Will endless sit-ups equal tight, sexy abs? Oh, absolutely, 100% for sure!!  What if I was an amazing champion at sit-ups, I should have the leanest, greatest abs ever! Right? Right?!?

Take a walk into any gym in America and you will see people doing a trillion crunches trying to find these abs… Without success.

Yet the sit-ups, this highly sought after, elusive six-pack is one of the foundations upon which this fitness industry was born!






Well, I hate to say it, but having a six-pack is not a  good judge of actual health.

I see so many programs that promise a six-pack abs in 4 weeks, or, the 10 secret moves to give you a six-pack, six-pack in a bottle of pills, six-pack in an ancient secret passed down through Chinese scrolls…

But if we go back to our friend with the unfashionable socks over there on the left, you see he does NOT have that six-pack even after doing 45,005 sit ups.  If that is not enough, then what does it take??  Here’s some strategies that you see today that usually work to get the six-pack ab look:

Take amphetamines, speed, crack  and party like a rock star.

Hopefully these uppers will supersede your bodies organic instinct to sleep and you will be able to remain active for loooong periods of time and dance the night away, exercise, burning abundant calories — all courtesy of your increased activity and super-boosted metabolism (however, if you start talking like a certain squeaky duck you might want to reduce the amount you are taking).

Take a look at all those models with their six-packs, showing them off every chance they get (of course, I can’t not mention the sunken in, dark eyeballs, the super jaundiced liver indicate they are extremely dehydrated and are going into a serious enough liver shutdown – but who am I to place  judgment??  These people want their sexy six-pack  no matter the cost!)

Diet pills:  pop ‘em like sweet tarts

They can  and will increase your metabolism, but that’s at a cost.  They also dehydrate your body, accelerate your livers capacity to convert fat to energy, cause you to crap a lot more,  and the mother of all, it ends all desire to eat.  This recipe of course  is an absolute combination to help you accomplish the dramatic body change – as long as you do it forever… the  moment you stop, your internal functions that are used to having a substance do the job for them will be asking for payback…probably for a long time. So whatever you’ve decided to go with, get a lifetime supply and hope your precious liver, heart and intestines manages to keep from spontaneously combusting.

Start the endless calorie counting…and hope for the best

Calorie counting does not equal lost weight. The awful truth is that we each respond differently to different foods and need to work with different calorie intake combination. Too few calories, your bodies metabolism will slow down. Work with a professional like myself to help assess your needs so you can have the healthiest outcome.

My favorite: do what the movie stars are doing

Movie stars hire their own personal trainers…no, forget  that, they hire teams. They spend time sleeping right, working hard, eating properly, hiding out and sharply focused on doing everything they can to look good  for their upcoming movie role.

For his incredible part in the “Troy”, the big blockbuster, Brad Pitt spent a ridiculous 5 hours a day for period of 7 months working out hard-core.

My question to you is:  how good do you think you would look if you (were able) to put forth the same effort?  Let’s not forget that they also have contracts and publicity events that they have to think about.  Also, there’s the money.   What if you were paid $20 million to workout and look perfect?

A few things to remember the next time you train your abs:

There. I said it. No doubt a six-pack looks pretty darn nice, but there are many other gauges of health we should focus on other than what we look like in the mirror (think about the mental/emotional/acceptance of self analysis… anyone?)

I’ve seen women drive their natural body rhythm into the ground in an attempt to get a six-pack at the price of not being able to have kids.  Some men get the fat suctioned off their belly without really stopping to question how it got there or what will they do to prevent it from coming back.

As a personal trainer, it’s my job to help clients get/maintain their body fat at a healthy level.   What do YOU think is an optimal measure of health?

There is no denying the benefits of being beautiful.

I hear people say that having a “nice personality” is the first criteria of true beauty, but is that really true? I have a few words, words, people, stop it. Stop convincing yourself of this when it’s clearly not so.

I tested this theory and tried to set up my friends with mates that were very funny, engaging and smart, but they were, well, hard on the eyes. And guess what? No one fell in love. While it was a brief study, and yes, lacking in participants, it was enough to conclude my theory that the person who uttered the words “beauty is skin deep” was , *deep-breath*, he was blind.

As much as a good personality is desired, people are attracted to the goods: good body, good face, good skin, good teeth.

Far from being only skin deep, beauty appears to be an indicator of genetic and developmental health, and therefore of mate quality; beauty is a “health certification.”

More attractive people are healthier, have greater physical fitness, live longer. Bilateral symmetry measures beauty so accurately that there is now a computer program that can calculate someone’s facial symmetry from a scanned photograph of a face (by measuring the sizes of and distances between various facial parts) and assign a single score for physical attractiveness, which correlates highly with scores assigned by human judges.

Beauty therefore, is an objective and quantifiable attribute of individuals, like height or weight, both of which were more or less “in the eye of the beholder” before the invention of the yardstick and the scale.

I bristle when people play down vanity as if it’s a bad thing, as if saying wanting a really good looking person is a bad thing.

We humans are superficial. It is okay to be superficial.