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.
Fortunately, “calorie shifting” can fix this. Calorie shifting is a method of confusing the metabolism to keep it from settling down, ensuring continuous burning of calories as your diet goes along. This results in continued weight loss.
If you want to avoid starving yourself or going through exercise you can’t handle, then calorie shifting may be for you. You’ll need to have followed a regular diet for at least a month before trying calorie shifting — just to be on the safe side. Here’s an example of how to calorie-shift:
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.
Following the changes made over the past two weeks, pick two more days and eat 400 calories more on those..
The fourth week, eat 500 less calories on Wednesday and Saturday, so you’ll eat 1,500 calories.
After the four weeks, return to your regular diet for the next two weeks. Afterwards, repeat the whole procedure all over again. As you go along, you’ll realize that you can break your weight plateau and keep losing weight without really starving.
Make sure to eat healthy throughout the calorie shifting phase, as well. As you go along, you may notice that certain combination of food result in reasonable weight loss — without tasting bad together.
But remember that you’re not really barred from visiting your favorite fast food restaurant once or twice weekly. It makes the diet a lot more fun than otherwise, and the healthier items on the menu can actually help you lose more weight in the long run. With calorie shifting, you can continue losing weight without starving or exercising beyond sanity.
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 more information about these diets, check out our Fat Loss For Idiots review or our review on the Every Other Day Diet.