What is calorie shifting? The idea behind calorie shifting is fairly simple. Let’s say you consume 2000 calories on your current diet. If you have been consistently following your 2000-calorie diet, your body is expecting to receive approximately 2000 calories every day.
But what if you are still not losing enough weight or your weight loss has stagnated? That is where calorie shifting comes in. Calorie shifting is designed to confuse your metabolism by up-shifting and or down-shifting into different calorie ranges, which may help your body burn more calories.
Does a calorie shifting diet work? Yes, it does work, but there is one important caveat. Calorie shifting is not going to work if your current diet is poor. You need to find a good diet, which you can follow consistently for at least three months.
Calorie-shifting is a tool which is designed to give a good diet an edge. If you do not eat a healthy breakfast, skip meals, snack on junk food, do not know how many calories you eat a day, and think that you can get six-pack abs by doing 500 crunches a day, a calorie shifting diet is not for you.
How does a calorie shifting diet work? While calorie shifting diets come in many flavors, I am not going to describe them all. My goal here is to give you a formula that you can apply to any diet of your choice, which enables you to create your own calorie shifting diet.
1. Establish a baseline. You need to consistently follow your diet for at least one month, which lures your body into expecting a steady stream of, say, 2000 calories a day.
2. Up-shift by 300 calories. Two times a week for the first week only, add 300 calories to your diet. On Monday and Thursday eat 2300 calories.
3. Down-shift by 500 calories. Two times a week for the second week only, subtract 500 calories from your diet. On Tuesday and Friday eat 1500 calories.
4. Up-shift by 400 calories. Two times a week for the third week only, add 400 calories to your diet. On Wednesday and Saturday consume 2400 calories.
5. Down-shift by 500 calories. Two times a week for the fourth week only, subtract 500 calories from your diet. On Thursday and Sunday consume 1500 calories.
Your body is smart and can quickly become accustomed to consistent patterns. The idea here is to keep your metabolism constantly guessing, which prevents your body from quickly adopting to a certain number of calories it expects to receive, which in turn, helps keep your metabolism efficient.
Once you have successfully executed the calorie shifting diet plan I have described, you need to go back to your regular diet for at least two weeks and only then you can try the calorie shifting plan again.
The recap: Follow your diet for at least one month and consume a consistent number of calories every day. Then, do the calorie shifting plan for four weeks. Then, follow your regular diet again for at least two weeks. And only then, try the calorie shifting diet plan again for another four weeks.