CHAPTER 5

The New Abs Diet Smoothies and Snacks

WHAT'S MADE THE ABS DIET SO successful for so many years has been its

one simple, but revolutionary, idea: If you want to weigh less, you need

to eat more.

Sure, it sounds crazy—the math doesn't seem to work when you

shorthand it in your head. But consider this: The number-one predictor

of whether you'll gain weight over the next 5 years is whether or not

you're on a diet right now. The more you diet, the fatter you get. Period.

The wild card in this quest for weight loss is our hormonal system.

When we diet and then binge, our insulin levels go crazy; insulin is the

hormone responsible for managing blood sugar and telling us when

we're weak with hunger. Leptin, the hormone that tells us when we're

full, can be undermined by too much or too little food at any given time,

especially some sugars. And cortisol, the fight-or-flight hormone, causes

us to store fat when we're under stress (and what's more stressful than

starving yourself?). It's not about cutting calories; cutting calories too

severely leads to weight gain. Instead, it's about managing calories.

That's why, if you're following the New Abs Diet, you'll never go

hungry. Because hunger is your enemy—it causes you to binge on food,

it causes you to store more of the food you do eat as fat, and it decreases

the number of calories you're burning during the day, another factor in

weight gain.

And how do you keep hunger at bay? By snacking throughout the

day. As I mentioned earlier, a study in the American Journal of

Epidemiology found that people who ate four to six small meals a day