Originally posted by hardtack
any suggestions for foods to eat, specifically?
Also, any excersizes I can do to tone my abs especially? I've been doing 250 situps a night.
Your situps may marginally increase the size of your stomach muscles (though as with your other muscles lower reps with higher weights is probably best).
In any case you can not spot reduce fat and doing situps will not burn much in the way of calories compared to the other exercises you could be spending your time doing. Even walking would burn more calories than your situps. I recommend spending the time your spending on situps jogging or some other higher calorie burning activity instead.
These days pretty much anything and everything you buy at the supermarket (apart from the raw fruit and vegs) has a breakdown of calories and protein carbohydrate and fat on the packet (at least thats the way it is here in Aus). So it should be easy for you to workout your daily calorie intake.
There are also numerous sites on the web that will allow you to calc your daily calorie requirments based on your daily activities. For example this one
http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_burn.html
It is then simply a matter of ensuring that your food intake level and your activity level are such that you burn up 7,000 calories per week more than you consume. 7,000 calories corrsponds to 2lb of fat which is the rate at which you want to loose fat at. Any quicker than this and you risk losing too much muscle tissue.
2lb per week is quite doable (I've done it myself). So you should theoretically be able to loose 16lb of fat in your 8 weeks if you do everything right. A 10% or so loss in fat should have your gut looking quite a lot better.
Note though that if you diet too drastically your body goes in to starvation mode and starts reducing your metobolic rate to prevent you from loosing fat - its better to burn the fat of than diet it off. Dieting to drastically can be counter productive (as I've recently found).
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Below is an example of a diet I have been using. That being said it is too low in carbs and on the bare minimumm you would want to take calorie wise (most dieticians recoimend you don't drop your calories below 2000).
I used it with a couple of cheat days though were I pig out on carbs (just before and just after I do my once a week training session). It worked for a while, for about 4 weeks I lost 2lb per week. But then I think it must have put my body into starvation mode because I've recently been gaining weight on it (my body must be really eficiently using the carbs I do eat on my cheat days because I recently just gained 5lb in a week on it LOL). For the time being I've given up and just gone back to eating normally (at least I managed to drop my weight from 265lb down to 240lb with a noticble reduction in gut fat).
2035 calories, 180g protein, 94g carbs, 75g fat
as follows
breakfast
2*100g tins tuna(with onion added)
150g coleslaw
snack
1 piece of flat bread
lunch
5 chicken kebab sticks (400g of chicken)
dinner
250g fish (dory fillets)
100g tinned tuna fish
150g coleslaw
