By that I mean that his book specifies the 6 meals you are to eat a day and the simple exercises that go with it. Even though the book tells you time and time again not to count calories - for curiosity's sake I did anyway for the first week just to see what Zinczenko's power foods and portions came to. My conclusion is that I averaged 1600 calories a day. Couple that meager amount with my exercise routine and I have a net effect of about 1000-1100 calories for my body not burned off by exercise.

Based on my 6' 2" frame and basal metabolic rate, I'm likely to have a calorie deficit of about 1500 calories a day. Simple math tells me I would lose a minimum of about a pound every two days. In fact I lost 4 lbs the first week. Sounds good doesn't it? Well the problem is most nutritionists (and I have talked to several) will tell you not to lose more than 2 pounds per week on any plan. You risk cannibalizing your own muscle for energy and therefore set yourself up to gain it all back in the future. In other words the average man should probably take the slow and steady approach and feed themselves about 2000-2200 calories a day of healthy food.

I guess my point is, that while the science is good and Zinczenko's motivation seems rational - when you really look at what he has you eat and how much, it is a starvation plan whether he admits it or not. Breaking it up into six meals is helpful, but at the end of the day I find myself craving more food. The portions suggested in the book are not realistic for long-term maintenance.


A comparison of Diet Books   June 3, 2007
 67 out of 68 found this review helpful

Like many of you, I found myself wondering what the differences were between the various diet programs. What I discovered is that all of the major diet books are well written and share many similarities. None of them offered an "silver bullet" to weight loss - it primarily comes down to keeping your calories burned greater than your calories eaten. There are theories presented about glycemic index, good vs. bad carbs, etc., but at the end of the day it's about calories and exercise.

In this review, I've tried to offer brief summaries of each diet book/program in hopes that it might help you pick out the one that would work best for you. Don't pay too much attention to the number of stars, as it's my own subjective rating based on effectiveness, ease of use, and ability to stick with the diet. Instead, try to discern which diet might fit your lifestyle better.

The Abs Diet, ****
This book is written by David Zinczenko, the editor of Men's Health Magazine. The diet likes the number 6 - promising "6 pack abs in 6 weeks," by eating 6 meals a day. Each meal is built around the "power 12" foods. There is a strong emphasis on whey supplements. The fitness program was easy to follow but perhaps too strenuous for beginners and seemed better suited to men. Strong points are excellent nutritional content and strong exercise. Weak points are questionable claims about rapid weight loss and "6 pack" abs, and mediocre meal plans. Average recommended daily calories are 1,890, with 7 fruits and vegetable servings.

The South Beach Diet ****
The SB Diet is a slightly more permissive version of the Atkins low-carb diet. It is based on the premise that eating low-glycemic foods (foods that raise blood sugar) decreases cravings for sugar and refined carbs. Like many of the diets, there are two phases. In the first phase, fruits, sugar, and grains are banned outright. Phase 2 allows some fruit, high-fiber grains, and dark chocolate. The simplicity of the diet might appeal to many busy dieters. However the emphasis on the glycemic index and insufficient exercise sections are a drawback. Recipes are easy to prepare, but some called for unusual ingredients (a clever cook could make substitutions). Average recommended daily calories are a mere 1,340, with 13 fruits and vegetable servings (mostly veggies).

The Sonoma Diet ****
The Sonoma Diet is an updated low-carb diet with a Mediterranean theme. Again, it is broken into two phases, called "waves." In "Wave 1," the dieter is banned from eating most sweet or refined foods. The much longer "Wave 2" permits fruits and wine. It has a unique method of calculating portions by filling sectors of small plates with specified food categories. The diet is healthy but complex. It is also very restrictive, which makes it more difficult to stay on. Also, the book doesn't offer enough on exercise. The recipes were tasty but elaborate to prepare. Average recommended daily calories are a mere 1,390, with 10 fruits and vegetable servings.

Ultra-Metabolism ***
The Ultra-Metabolism Diet is designed around the assertion that people get fat because their body's systems become toxic, inflamed, and imbalanced. Again, this is a two phase diet. Phase 1 is an initial "detox" period. The longer Phase 2 is a "rebalancing" period. Overall, the dieter must eliminate white rice, refined grains, most red meats, and caffeinated beverages. The theory of your body requiring detoxification goes beyond any scientific evidence and rings a bit of late night television "miracle detox bowel-cleansing pills." The diet is fairly restrictive and complicated. The exercise section was brief but practical. Average recommended daily calories are 1,660, with 12 fruits and vegetable servings.

