Q: Hey Mike,
I lost 45 pounds in about a year, and at 5'9 my weight ist 62kg.
I thought i would have abs but when i see in the mirror i see my gut hanging down.
I got a lot of stretch marks and the belly jiggles when i move around so i dont know whether its loose skin or fat.
Please Help now, whether i should concentrate on gaining mass or losing more weight

A: First off, congratulations and great job losing those 45 pounds! Even if you are not quite where you want to be, you've still made great progress. Now on to your question... what you are experiencing is extremely common. Only a tiny percentage of guys is lucky enough to be able to simply lose a lot of weight and get abs. What happened to you is normal and to be expected -- your body, in response to weight loss, "decided" that it needs to hang on to a good chunk of the fat as an emergency energy reserve and for virtually every guy the biggest portion of this fat will be around the waistline. The question is how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

At 5'9" and only 62 kgs you are already close to being underweight, so losing more weight now is definitely not a good idea. Instead you need to be patient and go on a bulk for awhile, to build new muscle and wake up your metabolism that's depressed after a year-long weight loss. Alter your diet to consume more calories, mainly more carbs and protein and slowly start to gain weight. If your diet is poor now (such as very few calories -- 1200 or less daily) or you are completely unsure about how you should change your diet for bulking, read http://www.mikesfitness.com/content/nutrition and use http://www.mikesfitness.com/content/fitnessguide (specifying "Gain Muscle" as your goal) to get a sample diet.

Whatever your new diet looks like you'll need to weigh yourself at least once a week and adjust your calories up or down to stay on track for very gradual weight gain of about 1 kilogram per month. Expect to gain a couple of pounds right away as your body adjusts to the new diet (this new weight will simply be new water retained in your body, not new fat or muscle). After the first week, start keeping track of your weight and make sure it's very slowly but surely going up. You should of course also be doing heavy whole-body weight training as described in http://www.mikesfitness.com/content/weight-training .

Together, the extra calories from healthy food, protein-rich diet, and heavy whole-body weight training combine to create perfect environment to build new muscle while keeping new fat gains to abolute minimum. After maybe 6 months on this regimen, if done right, you should be 6-9 kgs heavier with noticeably more muscle and strength and only a little more fat. After that you can restart your weight and fat loss by cutting calories again. The new muscle mass and higher metabolism will make it easier for your body to lose fat and come close to your goal of having abs. But it might well take several cycles of such bulking up, following by cutting down, following by bulking up again before you get to abs. The good news is that though it's a slow process, it actually works and the whole time you will be seeing progress in yourself, with new muscle and with less fat. Good luck!