What? Too Much Protein Will Destroy Your Ripped Abs?

This may be pretty hard to believe. While protein is essential to building ripped abs, too much of them can actually backfire and sabotage your months of abdominals training. If you have stumbled into cookie-cutter recommendations for your nutrient intake or following the new rogue food pyramid sponsored by the low-carbohydrates gurus, you are pretending you can improve your physique with complicated food combinations. In fact, you have likely just been on a starvation diet (very low calories diet of 800-1200 calories. Even worse, you might even experience dizziness, nausea, fatigue and lose lean muscle instead of body fat.

If you consume very few carbohydrates for fuel and substitute more protein than your body needs for rebuilding, some of the excess protein can be converted to glucose for fuel. However, you cannot just eat protein and hope that your body will use it for both energy and building muscles.

Carbohydrates and fats are made of carbohydrates, hydrogen and oxygen, just like protein. But protein also contains nitrogen. Your body now has an extra element to dispense if it has to convert protein to glucose or fat for energy, so it converts the nitrogen to ammonia. Ammonia is highly toxic so your body converts that to urea and stores it in your kidneys until you urinate to get rid of it. Aside from getting rid of your normal supply of body waste, you kidneys have to work extra hard if your body has to make energy from protein and consequently produces urea.

Recent studies confirm that people on high-protein, carbohydrate restricted diets lose weight at the same rate or just slightly faster than those on other diets for up to six months. But after a year, they lose no more weight than subjects on other restricted-calorie diet; they do not have lower levels of bad cholesterol. In fact, that is why they can no longer sustain the ridiculous regimen; they gain just as much of the weight back as those on every fad diet.

Lastly, how much muscle you build will always depend on how much and how hard you train. Substituting protein for carbohydrates leads to inferior muscle performance and lower energy levels, which makes it even harder for you to train for ripped abs.