I’ve tried just about every diet going over the years and none of them, so far, yielded me six pack abs. To be honest, I don’t really care one jot about having six pack abs, nor do I particularly care about being slim, even though I am, at the moment, the slimmest I have been since before that incident that happened with the “C”. I won’t mention it, I can’t. It’s a dirty word to me at this stage. In brief summary, I have tried the vegan diet, the carnivore diet, the keto diet, and the eat-whatever-the-hell-I-want-when-I-want diet. The last diet on that list was my absolute favourite, and occasionally, I slip back into it and every time I do my belly gets a little bit fatter than the previous time I tried it. Last time I gave it a lash, I hit a record weight of nearly 16 stone (100kgs ish).
In truth, I don’t and never have minded being a bit of a fatty, and it kind of baffles me why people get offended when one mentions their weight. When I have been a bigger version of myself, I would often get people mocking my fat belly and I have to say I kind of enjoyed it for some reason. Now, maybe I have a weird sense of humour, but in the past, I have found people mocking my fat belly as an enjoyable social sport of sorts. I only became annoyed with people joking about my weight after a while because it became a bit repetitive that people seemed to insist on stating what was obvious to a blind man. I got tired of repeating the “more of me to love” catchphrase when people would mock my ever-burgeoning waistline and found myself asking, in an irritated tone, “do you enjoy stating the obvious or what?” Anyway, my point is, I could quite contentedly swell to 32 stone and make every day an all-you-can-eat-buffet of chips, burgers, pizzas, sausages, Indian takeaways, garlic cheese chips, curry cheese chips, Pringles with dips, and beans on toast with half a block of cheese melted in. And I would happily wash all of these delicacies down with a couple of pints of Coca-Cola and never drink actual water ever again, for the rest of my life. In fact, I don’t think I ever in my life drank actual water until I had a hangover from hell in 30 degree heat in Ibiza at the tender age of 19, but that’s another story.
The big problem with my favourite diet, and the subsequent fatness it imbues me with, is that it makes me feel absol-ute-ly bloody awful. I feel bloated, fatigued, slow, both physically and mentally, as irritable as the day is long, and depressed. I’m all for body positivity and feeling happy in your own unique physique, but when you can’t, like I have been, climb a single flight of stairs without breaking into a profuse sweat with your heart drumming like Usain Bolt when he’s setting a world record, then you might, possibly, have a bit of a problem. It was a problem for me anyways.
Much of the first half of my life was a continuous assault on my digestive system. I remember older people in their 30s and 40s years ago that were baffled how I managed to shovel such a tremendous amount of crap into myself without being in pain, as they informed me they would be. “Sucks to be you,” I used to think. But now I am that guy in my 40s that is baffled by young people pouring Monster energy drinks and all sorts of other crap into themselves without seeming to suffer the consequences. “Sucks to be me,” I guess.
Anyway, below is a list of all the diets I have tried over the years and the success I have had getting six pack abs from my efforts.
· Eat-whatever-the-hell-I-want-when-I-want diet: there are people who actually do manage to maintain six pack abs on this diet, but I’m not one of them
· Vegan diet: I tried this a few times and even got pretty skinny on it, but no, no sick pack abs
· Carnivore diet: I tried this for a while, and became rather skinny, around 12 stone, at which point people kept trying to skinny shame me, and, as with being fat shamed, I got tired of laughing that off too
· Keto diet: I tried different versions of the keto diet, one which was vegetarian oriented and one which was more animal products oriented, and neither one brought me six pack abs
I have known skinny and overweight people on all of the above diets. In fact, I have been both skinny and overweight on all of the above diets. Up until around twenty I could eat whatever I wanted, and it didn’t matter, I stayed slim. But that ship has flown (what, that makes no sense, does it? Or maybe it does in today’s world? Ships didn’t fly last time I checked, not in a literal sense anyways). The upshot is, the diet you decide on doesn’t really help you get six pack abs, or even lose weight, if you eat more than your body needs to keep you ticking over. Keto-esque diets do help though, in that one is inclined to feel less hungry and more satiated on them.
As I said already, I’ve never been particularly bothered about having six pack abs. But it seems that, today, with my latest “weird diet” in a long line of same, I am closer to six pack abs than I have ever been before in my life. I expect to have achieved the abs of your dreams (maybe you dream about abs, I dunno. Shrug) within about 3 months, or 4 at the most. And I’m doing it by adopting yet another weird diet, called OMAD.
OMAD stands for one meal a day, and I’ve been on it for about 6 weeks now. The idea is simple, you simply eat whatever you want within a one-hour window. However, I think most people motivated enough to only eat once per day would also be inclined to try and make that meal as nutritious as possible. Fasting seems to be a bit of a hot topic these days, and lots of people are doing it. I think people do these things as a means of taking control of their mental and physical health, rather than being dependent on doctors and tablets.
I was going to include a commentary of exercises in this as a means of getting “6 pack abs” but I’m of the opinion that such an effort would be pointless as I don’t believe that exercise actually has anything to do with getting them. Everybody has six pack abs; they’re just buried under layers of belly fat of various thicknesses and viscosities. I’m not sure why I felt the urge to add the word “viscosities” to that last sentence, but for some reason it amused me to do so.
Finally, I’m going to conclude this post with two pictures of myself. The picture on the left is a progress pic I took last year. I ran around 400kms in January and 400kms in February, and didn’t lose a single pound of body weight or become even slightly more sculpted. The picture on the right is from yesterday evening and I haven’t done any running at all this month, and yet the abs are starting to pop a little bit. The difference in definition is purely related to my current One Meal a Day diet. I intend to stick with this meal plan until I have a six pack or it somehow negatively affects my health, whichever comes first. But so far, it appears to be working out quite well, I’m feeling more energetic generally, I’m saving about 30 euros a week at the supermarket, and I’ve nearly got a 6 pack that’s simply to die for lol (genuinely, I don’t care about 6 packs, I just wanna be my best self).
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