Nutritious Powerfoods for the Abs Diet

Power 12 Foods: Never Go Hungry
Meet the powerfoods that will shrink your gut and keep you healthy for life

The Power of Food

These 12 power foods make up a large part of your diet. The more of these foods you eat, the better your body will be able to increase lean muscle mass and avoid storing fat. They have been proven to do one or more of the following:

* Builds muscle
* Helps promote weight loss
* Strengthens bone
* Lowers blood pressure
* Fights cancer
* Improves immune function
* Fights heart disease

Though you can base entire meals and snacks around these foods, you don't have to. But do follow these guidelines.

1.Incorporate two or three of these foods into each of your three major meals and at least one of them into each of your three snacks.
2.Diversify your food at every meal to get a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
3.Make sure you sneak a little bit of protein into each snack.

Here's an easy way to remember what's good for you. The first letter of each food group spells: A.B.S.D.I.E.T.P.O.W.E.R 12

1) Almonds and Other Nuts

Eat them with skins intact.

Superpowers: Building muscle, fighting food cravings

Secret weapons: Protein, monounsaturated fats, vitamin E, folate (in peanuts), fiber, magnesium, phosphorus

Fight against: Obesity, heart disease, muscle loss, cancer

Sidekicks: Pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, avocados

Impostors: Salted or smoked nuts. High sodium spikes blood pressure.

These days, you hear about good fats and bad fats the way you hear about good cops and bad cops. One's on your side, and one's going to beat you silly. Oreos fall into the latter category, but nuts are clearly out to help you. They contain the monounsaturated fats that clear your arteries and help you feel full. All nuts are high in protein and monounsaturated fat.

But almonds are like Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: They're the king of the nuts. Eat as much as two handfuls a day. If you eat 2 ounces of almonds (about 24 of them), it can suppress your appetite--especially if you wash them down with 8 ounces of water.

For a quick popcorn alternative, spray a handful of almonds with nonstick cooking spray and bake them at 400 degrees F for 5 to 10 minutes. Take them out of the oven and sprinkle them with either a brown sugar and cinnamon mix or cayenne pepper and thyme.

2) Beans and Other Legumes

Including soybeans, chickpeas, pinto beans, navy beans, kidney beans, lima beans.

Superpowers: Building muscle, helping burn fat, regulating digestion

Secret weapons: Fiber, protein, iron, folate

Fight against: Obesity, colon cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure

Sidekicks Lentils, peas, bean dips, hummus, edamame

Impostors: Refried beans, which are high in saturated fats; baked beans, which are high in sugar.

Most of us can trace our resistance to beans to some unfortunately timed intestinal upheaval (third-grade math class, a first date gone awry). But beans are, as the famous rhyme says, good for your heart; the more you eat them, the more you'll be able to control your hunger.

Black, lima, pinto, navy -- you pick it. They're all low in fat, and they're packed with protein, fiber, and iron--nutrients crucial for building muscle and losing weight. Gastrointestinal disadvantages notwithstanding, they serve as one of the key members of the Abs Diet cabinet because of all their nutritional power. In fact, if you can replace a meat-heavy dish with a bean-heavy dish a couple of times a week, you'll be lopping a lot of saturated fat out of your diet and replacing it with higher amounts of fiber.

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If you’ve ever tried to go on a diet and exercise at the same time, you’d know how difficult it is to manage the two together – on the one hand you’re literally starving yourself and limiting your calories; and on the other, you’re working out so hard that you feel ravenous once you’re done.

It takes a great deal of control to ignore the pangs of hunger that your stomach keeps sending out, and more often than not, you end up gorging on food that’s not good for you. If you want to stay on the right track to weight loss, you need to learn how to battle your hunger, and to do this, you must:

Eat small meals more often:

The best way to boost your metabolism is to eat a larger number of meals, with smaller portions. Instead of eating large breakfasts, lunches and dinners, eat something every few hours. Eat just to satiate your hunger and not to fill your stomach. This way, you avoid putting on weight.

Drink lots of water:

Water has no calories, so you can drink any amount and still stay slim. Besides this, water helps in replenishing the fluids that your body has lost as sweat when you work out. It keeps you healthy and hydrated and flushes out all the toxins from your body. Water also gives you a feeling of fullness and you can stave off hunger till it’s time for your next meal.

Go to bed early:

A decent amount of sleep is necessary for good health. If you deprive your body of sleep, you tend to put on weight. Besides, when you stay up late, you tend to get hungry and snack on food that is not good for you. Sleep rejuvenates you and gives you enough energy to face the next day. And when you sleep early, you don’t find it hard to wake up early for your work out the following day.