Volumetrics, ****
The Volumetrics Diet is based on Penn State research. It aims to maximize the amount of food you can eat for a given caloric intake. This is done primarily by eating reduced-fat products, adding in lots of vegetables, and using low-fat cooking techniques. It encourages eating a first course of broth-based soup or low-calorie salad (not heavily laden with dressing, cheese or bacon) to take the edge off your appetite. Recent clinical studies have shown this diet to be very effective. The recipes are appetizing but time consuming. Average recommended daily calories are 1,500, with 14 fruits and vegetable servings.

The Zone Diet, ****
The Zone Diet was designed to keep your blood sugar and hormones at optimal levels so that you can better fight obesity and diseases. It requires that each meal consist of 30% protein, 30% fat, and 40% carbs (based on calories). The diet allows many fruits, but almost no grains except oatmeal. The meals are simple to prepare and nutritionally balanced. But having to keep to the 30/30/40 balance is very tedious and requires lots of preplanning. Recent studies showed that the overall weight loss was below average. Average recommended daily calories are 1,660, with 17 fruits and vegetable servings.

Eat More, Weigh Less, ***
The Eat More, Weigh Less (Ornish) Diet is a low-fat vegetarian diet that bans all meat, fish, oils, alcohol, sugar, and white flour. Their clinical studies suggest that strictly following the diet can prevent or reverse some diseases. Ornish argues that it is easier to make drastic changes to diet rather than small ones. The diet offers the most food per calorie of any of the diets. It is actually lower in fat than current USDA guidelines recommend. Studies have shown good long term weight loss, but a relatively high drop-out rate. Average recommended daily calories are 1,520, with 17 fruits and vegetable servings.

Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution, ***
The Atkins Diet is the grand daddy of them all. As with many of the other diets, it is divided into two phases. The first phase is a two week induction period that bans nearly all carbs. The second phase is only slightly less restrictive, but does slowly add more vegetables, fruit, and wine. Research has suggested that Atkins' dieters are less hungry than on many other diets. But the diet is difficult to adhere to and has a high drop-out rate. Long term weight loss has been shown to be average. The single most glaring concern with the Atkins diet is that the nutritional profile is far outside conventional dietary guidelines. (We've all known people eating handfuls of bacon, eggs, and cheese for breakfast, claiming they were on a diet). Average recommended daily calories are 1,520, with 6 fruits and vegetable servings.

Again, please don't worry too much about my ranking of the diet books - it's completely subjective. My suggestion is to simply find a program that seems to fit your lifestyle best.

Please be kind enough to indicate if reviews are helpful.

Written by Arthur Bradley, author of "Process of Elimination" - an intense thriller in which a martial artist, a greedy corporate attorney, and a sexy conspiracy theorist team up to stop a world-class sniper from killing presidential candidates.


Good Insight   September 18, 2007
 48 out of 49 found this review helpful


I like the fact that the authors explain how things work in our bodies (how protein intake relates to the increased metabolism resulting from the workout, and to the muscle growth; which foods are good for metabolism; which of them aid in weight loss or lowering cholesterol levels). Although the idea of having six meals a day does not always fit my busy schedule, the one of snacking with fruits and/or nuts between main meals does seem to be effective in my case. What I like most about the book is the well balance diet that does not exclude any food groups. I am a great believer in the nourishment based on natural foods and The Abs Diet fully supports this belief. Dr. Tombak in the book "Can We Live 150 Year" farther explains proper food combination and its effect on our bodies. For that reason his book is a very good addition to The Abs Diet.



