If you are looking for a good diet to lose the fat covering your great abs, think four words: Soup is good food.Dr. Barbara Rolls of The Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine conducted over 174 clinical trials to perfect the diet that is promoted by Jillian Michaels of television’s The Biggest Loser. Called volumetrics, Dr. Rolls’ diet plan is based on the simple principle that if you feel full, you eat less.
At first Dr. Rolls looked at the popular idea of drinking lots of water as a tool for losing weight. She and her research teams found that drinking water was not as helpful as many people hoped it might be. The thing about water is that your stomach does not need to digest it. It lets water pass right on through to the intestines, where it can be absorbed into the bloodstream. That means that water will keep you full, and keep you from eating, for just a few minutes.
Soup, on the other hand, can reduce your appetite for several hours. To digest all the little particles of food in soup, the stomach needs at least 90 minutes to an hour, just as long as any other meal. Of course, if you were to eat a big bowl of lard ‘n bacon soup, you would not lose any weight. Simple vegetable soups made from scratch (no mixes containing MSG), however, are a great way to fill up so that you naturally avoid 150 to 300 calories each meal.
If you can avoid 150 calories at both lunch and dinner, you can lose about 2/3 of a pound of fat each week. That may not sound like much, but for many women, this means that belly fat begins to completely disappear after four to six weeks. It is not necessary to abandon any of your favorite foods, and because you continue to eat the same breakfast, your body never has a need to slow down your metabolism as if you were going on a starvation diet.
Dieting is almost always necessary for women to achieve firm stomachs and well-defined abs. Exercise alone is almost never enough. With Dr. Rolls’ volumetric diet, however, your exercise efforts will be enhanced as the fat that covers your abs naturally and easily melts away and stays away, revealing a firm tummy with well-toned abs.