How to Calorie Shift as Healthy Loss Diet

Calorie shifting has become one of the most popular healthy loss dieting technique for rapid, healthy and sustainable weight loss. The difference to other diets: it is faster, safer, doesn't require hard work and you can eat most of your favorite meals with this plan, including fast food (even though it is not recommended).

Correctly applied, you can lose up to 8 or more pounds in less than 2 weeks without actually doing much! In this Blog I explain how I accomplished a constant weight loss over months without starving myself and avoiding the feared rebound effect.

The basic principle of the healthy loss diet with calorie shifting: you have to eat meals up to 4 or more times a day and no snacks or tiny meals are allowed in between. Each of the meals should have different calorie values, but must be a full meal. It is important to drink a lot of liquids, recommended are up to 10 glasses of water a day (but you can also drink sodas, coffee and juices in addition to this). The water is essential to speed up the weight loss process as it helps to flush out the food and to keep the metabolism high. For me it was very interesting to learn that if you just drink water, disregarding the calorie shifting diet altogether, you are going to lose weight but not as quickly as if you follow the Healthy Loss Diet with calorie shifting.

Eating meals with different calorie values and types of food results in a unique reflex in your body raising the fat burning metabolism and keep it high for as long as you keep doing this calorie shifting diet. Metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that occur in living organisms in order to maintain life, including calorie-burning processes. With an increased metabolism you are even burning fat while you sleep! It has been proven that combining 4 different meals each day, drinking plenty of water and shifting calories is the best way to accelerate your metabolism. 

As the Calorie Shifting idea is unusual and goes against many dieting rules and standards, it has been dismissed by many people being a scam. I assure you that this is not true! Calorie shifting works and anyone who tries this diet quickly finds out how shocking the weight loss effect is. It's just something you have to try to believe.

There are many ways to approach with this diet but here I explain you how I succeeded: 

As a first step, you need to analyze carefully what type and quantity of food you are consuming on a daily and weekly basis. It is highly recommendable to write everything down in a notebook – and please don’t forget things like soft drinks, coffee with sugar, etc. If you have a well-established eating routine, it should be ok to do this exercise for one week. If you are changing frequently food type and quantities, you should perform this counting for at least one month.

The next step is to calculate the calories you are consuming per day. I am posting a Food and Calorie Finder at the end of this blog that I used at the beginning to calculate my daily calorie uptake. After starting with this easy tool I decided to purchase the "Beyond Calories dieting handbook" which includes a sophisticated and practical online Diet Generator. With this software you select the foods you want to eat and the generator prepares a diet plan for you - very convenient. 

Once you know the daily calorie consumption over a certain period, you are able to calculate the average daily calorie uptake. The average daily calorie intake varies from person to person and depends on a variety of factors like lifestyle, but for adult women it should be in the range of 1940 and for adult men in the range of 2550 calories.  

Once you established your calorie baseline, you can start with daily variations of your calorie uptake. In order to lose weight you need to eat fewer calories per day than your body needs. To lose for instance 1lb a week, you’ll need a negative calorie balance of about 500 calories per day. To lose weight at 2lb a week you’ll need to reduce your calorie intake by approximately 1000 calories a day. These are values for purposes of orientation only and may vary depending on individual metabolism characteristics.

Considering my Body Mass Index and personal weight loss goal, I decided to reduce my daily calorie uptake by 500 calories (accumulating to a reduction of 3500 cal per week) thus achieving an average intake of approximately 1900 cal per day. I choose this "soft" version of calorie shifting as my goal was a steady and smooth weigth loss without starving myself. I distributed my personal daily calorie uptake as followings

• Monday: 1300 cal
• Tuesday: 2000 cal
• Wednesday: 1800 cal
• Thursday: 2500 cal (more physical activities at work)
• Friday: 1300 cal
• Saturday: 2700 cal (my “Pizza family day”)
• Sunday: 1700 cal

With this strategy and consuming the appropriate food as I explain below, I was able to loose 6 pounds in the first month, 4 pounds in the second one and again 6 pounds in the third. I found it easy to continue this diet plan (you don't feel hunger all the time as with other diets...) and to further reduce or maintain the achieved weight, whilst avoiding the feared weight loss plateau as well as the rebound effect. Other people applying this diet did even better as they reduced the calorie uptake more drastically and also increased their physical activities considerabley.