How to turn your body into a metabolic dynamo (recommended for bodybuilders).   July 29, 2006
 45 out of 49 found this review helpful

Calorie controlled diets are the most scientifically valid diets. Less calories in, plus cardio = weight loss. The problem with this is that we generally loose fat and muscle at the same time. However, very low-calorie diets are beaten by the body after two to three weeks. The body learns that you are starving down and so starts to conserve fat. You can even eat half the allotted calories per day and watch as you stay the same weight and look like you have the same fat (and you do). Combine cardio and you can loose it all eventually (fat and muscle) but at least you lost the fat. Hard, but it can be done. Although this backbone of dieting is important, actually very important, and works, you can't start eating bad again or else you will put it all back on. You can't stick with a very low-calorie diet forever either without repeating this process every time you put on fat. In general this isn't a bad way to go about getting fit, especially if you are obese and fed up with that fat. This traditional method will rip the fat off for at least 3 weeks and get you down a bit. Then the low-carbohydrate diet is the next obvious choice to get down even more, like the Atkins diet. Low-carb diets limit what you eat so that you find it hard to eat and what you do eat doesn't convert to fat quickly. Lots of foods with medium to high carbohydrate levels vanish from your menu and so if you don't eat fatty foods on this controlled diet your body will continue to loose more weight. Combine this with the traditional method of a very low-calorie intake with cardio and you have a diet on rocket fuel. The problem though is that low-carb diets are very limiting, remove healthy carbohydrate foods that your body needs, and may even be considered dangerous by some experts. Shopping for low-carb foods is not as fun, or as easy, as it sounds. Even health stores and low-carb sections do not have such a great range of foods for low-carb diets. Even food producers have tried to corner this market by adding hidden ingredients to the low-carb foods. You will tend to eat the same things over and over. You can't do it forever. If you want something you can do forever then the Abs Diet is the way to go.

