The Abs diet developer David Zinczenko says it will allow people to lose weight—primarily fat—while developing a leaner abdomen and increasing muscle tone, strength, general health, and sexual health. The diet has two components: exercise and nutrition.
There are six general guidelines that are the basic principles of the diet. These are: eat six meals a day, drink smoothies regularly, know what to drink and what not to; do not count calories; eat anything you want for one meal a week; and focus on the Abs diet twelve power foods.
The diet strongly recommends its followers eat six meals a day since it helps to maintain what researchers call an energy balance. This is the number of calories burned in an hour versus the number of calories taken in. Georgia State University researchers found that if the hourly surplus or deficit of calories is 300–500 at any given time, the body is most susceptible to burning fat and building lean muscle mass. To stay within this range, Zinczenko recommends the following daily meal schedule: breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, dinner, and evening snack.
Another guideline is to drink smoothies regularly in place of a meal or snack. Smoothies are mixtures of low-fat milk and yogurt with ingredients such as ice, protein powder, fruits, and peanut butter, that are prepared in a blender. Although there are no definitive studies, some researchers suggest that the calcium in the milk and yogurt helps to burn body fat and restricts the amount of fat produced by the body.
A third guideline details what to drink and not drink. Drinking eight glasses of water daily is recommended. The benefits of 64-oz of water are that it helps to alleviate hunger pangs, it flushes waste products from the body, and it delivers nutrients to muscles. Other acceptable drinks are low-fat milk, green tea, and no more than two glasses of diet soda a day. Alcohol is not recommended at all since it does not help to make a person feel full. It also decreases by one-third the body’s ability to burn fat and makes the body store more of the fat from food. In addition, it decreases production of testosterone and human growth hormone that help burn fat and increase muscle mass.
