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Walnuts: A food with healthy fats to help you along in your flat belly endeavors. (Trisha Ruiz)

I recently read an article on the MSNBC website about five foods that can help you lose belly fat. (Don’t ask why I was reading about losing belly fat. I know I’m usually one to write about things like seafood buffets and pork fat, but it’s not like it’s summer or anything…) And imagine my surprise and delight at finding a weight loss plan about adding something to your diet and not so much taking things away! I figure, it’s worth a shot. It looks like a pretty healthy plan, so there’s not a lot to lose (besides belly fat, of course).

There are five foods that this diet—they call it the Flat Belly Diet Plan—includes: oils, nuts/seeds, avocado, olives and chocolate. Don’t get too excited yet; this diet hardly instructs you to eat only a diet of, say, Hershey’s bars with almonds…but almost.

The things that all of these foods have in common are monounsaturated fatty acids (or MUFAs – pronounced, apparently MOO-fahs). These are the fats that are usually recommended to help prevent chronic disease and fight the bad fats inside your body, but new research shows that eating one serving of MUFAs with each (400-calorie) meal can also help fight the fat on the outside of your body.

One serving amounts to one tablespoon of oils, two tablespoons of nuts and/or seeds, one-fourth of a cup of avocado, 10 large olives or one-fourth of a cup of dark or semisweet chocolate. Mind you, adding only a serving of one of these categories, not one of each to each meal.

The recipe ideas are endless—cook a healthy stir fry in one serving of any kind of oil, mix your nuts in a salad or eat them with a handful of dried cranberries (my favorite), make some awesome guacamole, enjoy an olive tapenade, and I don’t even have to tell you what to do with the chocolate.

It seems like an easy plan to follow, considering that the only other instruction the diet gives you is to control your portions slightly, which shouldn’t be too hard as long as your diet doesn’t consist of Potbelly’s and McDonald’s for every meal.

I wish everyone a happy summer and good luck on all of your flat-belly endeavors.