1. Eat at caloric maintenance or a slight caloric surplus to build muscle
2. Do a consistent ab workout routine 3-5x per week (free on YouTube), progressively overloading your body with more resistance through longer workouts, heavier weights or more demanding positions
3. When you want 6-pack abs, cut your caloric intake to be at a slight deficit for a few weeks and try to shred as much excess body fat as possible to let your ab muscles show
Easier said than done though.
That said, dealing with the "knowing exactly what ingredients" part is actually easy enough, if you're cooking your own food. If not, most places have some kind of nutrition information available, and if they don't, a rough guess is definitely better than nothing.
Calorie tracking is not much fun, but it is definitely effective. Getting it perfectly right isn't as important as consistency.
Plan sets of meals with known calories and macronutrients, make them all on Sunday and eat them throughout the week. Easiest is obviously eating the same thing every day, but if that's too monotonous, then choose two or three varieties and make them in big batches. Then you're not weighing grams of ingredients for a single meal at a time, you're weighing X times that for X meals at a time.
Also easy to split them up into the right serving size in a container in the fridge, and you don't even have to think about meals, just grab from fridge and pop in microwave or oven to hear.
That gets you 90% of the way without having to micromanage every meal. The odd meal out on weekends is not a big deal as long as you don't go crazy.
Yes the first day and last bit suck, especially the first time. But its also ~3-5x more time efficient than most calorie reduction diets and you save time and money.
Magnesium from random supplement I got at target, potassium from no-salt salt alternative.
There's no way that's healthy, especially longer term.
You can look into it if you want but there are a lot of people that think its actively good for you. I'm more in it for the weight loss and take anything else as a bonus.
2. Weigh yourself every day.
3. After 2 weeks, raise or lower your calorie budget depending on how much weight you've lost. Look at averages, not daily weight.
4. Repeat.
The 2 week adjustment takes care of most mistakes you make with calorie counting. I am usually consistent with the direction I'm over or under counting.
Over the years I've been on/off with tracking. But I've been able to stick with it over a year now, the longest I ever have. The big difference between now and then is that I'm okay with being 80% accurate if it means easy consistency.
Previously it was very important for me to be 100% accurate. This is especially difficult to do when you eat out. By allowing myself to be imperfect in my logging, it eases the burden to track.
Here's what I do now.
1) Take a photo of everything I eat 2) Log right after eating if I feel like it, but usually I log at the end of the day
Sometimes I underestimate. Sometimes I overestimate. I think it washes out in the net. If my logging is really off it will show in my scale and progress pics.
Doing the above has given me lots of visibility into my diet and unlocked optimizations.
Consistency > Accuracy
If you want to be more exact, some ways to make it easier are:
1) eat prepared food that has caloric info on it, like a pre-made salad
2) cook recipes that provide caloric info
3) make very simple meals (ex. 1 cup yogurt + 1 tbsp peanut butter + 1 banana) where you can do the math yourself
But yeah, for most people they'd rather ballpark it and have less stress. Maybe that means a 4-pack instead of a 6-pack, but you're still going to look good.
That's why the first week or two your weight yourself everyday, chart it and note everything you eat. If your weight doesn't change then you can start reducing calorie intake by reducing portions.
I regularly have alcohol when I'm cutting weight. It just gets counted towards my calorie budget.
I do find non-diet soda to be completely wasted calories though. Just not worth it.