Stock up on fruits, vegetables and low-cal snacks:

You are going to get hungry from time to time, so make sure you have enough healthy food options on hand to tide you over on such occasions. Eat fruits, vegetables and other low calorie snacks that fill your stomach without making you fat.

Stay busy:

When you have something to occupy your mind, you don’t tend to forage around for something to eat. It’s only when you are at loose ends with nothing to do that you feel like snacking in order to pass the time. So keep yourself busy and you tend to forget that you’re hungry.

Nutrition

Principles
Nutrition plays at least as much of a role in muscle gain and fat loss as does weight training. It is also arguably the more underappreciated and misunderstood of the two with a huge number of bogus and unhealthy "diets" which can be best compared to get-rich-quick schemes.

The basic principles of nutrition stay the same regardless of your goals, age, sex, or physical condition. The main differences will lie in meal sizes and proportions of different macronutrients in meals. You should always:

• Have 5 or more small to medium-sized meals throughout the day.
• Drink lots of plain water throughout the day. 8 cups of water is the minimum.
• Get at least 25% of your daily calories from protein, with some in every meal.
• Get 20-40% of your daily calories from carbohydrates.
• Get 20-40% of your daily calories from fats.
• Eat minimally processed and cooked foods. Especially, eat a lot of raw vegetables.
• Avoid meals heavy in carbohydrates and/or fats.
• Avoid sweets and sugary foods, processed foods, fried foods, junk foods, and alcohol.

Best protein sources are lean meats, poultry, fish, cottage cheese, and eggs. Other dairy products also contain significant amount of protein, but are typically high in sugars as well so they should be limited. Beans, lentils, other legumes, and nuts contain fair amount of protein and should become especially significant sources of protein for vegetarians. One of the very few worthwhile "supplements" is whey protein powder which can help if you are having difficulty getting enough protein from "regular" foods.

Most of your carbohydrate intake should come from fiberous vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Green veggies such as green beans, broccoli, and spinach are nearly perfect carb sources. Plain oats, brown rice, and other whole grains and legumes are also terrific complex carb sources. Moderate amount of fruits or berries are also great for you.

Avoid processed sources of carbohydrates such as sweets, sugars, breakfast cereals (substitute oats or other plain whole grain in their stead), white breads and pastas, potatoes, and corn (sweet potatoes or yams are an excellent substitute for regular potatoes).

Even whole wheat breads should be passed over in favor of plain whole grains like oats or brown rice as much as possible. Dairy, and to a lesser degree fruits, should be limited due to their high sugar content.

Healthy fat sources include nuts, egg yolks, flax seed, fatty fish such as salmon, olive and other plant-based oils (but only if used at room temperature and not heated). Animal and poultry fats are also OK.

Avoid processed fats such as found in most salad dressings and sweets. Also avoid cooking methods that use significant amounts of oils at high temperatures. Healthies ways of cooking vegetables, meats and fish are grilling, broiling, steaming, and others that do not require heating of oils.

How Much To Eat?
While the basic principles will apply for everyone regardless of their goals, the amounts of food you consume and the protein/carbs/fats breakdowns will be different depending on your present physique and your goals. There are two main directions in which you can go: losing fat and building muscle. While it is not impossible to achieve both, especially for beginners, you would do well to pick one or the other for a given period of time and structure your nutrition program accordingly. ("Toning", another popular goal, is really just a combination of losing fat and building muscle. For most people, "toning" nutrition would amount to conservative fat loss nutrition).

Nutrition for losing fat requires slight undereating to lose 1-2 pounds/week. Faster weightloss is unhealthy, causing significant muscle loss (as opposed to fat loss), and shutting down your body's metabolism thus sabotaging your fat loss. Nutrition for muscle gain requires slight overeating to add about 1 pound every 2 or more weeks. Faster weight gain will result only in unwanted fat gain (as opposed to muscle gain).

It is therefore very important to continuously monitor your weight and adjust your caloric intake to stay on course, whether it be towards fat loss or muscle gain. If you are of average build and are not sure what caloric intake to start with, use the Fitness Guide to get suggested diet. This diet should only apply to people with average physiques. It is important that you and your trainer custom-design diet suited specifically for your needs and goals and continuously monitor and adjust it according to your progress. It's also important that you do not immediately jump to your new diet, but instead gradually shift to it over a couple of weeks.

In general, for fat loss Diets get 40% of your calories from proteins, 30% from carbs (mostly in the first half of the day), and 30% from fats. For muscle gain diets, get 30% of your calories from proteins, 40% from carbs, and 30% from fats. As with the total caloric intake, it is important that you and your trainer monitor your progress and make necessary adjustments.