Eating pasta and developing a sixpack

Question

I know that it's very important to have a proper diet when you want to develop a sixpack. I often read that one should avoid pasta, rice, potatoes, bread and so on.

However, I like this stuff very much. Is there a way to incorporate pasta, rice, potatoes and bread into a diet which aims to develop a sixpack?

My idea is to do just more cardio, avoid sugar, alcohol completely and have enough proteins in my diet and eat much veggies and little fat.

Does this have a chance to work? Do you have any other suggestions?

Answer 1

There are a lot of diets and a lot of claims. A lot of them are simply not true.

The problem with pasta, rice, potatoes and bread is that they are high in carbohydrates and by that high in calories.
If you want to lose weight (and by that reducing the fat that covers your abs), you should try to keep your caloric intake below what you burn each day. How you reach your daily limit does not really matter, as long as your diet doesn't lack crucial nutrients.

You should also note that people (and by that the articles they write) often think of different things when they talk about the same stuff. The bread I think about is certainly something completely different as someone else thinks about.

Cutting alcohol is a good idea, too, as it contains a lot of calories. Drinking less alcohol is always a good idea when looking from a health perspective.

Of course your abs won't develop themselves, I am not sure if cardio alone is enough. Try to incorporate some exercises into your workout that target the abs, at least in a compound style exercise. And always be wary of the spot reduction myth.

Answer 2

Actually, dieting is a vast subject, and "simply cutting calories", reducing the amount of food you eat, without changing your eating patterns, does not necessairly work.

As for the proper way for losing weight, even among professionals there is no consensus. Maintaining the new weight is heven harder.

Also, youre quite a specific target - you want to drop your BF% very low (for men, abs are visible at around 10%BF, a bit more for women, but still equally hard to achieve) while most of the studies focus on obese people.

One of the theories pinpoints carbs as the main villain in the battle with fat, and after reading a whole lot of books and articles on the subject, Im willing to say that most of it makes sense.

Basically, high carb and sugar intake makes your insulin levels spike, and one of the roles of insulin is causing your body to store fat. A carb rich meal can rise your blood sugar level to a point where you cant use all of it as an energy source, and the insulin makes sure the rest is stored as fat - our glicogen stores are limited, but we can store almost unlimited fat. If your diet is very high on carbs, you may even build up partial insulin tolerance, which will keep your insulin very high just to preserve the normal blood sugar level.

This video quicky summarises the role of insulin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNYlIcXynwE

http://eatingacademy.com/start-here - this is a great blog full of great articles. I suggest you surf around that site - youll finish having a lot of new knowledge. There are great articles about the ketogenic diet, the causality of calorie intake imbalance and much more. The author is an M.D and he managed to get his own six pack abs, so i think its a worthy read. Especially this article: http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/do-calories-matter tackles the problem of why does it matter what we eat and simple counting calories isnt exactly the best way to go.

Just to say, Im in the process of losing weight myself, and in around 3-4 months i lost over 20lbs, and mostly the changes in my diet would be cutting on carbs. Im still far away from my target BF%, but im not done yet :)

So while i understand your love for pasta, youd probably do better leaving it be, or at least restraining your intake. If you have to eat such carbs, try to eat small portions, even if more often - less of a insulin spike. Same, try to aim for low glicemic index products, for example try using full grain pasta isntead of the regular one. Try to educate yourself on the dieting matter, because the subject is quite vast and complex, and a simple "Ill eat less and it will be okay" is probably not a good idea.

Answer 3

Why not try a body recomposition program.

A well defined six pack is well built muscles and a low fat percentage. A way to attain this is to eat 500kcal above maintenance levels on training days and 500kcal below maintenance on non training days, training each other day so that the net balance is zero over the week.

To build the muscles you need to hit them with hypertrophy training. Cardio is detrimental towards that goal. It puts alot of stress on your body which really should be resting and building muscles.

Try to eat somewhere around 1.5g protein per kg lean body mass, which also helps towards building muscles. As long as you hit your protein, the rest can be pasta, rice or whatever you like to eat which helps you keep the dietplan.

As long as you are in a net equivalence, or in net deficit. This will, albeit slowly, gain you some muscles and lose fat leading towards a six pack.

Answer 4

Having visible abs is all about having low body fat, and having low body fat is all about eating fewer calories than your body consumes in a day. It doesn't matter (much) what foods you eat, as long as you're eating fewer calories.