Eat your Way to Hard Abs

1. Eat Six Meals a Day

To lose weight and change your shape, you have to raise your metabolic rate to burn more kilojoules, even when you’re not exercising. One of the main ways to keep your metabolic rate stoked is by constantly feeding it. If you eat six times a day – in the form of three meals and three snacks – you’ll stay satisfied and free of cravings while avoiding the daily metabolic highs and lows that make you more likely to overeat.

2. Use your Blender

Your blender is a powerful tool to help you create a leaner body. Smoothies - blended mixtures of milk, low-fat yoghurt, whey powder, ice and other good stuff - can serve as meal substitutions and potent snacks. They require little prep time, they're filling and they taste like dessert if you add berries, flavored whey powder or peanut butter. Drink a 230ml smoothie for breakfast, or as a snack before or after your workout.

3. Know what to Drink

Okay, so water isn't the most exciting beverage, but drinking about eight glasses of it a day helps you stay well hydrated and satiated. (Many times, what we interpret as hunger is really thirst.) Other than water, the best drinks you can have are low-fat milk and green tea. If you must indulge in a soft drink, limit yourself to two glasses of the diet variety a day, and no matter what, can the regular soft drinks.

4. Focus on Power Foods

Diversify your food at every meal to get a combination of protein, carbs and fat. Make sure you sneak a little bit of protein into each snack.

5. Stop Counting

Though kilojoule burning is paramount to losing fat, kilojoule counting can be tedious and discouraging. The great news is that when you focus on the foods, the foods themselves will, in a way, count kilojoules for you. How? You'll eat often enough and with enough nutritional diversity that you'll stay full all day long rather than experience the blood-sugar surges that can cause you to annihilate everything in your pantry.

6. For one Meal a Week, Forget the other Five Principles

Take one meal during the week and forget about good carbs and good fats. Eat pizza, burgers or whatever it is that you miss the most. Have it, savor it and then be your better self for another week. The point is to control your diet by planning your weekly cheat meal ahead of time. If you schedule it, you'll stick to it.

The healthiest cut of beef: round. It comes from the rear end of the cow and has the least amount of fat and the highest amount of protein. Second best: loin.

Avocado slices should be a sandwich staple. They provide not only heart-healthy mono-unsaturated fats but also potassium, folate and fiber.

A study from Texas Tech University and the Mayo Clinic suggests that people who have a daily alcoholic drink are 54 percent less likely to have a weight problem than those who don't imbibe. (Having two drinks is also linked with less risk of being overweight, but consider that your cut-off: any more than two appears to reverse the trend.)

Taiwanese researchers determined that people who drank black, green or oolong tea at least once a week had 20 percent less body fat than those who drank none. And a Canadian study revealed that green tea kills the bacteria that cause bad breath.

Salsa is the ultimate condiment. It's low in kilojoules, packed with flavor and high in nutrients - including lycopene, an antioxidant that helps fight prostate cancer. Plus, it goes with virtually everything.