Nutrition

Your diet plays a vital role in obtaining the ‘cut’ physique of a six pack. Often we will eat according to our habits and lifestyles but if you want to get a six pack you will need to be more disciplined since any work you might do in the gym can easily be undone by a poor diet.

For starters make sure you eat a good breakfast. Ideally it should be the largest meal of the day followed by lunch as the second largest and then a small dinner. The importance of having a good breakfast cannot be understated when looking to build muscle and lose fat.

At breakfast time you will have not eaten for maybe 12 hours or so and your body will be in need of food. Breakfast literally means to break the ‘fast’ of not eating for so long. If you do miss this meal, chances are that you may overload on lunch due to not having eaten for so long. This puts a huge strain on your body to digest a lot of food at once and you will usually feel lethargic and inactive while digesting a large meal. Your metabolism will slow and you will want rest.

You need to keep up your metabolism and a good way of doing this is to eat small meals every three hours rather than 3 large meals over the course of the day. What this does is keep your body going and keep your metabolism high. Often appetite can be confused with thirst so make sure you drink plenty of water throughout the day. Drink a glass of water before every meal and you will feel more full more quickly.

Include some lean protein with each meal so that your body doesn’t break down the protein in you muscles for fuel. This would slow your metabolism and also shrink your abs. Also choose food which is going to help meet your body’s nutritional needs rather than those of your taste buds. Fast food and fizzy drinks contain a lot of sugar and salt and offer lots of ‘empty’ calories but no real nutrition. You will need to fuel your body more efficiently if you are to develop your muscles and increase your metabolism.

Do not eat late at night and have a small dinner as early as possible. After dinner we are largely inactive, especially when sleeping. If food is still undigested when going to bed it becomes difficult to break down and it sits in your system, slowing your metabolism.

Switch to whole grain foods rather than refined grain. In general try to make your diet as unrefined as possible. The more a food has been tampered with the harder it becomes for it to be broken down by your body. A controlled scientific study showed that in two controlled groups of people, more belly fat was lost by the group which ate whole grains than the group which ate refined grains. (In addition to a controlled balanced diet).