Fat

• “Belly fat—the fat that pushes your waist out—is the most dangerous fat on your body. And it’s one of the reasons why the Abs Diet emphasizes losing belly fat—because doing so means you’ll live longer. Belly fat is classified as visceral fat; that means it is located behind your abdominal wall and surrounds your internal organs. Because it carries an express-lane pass to your heart and other important organs, visceral fat is the fat that can kill you. Just consider one University of Alabama-Birmingham study in which researchers used seven different measurements to determine a person’s risks of cardiovascular disease. They concluded that the amount of visceral fat the subjects carried was the single best predictor of heart disease risk.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker) Page xiii
• “One pound of muscle requires your body to burn up to 50 extra calories a day just to maintain that muscle.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker) Page xv
• “When you combine exercise with the foods that most promote lean muscle growth, the ones that keep you full, and the ones that give your body a well-balanced supply of nutrients, you’ll be in the sweet spot, doing what this plan is all about. You’ll change the shape of your body by stripping away your fat and showing off your lean muscle.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker) Page xv
• “Most diets are about eating less food or about restricting you to certain kinds of food. Most of them work in the short term because if you reduce your calorie intake, your body starts to burn itself off in order to keep itself alive. Presto, you lose weight. But here’s the problem: The first thing your body does when it’s short of calories is to dump the body tissue that takes the most calories to maintain. That’s muscle. So on a low-calorie diet, your body burns away muscle and tries to store fat. Sure, you’ll lose weight, and you’ll eventually start losing fat as well. But when you “go off” your diet, you’ll start to put weight back on. And guess what kind of weight you’ll gain? Pure fat. Because you’ve taught your body a harsh lesson: It has to be on the lookout for potential low-calorie periods in the future, so it had better store fat just in case. You’ve also used up valuable calorie-burning muscle, so you’re likely to end up fatter than you were before your diet. That’s why people who try diet after diet not only don’t lose weight but also gain” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige xvi
• “A 2008 study at the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Connecticut suggests a similar strategy for triggering the body to burn more fat. In an experiment, two groups of men were instructed to do resistance training while following either a low-carbohydrate or low-fat diet. After 12 weeks, the lifters who reduced their intake of carbohydrates lost an average of 17 pounds of fat, twice as much as the lifters who followed the low-fat plan. What’s more, each member of the low-carb group gained about 2 pounds of lean muscle. “Restricting carbohydrates forces your body to burn fat instead of sugar,” says study author and assistant professor Jeff Volek, PhD. And doing so will work as effectively for you as it did for the men in this particular study. The eating plan in this book will show you exactly how to reduce consumption of empty carbs and properly fuel your body for a metabolic lift.”The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 7
• “Eating a breakfast of slow-burning carbohydrates like oats can significantly improve calorie-burn during exercise, according to a study at the University of Nottingham reported in 2009 in the Journal of Nutrition. When active people were given a breakfast of low-glycemic index foods 3 hours before embarking on a 60-minute run, the amount of fat they burned during exercise was 55 percent higher than when they ate a high-carb, high-glycemic breakfast.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 7
• “Recently, British researchers measured the effect of eating a protein-rich snack after a workout versus a high-carbohydrate snack: Those who consumed 43 grams of protein in a low-carb snack burned 21 percent more fat than the subjects who chugged a sugary post-workout drink. Not only do you expend more energy processing protein than carbs, but the amino acids in protein may lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in your blood, which could boost your metabolic rate, say scientists at Syracuse University.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 8 The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life
• “The average American is carrying around about 30 billion fat cells. Each of those buggers is filled with greasy substances called lipids. When you pump doughnuts, corn chips, and fried Snickers bars into your system, those fat cells can expand—up to 1,000 times their original size. But a fat cell can get only so big; once it reaches its physical limit, it starts to behave like a long-running sitcom. It creates spin-offs, leaving you with two or more fat cells for the price of one. Only problem: Fat cells have a no-return policy. Once you have a fat cell, you’re stuck with it. So as you grow fatter and double the number of fat cells in your body, you also double the difficulty you’ll have losing the lipids inside them.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 11
• “In any case, abdominal fat doesn’t just sit there and do nothing; it’s active. It functions like a separate organ, releasing substances that can be harmful to your body. For instance, it releases free fatty acids that impair your ability to break down the hormone insulin (too much insulin in your system can lead to diabetes). Fat also secretes substances that increase your risk of heart attacks and strokes, as well as the stress hormone cortisol (high levels of cortisol are also associated with diabetes and obesity as well as with high blood pressure). Abdominal fat bears the blame for many health problems because it resides within striking distance of your heart, liver, and other organs—pressing on them, feeding them poisons, and messing with their daily function.”  The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker).  Page11
• “Fat’s role is that it can impede muscles that inflate and ventilate the lungs, forcing you to work harder to get enough air. When Australian researchers studied 313 patients with severe obesity, they found that 62 percent of them with a waist circumference of 49 inches or more had a serious sleep disturbance and that 28 perecnt of obese patients with smaller waists (35 to 49 inches) had sleep problems.”  The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker).  Page14
• “HAVING A BIG belly and a fatty neck can trigger chronic loud snorning and its partner, a sleep disorder called sleep apnea. People who have sleep apnea literally stop breathing for a few seconds to more than a minute sometimes hundreds of times a night, disrupting their slumber. They end up feeling exhausted the next morning. Losing weight can often help remedy the problem so you can get a better night’s sleep. Exercise helps, too. Australian researchers found that people who lifted weights three times a week for 8 weeks experienced a 23 percent improvement in their sleep quality.”  The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (DavidZinczenko and Ted Spiker).  Page 21
• “When you pack on extra padding around your gut, your heart pumps harder to force blood into all that new fatty tissue. When you nosh on potato chips and other high-sodium foods, your body retains water in order to dilute the excess sodium, increasing overall blood volume. When you line your arteries with plaque from too many fatty meals, pressure increases as the same amount of blood has to squeeze through newly narrowed vessels. When you let the pressures of the day haunt you into the night, your brain pumps out stress hormones that keep your body in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight anxiousness, also forcing your heart to pump harder. High-salt, high-fat diets and an excess of stress all combine to create a dangerous situation.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (DavidZinczenko and Ted Spiker).  Page 22