When you're trying to get your body fat down, you need to exercise hard, but you also need to control the amount of food you eat. To get really lean, you will have to consume fewer calories than you need to maintain your current weight. This is where things get tricky.

One of the reasons that diets don't work well is because your body adapts. When you consistently cut back on the number of calories you consume, your body takes this as a sign that there isn't enough food. In short, it acts as if you are in danger of starving.

When your body is in starvation mode, it behaves differently. It starts storing every calorie it can as fat, since it things there isn't enough to go around. Your metabolism slows, leaving you with less energy. It puts less effort into repairing your joints and muscles, since the top priority is to survive until there's more food. If necessary, it starts consuming your muscles as fuel while preserving the fat for an even more dire emergency.

The results are ugly. You end up listless, with little energy to exercise. Everything you eat seems to instantly turn into belly fat. Your muscles start to wither away. Not the best conditions for working out really hard and building a lean, high energy body with six-pack abs. This is where cheating comes in.

Your body doesn't jump from its normal mode into starvation mode if you skip dinner one day. It needs to experience a significant shortage of calories for a number of days in a row before it switches over. If you don't experience that significant shortage of calories for that number of days, your body won't make the switch to starvation mode. You'll get the benefits of reduced calories, without the unpleasant side effects of starvation mode.

So, to get the best results from your strict abs diet, you need to cheat once in a while. Every so often, you need to eat significantly more than you otherwise would, to keep your body from going into starvation mode. And it gets even better. If you eat your favorite junk food on these cheating days, it becomes that much easier to stay on your diet the other days. After all, there's a big difference between giving up pizza (or whatever) altogether, and only eating it on your cheating days.

The easiest way to do this is to just pig out once a week. But this approach isn't necessarily the most efficient way to go. If you want to get the best fat loss results possible, while still avoiding starvation mode, you should get expert advice on how long to go between cheating days, based on your body type and so on. Still, the basic concept is simple. A fun 6 pack secret is that you need to cheat on your diet once in a while to keep it working effectively for you.