When you eat has a huge impact on your results. Let's start at the beginning of the day. When you wake up in the morning, your body has been without food for many hours. Your blood sugar level is low, and your body is running on reserves. Particularly when you are close to your goal of a razor-sharp 6 pack, you're not carrying a lot of reserve fuel (fat) for your body to burn. Once those reserves are used up, your body will turn to its next available source of fuel, your muscles! It's real tough to work out hard and focus on getting the abs you want when you're groggy, hungry, and your body is cannibalizing the muscles you're trying so hard to build.

You don't need to be groggy and half out of it in the morning. And you can't afford to be if you're gonna succeed at your 6 pack quest. You certainly don't want your body cannibalizing your muscles for fuel. You need to eat your first meal as soon as possible after waking up. This gives your body the energy it needs to come fully awake and alert, and spares your muscles.

So now you know how important it is to eat as soon as possible after you get up. Doing so gets your blood sugar into the right zone (assuming you are eating healthy stuff) for you to function effectively and protects your muscles. You'll feel better, function better, work out harder, and protect your muscle while shedding fat.

The quest to keep your blood sugar level in the right zone also tells us how often you should eat. Within 3 to 4 hours after a meal, your body will have digested that food and your blood sugar level will start heading down again. That means you really shouldn't go much more than 3 hours between meals (except when you are sleeping at night).

If you think about this for a minute, it's clear that you need to eat a lot of meals in a day. To really keep your blood sugar stable and gain all the benefits that brings, you need to move toward five meals a day, instead of the traditional three. If you wake up at say 6:00 AM, and space your meals 3 to 3 and a half hours apart, your blood sugar should should stay pretty much right where you want it throughout the day.

One last thing. If your 6 pack quest requires you to eat five meals a day, you're going to have to adjust what's in those meals. Eating 5 meals that are the same size as the 3 meals you used to eat will explode the amount of fat on your gut instead of helping you reach your 6 pack quest goals.

An easy way to deal with this problem is to make the second and fourth meals into healthy snacks of just 100-200 calories, and cut back on the other three a bit. Doing it this way should make it easier for you to adapt. Forcing yourself to have a small healthy snack mid-morning and mid-afternoon shouldn't be too tough. And you should be less hungry at lunch and dinner than you used to be, so cutting back a bit on those meals should be pretty easy too.

Try this approach and see for yourself. It will take you one step closer to getting the abs you've always wanted.