David Zinczenko - The New Abs Diet Cookbook: Hundreds of Powerfood Meals That Will Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life!

T HIS IS NOT YOUR standard cookbook. A simple flip through the following pages will tell you that. Among the words you will not find in these pages: au jus, glace, ragout, bchamel, bouquet garni, and coq au vin.

Among the words you will find in the following pages: lean, abs, strong, fit, healthy, body.

What you're holding in your hands is not just a compilation of food tips and smart recipes: The New Abs Diet Cookbook is, in fact, a training manualone that will help you to strip away fat (from your belly first!); build lean, strong muscle; boost your energy level; and discover the flat, firm abdomen hiding beneath the softer layers of your midsection.

Of course, traditional cookbooks have their place on the kitchen shelf. Sometimes you need to find a pumpkin pie recipe, learn the best way to braise a capon, or figure out what to do with the catch of the day. But most cookbooks are training tools for your tastebuds. The New Abs Diet Cookbook is a training tool for your whole body, one that will reshape your physique into a tower of lean, sexy muscle. (And your tastebuds are going to get pretty buff, too!)

Now, you might be thinking: How can eating delicious food help me to become leaner and fitter? How can a cookbook help me build muscle and get rid of my gut? After all, isn't building muscle just a matter of going to the gym and throwing around heavy objects? And isn't shedding flab just a matter of eating less and trading in cupcakes for rice cakes?

Well, no. Shedding belly fat isn't just about eating less food, and building muscle isn't just about going to the gym and dripping sweat on all the gleaming chrome machinery. The groundwork for both goals is laid right in your own kitchen. And that's where this book comes in. By centering all of the recipes around the 12 Abs Diet Powerfoodsthe most powerful fat-burning, muscle-building, disease-fighting foods known to manthis cookbook will do more than simply keep you happy and well-fed. It will help you strip away fat (did I mention from your belly first?), up to 20 pounds in the next 4 to 6 weeks. And you will never, ever go hungryor eat a single rice cake.

How to Rediscover Your Abs

When you think about uncovering your abs, it's easy to get discouraged. The only people we ever see with abs seem to be celebrities and models, and it's a lot easier to keep your belly flat when movie studios are investing millions of dollars in your midsection. So it's not hard to fall into the mistaken belief that unless you have a personal trainer, a 2,000-square-foot home gym, a nutritionist on call, and an entourage of masseuses, abs are just plain out of reach. You look down at your spare tireand look up at the mountain of work and family obligations coming at you each dayand think, My abs are gone, and I'll never see them again.

But I'm here to tell you that you're wrong.

How do I know? Because helping you find your abs is my job.

As editor-in-chief of Men's Health, editorial director of Women's Health, and author of the bestselling Eat This, Not That! book series, I've been analyzing health, fitness, and nutrition information for the better part of two decades. In that time, I've seen diet and exercise fads come and go. (Remember the lowfat craze? The low-carb craze? The cabbage soup diet?) I've tried every kind of exercise equipment, talked to all of the leading researchers in the nutrition and fitness fields, and crunched the numbers on studies (and a number of studies on crunches!) to find the most effective ways to build the lean, flat abs that my readers are searching for.

And what I've learned from all that researchbeyond the fact that cabbage soup tastes really, really badis that finding your abs is possible. And it's not as hard as you'd think, even if you've struggled with weight issues all your life.

Indeed, when I wrote The Abs Diet back in 2004, I knew that all the research we had done at Men's Health would yield the easiest, most effective weight-loss plan imaginable. And I was right. The Abs Diet and The Abs Diet for Women have sold more than 3 million copies and been translated into 30 languages. (We recently updated both books The New Abs Diet and The New Abs Diet for Women with the latest nutrition and fitness research, useful tips, advice, and workouts for even faster results.) What these millions of Abs Diet readers have discovered is the same thing that you'll discover: Your abs aren't extinct. They're just waiting for you to find them again.

Where Abs Await

Think of your abdominal muscles as long-lost pals you once knew in high school. Sure, when you were younger, you used to see them every day, but as the years have passed, you've lost touch. You went on with your life, which got busier and more hectic every day, and your abs sort of receded into the background, until you all but forgot about them.

But your abs are still there, hanging out in the old neighborhood, waiting to be found and rediscovered. And eating great foodfood that you cook yourself is the first step in finding them again. Consider:

In a study at Penn State, 50 obese subjects were split into two groups. One group ate mostly whole grainsone of the 12 Abs Diet Powerfoods you'll read about in a coming chapter. The other group didn't. After 12 weeks of moderate exercise, both sets of subjects lost weight, but the whole grain group lost mostly belly fat. And their levels of C-reactive protein, an indicator of heart disease and diabetes risk, had dropped by 38 percent.