The Abs Diet by David Zinczenko, Ted Spiker (2004, Hardcover)

The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life is not the book that I would necessarily recommend for those looking to eat healthier and live healthier (my preference is Body for Life)... but, I have only heard rave reviews and success stories about The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life.

While Ted Spiker provides excellent content in the Abs Diet (the meat of the book is very strong, if you will) but I am quite turned off by the approach - suggesting that healthier eating and living should be done so that readers / dieters have better looking abs is silly to me. In fact, I think its the wrong approach to entering a diet. That said, Spiker's route to achieving better abs is a good one - it suggests balance and general lifestyle healthiness.

From the book synopsis: "How do you lose weight? Diet and exercise, they say. How do you lose weight and look good? By eating and by working out according to a sensible plan. The critical difference is in this book by Men's Health magazine editor Dave Zinczenko, who offers basic, rational lifestyle adjustments that are intended to make a big difference on the body. He offers a six-week plan that eliminates foods from the diet that he considers especially bad and adds things that will help, without totally eliminating fun food. His exercise workouts help build muscle and improve metabolism. Nothing extreme here, no starvation required, and he builds in a maintenance plan to use after the initial six weeks."

Summary: If you like Men's Health, you'll certainly enjoy this book. Its intelligently written and suggested a permanet life and eating change - both positives in my mind. My only critique is that dieting shouldn't be started purely to achieve abs - because, if thats the motivation, diets usually aren't successful for more than a few months.