My "active weight loss" part of the diet is now several months ago and routinely continuing with the basic rules of this diet I manage to adjust and to maintain my weight inside the green range of the Body Mass Index (a BMI calculator can be found at the bottom of this blog) and I feel much better and healthier now. As a "side effect" I was able to normalize my elevated Cholesterol and Triglycerides levels, principal cause of high blood pressure and occasionally detected elevated blood sugar levels.

Which Type of Food is Required for Calorie Shifting?
The calorie shifting diet is not a food-specific diet like low-carb or low-fat diets, etc. It does not really matter what you eat, as long as you do not exceed your daily calorie limit. But this does not mean that it doesn’t matter what you eat. You imagine that it is not ok to eat fast food with grease saturated French fries every day - the point is that your body gets a balanced food following if possible the Food Pyramide. The Food Pyramide is a government created guideline for "healthy eating" and was developed considering the results of hundreds of scientific studies. Be aware that following these guidelines alone will not produce the desired weight loss effect, at least not in a short term (a discussion can be found in this article).

Here are the basic 8 rules of the Calorie Shifting Diet that I followed:

1. Stop eating once you are satisfied – do not eat until you are too full;
2. Eat exactly 4 meals a day, leaving a gap of 2.5 to 3 hours between each meal;
3. You have a choice to eat any of the 4 meals in any order throughout the day;
4. Eat only the foods prescribed to you according the calorie shifting meal plan;
5. Eat each day different food, from meats to fruits and vegetables;
6. Change the calorie uptake each day randomly in order to avoid that the metabolism gets used to the diet;
7. Take a 3-day break from the diet on days 12 through 14 of your diet, before you may resume the diet again. This is important to give your body a chance to rest from the rapid weight loss that you will be experiencing;
8. Stick to the calorie shifting plan – be honest to yourself.

In order to be successful, I recommend to add the following rule:

   9. Combine the diet with a Cardio Exercise program (read this article to understand why this is important).

Calorie shifting diets come in many flavors, and I am not going to describe them all. My objective is to give you a tool that you can apply to any diet of your choice, enabling you to create your own calorie shifting diet.

Leading promoter of the Calorie Shifting Diet is “Beyond Calories” who provides unlimited access to a diet generator and a Calorie Shifting handbook.

Following strictly their diet plan, developers of the Fat Loss 4 Idiots diet claim that dieters are able to lose 9lbs in 11days. Well, based on my experience I feel that this is somewhat wishful thinking. In an approach to get more realistic performance data, I talked to 5 friends and relatives using the Fatloss4Idiots diet plan already for more than three months (most of them very consequent) and evaluated their weight loss results. As a modification of the original Fat Loss 4 Idiots diet plan, which does not require specific physical activities, all of the interviewed dieters were exercising more than usual during the application of the diet.

As a conclusion, the average weight loss in about 14 days was only 7.6lbs instead of the claimed 9lbs in 11 days (resulting in an average weight loss of 6lbs in 11 days). Evaluating the results was complicated by the fact that several evaluated persons did not control their weight on a daily basis.

Although we believe that the 9lbs is only an estimation, we still think that it is not truthful and honest in providing such an excessive claim. Overall, the average result of our "test persons" is still quite impressive and without exception all of them expressed their satisfaction with the performance of the diet. Several of them also mentioned the quality of the customer service of the Fat Loss 4 Idiots team.

The handbook provides a comprehensive information on what kinds of food that will encourage fat burning, what food to avoid during dieting etc. etc. It is definitely one of the better weight loss ebooks I have read during the past years. Overall, it is professionally written with very comprehensive explanations. For me the most interesting part: when you purchase the Calorie Shifting Handbook you'll get an Online Diet Generator which I found very useful for putting together daily diet plans. I bought the handbook together with the online diet generator for $78 which definitely was worth the investment. If you visit now there homepage, you'll get the same package for only $39 (as I understand, this is a limited time offer).

And: This is a one-time investment as there are no follow-up costs (as with other diet plans where you need to purchase dietary supplements, etc.)!

Visit the Calorie Shifting Diet Homepage