Six pack abs
6 pack abs that is, yet magazines, websites, and TV shows that are supposed to know about health and fitness are littered with images of men and women sporting well defined abs that brainwash us into thinking that that’s the ideal benchmark. What they fail to tell you is that looking like what they portray as “healthy” is actually quite dangerously unhealthy. They also don’t tell you that images and videos on their media are largely photoshopped and/or enhanced by lighting. So the models in their publication look nothing like that in real life or they only look like that for a few days during their shoot. You see, achieving that “magazine” look require you be hungry and dehydrated for days at a time. Some people even take dangerous supplements that “burn” body fat (by increasing your heart rate!) to assist in getting the look. You would only be capable of flexing for the shoot and nothing else.
Let’s be real, the human body is an amazing thing. It can function in gazillion modes, e.g. “camel” fluid retaining mode when it’s hot and we’re consuming a lot of fluids, lean when running low on fuel e.g. first thing in a morning before breakfast, just to name a couple. The female body is even more complex, an enhancement from the “basic” male body model, equipped with an extra gazillion modes. Our body fluctuates so much during the day that how we look in the morning can potentially be completely different to how we look at night.
Bottom line is, anything between 14-30 percent fat for a woman and 8-20 percent fat for a man, depending on age, is healthy. Healthy fat percentage increases with age, for example it’s OK for an 18 year old man to have 7% body fat, but a 50 year old man needs about 17% to be in the healthy range. That being said, an 18 year old can healthily sport six pack abs, all year long, but a 50 year old can’t sustain it for that same period without harming his body.
