The body’s metabolism controls how slowly or how quickly it burns calories to produce energy, and the metabolism can rise and fall depending on your diet and fitness level. If your metabolism slows down, the number of calories your body burns in a day decreases with it. This is the reason why people experience plateaus after dieting for a few days or weeks — their metabolisms have slowed down to match the decreased intake of calories.
This is where “calorie shifting” comes in. Calorie shifting is up-shifting or down-shifting your calorie intake on a regular basis, in an attempt to “fool” your body’s metabolism from settling down at any level. This prevents any weight loss plateaus.
To try calorie shifting, you’ll need to have a healthy, stable diet to begin with — this shouldn’t be hard to come up with when you’re already on a special diet. After you’ve stuck to the diet for at least a month, you can then try the following steps:
Pick two days from the week, and add 300 calories to your diet on those days. The rest of the week, follow your usual diet.
The second week, eat 500 calories less of your diet. Monday and Thursday, eat only 1,500 calories.
Carrying the setup over from the second week, choose two other days of the week and eat 400 more calories on those days. By this time you’ll realize you’re eating varying amounts of calories throughout the entire week.
Finally pick any two days and eat 500 calories less on those days.
After you follow this four week process, go back to your regular diet for at least two weeks before you try the calorie shifting again. You should see increased weight loss during the calorie shifting diet, because you are fooling your metabolism so it doesn’t have time to get used to what you’re consuming.
Calorie shifting works a lot better when you know the right kinds of calories to take in. You’ll want to avoid sodas and junk food as much as you can, since most of the calories you get from these are empty — they may sabotage your efforts.
When you begin your calorie shifting diet, you may not want to consume more calories, it may not make sense to you, but you do have to consume more calories with the plan, in order to shift your metabolism and get it working again. That doesn’t mean adding empty calories to your diet. You should always eat healthy alternatives to high-calories snacks and high-fat snacks. If you follow one of the many calorie shifting diets available, you’ll end up losing more weight than you would simply following your 2,000 calorie diet, and you’ll lose the weight quicker. It really works, and you don’t have to starve yourself to lose the weight you want to lose.
There are a few calorie shifting diets available online such as Fat Loss For Idiots and the Every Other Day Diet. If you would like to learn more about these diets, read our Fat Loss For Idiots review or our review on the Every Other Day Diet.