keep that up. The book also tells you that cardio is optional. Again, since I do cardio, I will keep it up 2-3 times a week. The author admits he runs a few times a week. Today is a running day for me so I will attempt to knock out some interval training this afternoon, despite the pouring rain.

So there it is in a nutshell. For my first day on the diet I have eaten:

• 1 smoothie (breakfast) - included milk, non fat yogurt, vanilla whey powder protein, flaxseed, peanut butter, ice cubes and oatmeal and some splenda. This was yummy. Like going to Dairy Queen.
• 2 tablespoons of peanut butter with celery and carrot sticks (snack #1)
• 1 turkey sandwhich on wheat bread (lunch)
• 1 apple (lunch)
• almonds (snack #2)
• strawberries (snack #2)

Tonight will be one of the recipes from The Abs Diet book (Mas Macho Meatballs). I am supposed to run as well. Hopefully I will do the interval training. That’s the goal anyway.

Hours later…

Well, after I got home this evening, I ran 13 intervals (about 3 miles for me with my warm up lap). It was hot and muggy to, which actually felt nice after running through the winter.

My night time eating consisted of:

• mas macho meatballs (meatballs made from lean ground beef and onions on a whole wheat hoagie with tomato sauce and low fat shredded cheese). This was actually so yummy I think I will eat the rest tomorrow for dinner.
• Ultimate Smoothie (the rest of what I had for breakfast).