This is an especially tough concept to swallow for us guys. It's our nature to jump in to something new with both feet first, damn the torpedoes full steam ahead and all that. We sit on our butts all week at the office, then expect to be able to beat our teenager at basketball on the weekend. We have a hard time with half measures.

Even so, lets look at this logically. You don't have the abs you want, or you wouldn't be reading this. The reason you don't have the abs you want is because of the way you eat, live, and work out. You're going to have to make some pretty significant changes to go from where you are now to looking like you could be on the cover of a fitness magazine. But there are two problems with making the transition all at once.

The first is death. I mean that figuratively, but if you're really out of shape, it could be literally. If you try to go from little or no exercise and pigging out to major workouts and eating like a model in one leap, your body is going to rebel. It's too much change all at once. Your body needs time to adapt to changing demands and nutrition. You'll get sick or hurt yourself.

If you try to make the jump all at once, your mind is going to rebel too. You won't be able to do everything in the exercise program, and your stomach will be screaming for its daily extra-cheese pizza, you won't see any results right away, and you'll give up on your 6 pack quest in disgust.

Finally, if you make all the changes at once and somehow manage to avoid a physical or mental breakdown, you'll be missing something else. You won't know which changes were effective and which weren't. Are the dietary changes working, or are bad results there being masked by great results from the workouts? Would you get better results from eating fewer carbs or lifting more weights? There's no way to know.

This wouldn't matter too much if you could jump right into a program that worked great for you and got you the abs you want without having to make any mid-course corrections. But that seldom happens. Most of the time, people need to modify and tweak things as they go along to keep the progress coming. You wouldn't know how to tweak things since you dived right into the deep end and changed everything at one.

Gradual change is a better way. By gradually changing your diet, workouts, and lifestyle, you eliminate all the problems I described. By changing one thing at a time, say skipping the second double-cheeseburger at lunch, you'll start moving in the right direction without major trauma. Your body can easily adapt to small changes. You won't freak out and quit because it is too hard. Instead you'll have one success under your belt and be ready to go after the next one.

Except sometimes you won't. Sometimes, a change will work either better or worse than expected. If you make only one change at a time, you can easily see the results of each change. Then you can decide what to do if those results are out of line. Cutting out the morning bagel caused your workouts to stink this week? Replace the bagel with whole grain toast or a piece of fruit and see if that solves the problem. You get the picture.

So there's the secret. Change gradually for the best results. You might not get there as fast as you would if you dived in head first and changed everything at once, but when has that approach ever worked for you anyway? Change things gradually and you'll succeed in your 6 pack quest.