The Abs Diet has the right ideas, and really that is the bottom line. It is quite humorous at times too and is easy to read. Modern medicine tells us that the human body can use food to burn fat if we eat the right foods in the right proportions. When we eat certain foods our body's metabolism increases. The very activity of our digestion can use more energy than what we are ingesting. This is the way our bodies where always supposed to act. By avoiding appetite suppressants (the type that stops you feeling full!) food additives (like HFSC) we can eat healthy and feel full like we should, not drinking 2 litres of soda containing appetite suppressants and then want to snack out on a candy bar containing the same appetite suppressants, an endless spiral of overeating. Trans-fats, which are coming under fire only now in the 21st century with the new "dangerous fats" label on the way in means that it should be easier for us to learn about and identify problem foods like trans-fats, hydrogenated oils, HFSC, high GI-foods. The Abs Diet does a good job of telling you the stuff that is really bad for you. What you then discover is that there are medium to high carbohydrate foods that do not have this stuff in them. Meaning a low-carb food with these danger ingredients is worse than a high-carb food without these danger ingredients. If we exclude these danger ingredients in with our low-carb diet then good luck in finding food that you can eat - but if you can do it you will loose weight... but you can't do low-carb forever. The Abs Diet uses the principle that there are foods that can increase metabolic rates and that these foods can also be medium-high carb and should also be included in a diet for health reasons. This inclusion of medium-high carb foods suddenly opens up a wave of food options for your diet. You can shop this stuff probably anywhere. Next, the Abs Diet tells you that you need to move to six meals a day. 8am breakfast, 11am snack, 1pm lunch, 4pm snack, 6pm dinner, 8pm snack. This is a major component of the metabolic diet that bodybuilder's will already know (the Abs Diet borrows heavily from the bodybuilding world). You can cheat on one day a week (wow). Most of the foods contain high protein (this is also borrowed from bodybuilding) and so nearly every meal has vitamins, high protein and some carbs. There are even some meals with good fats in them. It is all very healthy. Nuts and berries are high on the list, veg, whey protein, beans, poultry, skimmed milk and low-dairy, oats, eggs, peanut butter (yep, a little can combat fat), olive oil and wholegrain breads. The Abs Diet asks that you get a blender to make some `smoothies' that are like health drinks you can use throughout the day. These are great and tasty additions to your diet. You even have full lunches and dinners with steak and chicken and tortillas. In essence you haven't seen a diet that looks as tasty as the Abs Diet. The blender allows for unprecedented creation of all sorts of metabolic foods. Although protein concentration is very high, so what, the meals are great and that is what counts. Watch out that you actually calculate for servings (per person) as some of the smoothies are enough for 2 servings and the lunches/dinners can serve 4 people sometimes. Metabolic dieting of six meals a day, which are high in protein and low in danger foods, will make you loose fat. The Abs Diet is a pretty valuable cook book. Lots of very good recipes are in here (I had to copy the recipes onto my PC because my pages are already worn from cooking with it) and they allow for a lot of variation when you have worked with them. You get the general idea and can even advance on to making up your own. Once you get the idea you can continue it for life. In short, the Abs Diet works, but there are some major drawbacks that are more side issues than the diet itself, but you need to know about them. The Abs Diet talks you out of cardio saying that you only burn a couple of hundred calories for every 30 minutes to 1 hour doing it. Fine, this is true, but you also get cardio-vascular exercise which promotes a body that can produce a better metabolic system. Never walk away from cardio. The Abs Diet tells you to stop counting calories. This is also a bad idea. The basic traditional calorie counts are important because if you are consuming more than you can burn then you are going to get fat. However it would be better to see these calories in light of their metabolic effect so don't get too worried if you see some bigger figures. At the same time, they should not get too big or else, so will you! These food amounts advocated by the Abs Diet need to be cautioned against. If you are gaining weight then check to see what could be responsible for it. Next up is the biggest lie of them all - that you can gain muscle and loose fat. You can't build muscle and loose fat at the same time. As any bodybuilder will tell you, this is a strategic impossibility. In order to build muscle you need a bulk diet which gains muscle and some fat and then you move to a cut diet which looses a little muscle but lots of fat. Bulk and Cut. That is how it is done. The Abs Diet tries to tell you that you can cut fat and gain muscle together. You can't. The worst part is yet to come. Pages 200 to 300 are dedicated to a four day a week gym exercise. Do not even read this section. The book has ended at page 200. To ask people to train four days a week is horrible overtraining advice and the exercise examples are horrible form. Only steroid users train this way four times a week or more and some of the examples will injure you. Forget about all the weight lifting information in here and concern yourself with cardio, like an exercise bike or biking. I suggest you look for better weight lifting exercises through manuals that are dedicated to natural bodybuilding that is responsibly taught. Search around. Now with that out of the way, if you have gym experience then the Abs Diet works super wonders but for the average person, who doesn't lift weights, don't waste time learning weights yet, and instead get your cardio in order first. The other thing this book lacks is sources. It really needs to cite its sources. The exercise and cardio claims are wrong for the above reasons. The writer knows nothing about weight training properly. I would be suspect of lots of the claims he makes but the general ideas are good and most importantly, the metabolic diet works... and it works really well, for as long as you want. Overall this is a great book because of its core message - Metabolic dieting on foods you can live with forever and that is why it is highly recommended. This could be the best diet book you could own.
*Updates*
- Always eat at those 6 times in a day. Even if you break the diet with a bad meal keep to the plan. Cardio always help if you mess up.
- Try not to snack between snacks. Keep the meals to 6 per day.
- The calorie calculations for the recipes are far from accurate.
- Turns out when you add up the meals that this is a pretty low calory diet for men but maybe high for women.
- The meals have massive variations in the calorie differences. One dinner recipe is 700kcal while another is 300kcal.
- You need to add about 3 tsp of olive oil to the non-stick pan if you dont want to burn your food.
- Drink plenty of water.
- I think the meals run a little too late for me. Better is 12pm lunch, 3pm snack, 4:30-5pm dinner, 7pm snack. I try to have the last sizable meal before 7pm. I eat something small with protein before I go to bed to prevent catabolism.
- Don't worry if the diet doesn't work right away. You need to get rid of the all the metabolism inhibiting chemicals that you have in your system. It can take awhile for the diet to kick in because of that.
- If you find that the diet is not working after all of the above then have a higher calory dinner for lunch and a lower calory lunch for dinner. That way you eat bigger midday and less in the evening. Two lower calory lunches for lunch and dinner are more extreme but if that is what you need to do then that is what you need to do.
- Get a digital weighing scales. You will drop down and go up and drop down and go up. The key here is to create a decline of dropping down and going up.
**I have gone from 220lbs to 207lbs in 1 month on this diet.**
*** I am now 181lbs** 8th May 2007 *** Slow, but getting there! Cardio is a must!!!!