developing a strong midsection is easy, because it’s not. On the other hand, it’s not terribly difficult either. It just takes knowledge and discipline. In subsequent chapters we show you how sound dietary habits and exercises aimed at your entire body stimulate overall weight loss, including ridding the midsection of fat. We even show you how to get maximum benefit out of just a few crunches. Before you get giddy, though, know that these crunches are tough and make the veins in your forehead stick out. But you can do it.
A Word About “Ripped”
A ripped midsection isn’t mandatory for optimum martial arts performance. Case in point: Movie star/martial artist Samo Hung, star of Martial Law and numerous kung fu movies, moves extremely well for an overweight fighter. But he is a rare exception, as few martial artists carrying extra pounds move with such grace and speed. We use the term ripped and its visual image as a way of describing an ideal, one that affords you strength for your techniques and one that offers visual proof of your conditioning.
If you are currently soft around the middle, but four months from now you have developed a six-pack of ab muscles as a result of discipline at the dinner table and in your training, feel proud of your accomplishment. However, if you choose not to reduce your body fat to the extent that your developed abs show (some people naturally have a thin layer of fat over their abdomen), it’s okay as long as they are strong.
I’ll Just Eat Less to Lose Weight
The assumption with this myth is this: Eating makes me fat. Therefore, I’ll eat less and I won’t get fat. People who cut calories radically or skip meals “to drop a couple of pounds” are following the assumption to its seemingly logical conclusion.
Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. In actuality, cutting calories drastically affects your metabolism; specifically, it slows it down, and the slower it goes the more likely you are to store fat. Yes, store it. It’s a cruel joke: eat a whole lot less, and get fat. Real funny!
Stress Reactions to Excessive Calorie Reduction
The human body knows two powerful stress reactions: Acute and prolonged. Think of acute stress as how you react physiologically when a mugger jumps out from the dark and points a knife at your face: Your body dumps adrenaline instantly into your system for fight or flight. Think of prolonged stress as the physiological reaction of being trapped in a collapsed house for several days after an earthquake without food and water: To survive, your metabolism slows down and energy drains from your muscles, digestive system and sexual system, using it mostly for primary functions, such as thinking, breathing and keeping your heart beating. Your system becomes highly efficient with its resources when it figures out that it’s not getting the usual amount of nourishment it needs.
This is a survival mechanism (probably left over from our caveman days) that keeps you alive when food is at a minimum. So when you skip meals and drastically cut calories, your body can’t differentiate between a real famine and you just deciding not to eat. It just knows it’s starving, and slows down your metabolism to desperately hold on to every critical calorie it gets. It’s a fight your body wins, which means those love handles are going to cling fast to your sides.
Here is more bad news: The fact that you are always hungry ultimately leads to binging and overeating, and when that happens, your body thinks, “Finally, some food! I’d better store it for later,” and retains as many calories as possible as — you guessed it — icky fat. Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, director of education, prevention, and outreach at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center (a division of Harvard Medical School) who treats eating disorders says, “If you begin to restrict or think obesssively about food, you are very likely to binge.”1
You can gain weight due to the famine stress reaction, even when eating only twice a day and with limited portions. Consider this incredible story. A woman complained to her doctor about being depressed and having low energy. When asked what she ate, she told him she had one bowl of soup at lunch and one yogurt at dinner. That was it. Nothing else. Not even a raisin. Since she wasn’t consuming enough calories in those two “meals” to sustain her basic dietary needs, she was constantly fatigued and depressed. On weekends, she rewarded herself for all her suffering by binging on junk food, which accounted for her overweight condition. This is because her body frantically accumulated all the calories in her fat cells to use as energy during the long week of starvation. She had been following the I’ll-just-eat-less-and-lose-weight logic for five years, never once questioning that it just might be the root of her problems. Her doctor immediately saw what was happening and put her on a healthy diet with fixed times to eat throughout the day. Within one week, she dropped three pounds and immediately began to enjoy greater energy and a happier outlook.
Lack of Energy
This will be discussed in detail later, but for now know that you cannot get a productive workout when skipping meals and cutting calories drastically. Calories are not bad guys; you need them desperately to train, compete, strategize, and recuperate. Later we provide you with several plans to cut calories intelligently so you can still slam and bam with energy to spare.
Something to Get You Started
Later, we give you several ways to reduce calories, but here is a trick you can start using right now since it’s used in all of our eating plans: Eat frequent, small meals throughout the day. This prevents your body from declaring a famine and defensively retaining all the calories and nutrients it can get. By eating five or six small meals throughout your waking hours, you speed up your metabolism, which sends your body the opposite signal: It has enough calories and nutrients for what lies ahead.
One other benefit, which sounds almost too good to be true, is that since it takes a lot of calories to digest your food, eating several meals a day turns your body into an efficient calorie-burning machine. In other words, the more often you eat the more calories you burn. Life doesn’t get much better than that. Additionally, you enjoy ample and consistent energy from the moment you get up until you crash into your bed 16 hours later. More on frequent meals in subsequent chapters.
I’ll Stop Eating Fat to Lose Weight
We don’t state many absolutes in this book because it’s difficult to do so when discussing how the human body reacts to various programs. That said, here is one absolute about dieting, or more specifically, about calories. As you know, there are gazillions (read: a lot) of diets in books, magazines, on the internet and on photocopies passed around the office. Some are good, some are absurd (the beer and steak diet comes to mind. Darn it!), and others are seriously dangerous to your health. There are diets designed around eating only vegetables, eating only meat and a popular one at this writing that touts the wonders of eating lots of fat.
If any of these diets work, whether they are the healthy ones or the crazy ones, it’s because of one reason and one reason only: Your body uses more calories in its daily activities than it takes in. It doesn’t care if the calories are from fat, carbohydrates (carbs) or protein. If you eat fewer than what your body needs to train, work, play, sleep or zone out in front of the tube, you lose weight. It’s a simple concept. There is no argument.
Since fat holds more calories than carbs and protein, it would seem that fat is the bad guy in your diet. Much of this myth comes from the negative connotation conveyed by the word. We want to trim fat from our waistlines; our butt is too fat, our thighs are too fat. Therefore, fat is bad. While that seems logical, it’s dangerously incorrect.
The truth is that there are vital biochemical functions in your body that need fat. For example, fat is required to maintain a correct hormonal balance, maintain healthy skin, maintain a healthy testosterone level, and absorb certain vitamins. Totally eliminating it would lead to illness. Even if it were possible for you to avoid dietary fat altogether, you wouldn’t lose weight if you consumed more protein and carb calories than you use in your daily activities.
Make fat a part of your diet, just make sure it’s not the biggest part. More on fat in