What is Calorie Shifting and Can I Lose Weight Using the Calorie Shifting Method

Calorie Shifting is an absolute must if you are on a diet. The reason for this is when you are on a diet or simply trying to lose weight, you will hit certain plateaus which will be hard to break through. The thing to blame here isn't how many calories you are eating (or not eating) but how your body is perceiving your diet; are you starving or are you okay? If your body thinks you are starving (which is likely if you are dieting), then it will slow down your metabolism to try to store your energy. As a result, the caloric reduction in your diet won't equate to weight loss. And this is where calorie shifting comes into play....

Instead of simply eating the same things daily and trying to stay within a finite caloric range, you will eat a variety of foods and sometimes surpass your calorie limit on some days and then drastically reduce your caloric intake on other days.

For example, if you are trying to limit yourself to 1,200 calories a day, then the first week you may have 2 days where you go over your dietary limit by 400 calories. The next week, you may have two days where you limit your calories by 500. The next week after that, you may eat 500 more calories over 2 days...and so on and so forth.

What you are really doing here is confusing your body and not giving it the chances to establish a lower metabolism which is crucial to losing weight on a diet.

Another way to calorie shift is to establish a "cheat day" in which you can eat whatever you want. This gives you something to look forward to throughout the week and also allows you to eat things that most restrictive diets wouldn't allow.

The good part of the cheat day is that there is only so much you can eat and in most cases, even gorging yourself on a large pizza every once in a while isn't going to be enough to totally wreck your diet as long as you are following your diet for the rest of the week. As for your body, this technique will keep it from going into starvation mode and wrecking an otherwise perfect diet.

Calorie shifting is probably the best option for taking a good diet and totally optimizing it for weight loss. Personally, I can't think of a single thing, barring the extreme diets, that work so well. Plus, it is easy and gives you a little more wriggle room when it comes to dieting. And when you are dieting, we need all the wriggle room we can get.