Calorie Shifting Review - Is this Diet useful for a Healthy and Rapid Weight Loss?

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Calorie shifting is a weight loss approach that focuses on eating patterns, rather than on what types of food to eat or have to avoid. The result is supposed to be a rapid and safe weight loss without starving yourself. This blog describes my personal experiences with this diet. 

Calorie Shifting Review

After several intents with different weight loss diets, I decided to give it a try with the "Calorie Shifting Diet", a diet promoted in Internet as "Beyond Calorie Diet". The diet is claimed to result in a faster  and sustainable weight loss and for being more economic and healthier. This blog describes my experiences with this diet and you will understand why I chose this method and stoped wasting money on diet pills and doing other unhealthy things for losing weight - and maintaining this.  

Many of the popular programs, supplements and diets currently on the market help people lose weight. In general if you follow a calorie reduced diet you will drop some pounds. But that is only half the battle. The real challenge is keeping the pounds off once they have been shed. Common diets often advise people to reduce or eliminate certain type of foods from their diets, such as carbohydrates, fat or even proteins. The immediate result of these diets in general is a short-term weight loss but the body’s metabolism usually adjusts after a few days to the new eating regime by slowing down in an attempt to conserve energy. In other words, your body enters into a "survival mode". But this doesn’t stop the body from craving the foods that it’s missing, though. When those types of foods are consumed again, the body soaks them up like a sponge and stores them as fat to keep them in reserve for the next time there is depletion in the food supply. This explains the so-called “rebound effect": most of the weight that was lost initially - and sometimes even more - is gained back as rapidly as it disappeared during the weight loss diet.

In this blog I describe my experience with a diet called "Calorie Shifting" in a series of postings. This diet was designed to overcome several general dieting problems:

• It is healthier compared to other diets 
• It avoids the rebound effect
• It is cheaper compared to many other diets
• The only diet I found where you do not need to starve
• It results in a FASTER weight loss compared to other diets
• You don´t need to starve!

As a conclusion, the only real disadvantage of this diet I found is the fact that it is a bit time consuming to start with it. The reason is that at the beginning of shifting calories you´ll need to develop diet plans based on the estimated average calorie demand of your body. I did this homework by my own using the free Food and Calorie finder posted below which I found a very helpful tool in developing menu plans and calculating calorie intakes. Once you developed your menu plans, there will be only minor adjustment work involved when you decide to modify a menu using different or changing quantities of ingredients. 

As the Calorie Shifting Diet is not really that straight forward compared to other diets, I decided to present the rationals and applications of this weight loss diet in this blog. Here you will learn how to lose rapidly weight by "shifting  Calories" and how to start even without sofisticated software and guidance. As introduction to the Calorie Shifting Diet, I recommend to start with the following articles:

1. How to Calorie Shift as Healthy Loss Diet - and use the free Food and Calorie Finder as Menu Planer (see bottom of this page).

2. Calorie Shifting avoids the Diet Plateau and Rebound Effects

3. Strengths and Drawbacks of the Calorie Shifting Diet
4. Calorie Shifting - Maximized Weight Loss

As everything in our modern world, there are people who developed tools to make life easier. If you don´t want to invest time in counting calories and developing menu plans by your own, it is easier and faster to use commercial calorie shifting sofware with automatic diet planer which comes together with a diet handbook, called "Beyond Calories Diet". 

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

Why 95% Of Diets Fail and the Healthy Loss Diet Does Not

And Why I Choose thehe     Healthy Loss Diet with Calorie Shifting
Researching statistics about the success of diet plans shows that 95% of them fail miserably. Like the vast majority of people with overweight I already followed several distinct diets (among those: low fat, low carb, low calories) and always with the same result: I managed to lose some weight in the beginning of each diet, though unfortunately most of it seemed to be just liquids and not fat. As a result, I stopped losing weight after a while and gained back what I lost after finishing the diets, and worse - I ended up even fatter than I was before I started each procedure.

The main reason why most diets fail is that they are based on a greatly reduced calorie intake and/or a total avoidance of a certain food group. A low calorie diet, and I have seen people go on 400 calories a day diets, causes our metabolism to slow down considerably and your body to burn less and less fat. The explanation for this: the body protects itself because it thinks we're starving it – we are constructed to survive, even in extreme situations.

The bad part of the story:
After complying with a diet we are going to consume more calories again and as our metabolism is still at low speed after the "bad times" of dieting we are accumulating fat much faster - which is being accumulated by our body as calorie deposit for bad times. And besides, eating 400 calories a day over a prolonged period is very hazardous to your health, even though you are taking supplements like vitamins, minerals, etc. In general, consuming less than 1800 calories a day will not provide you with enough essential nutrients to meet all of your needs. The human body is an extraordinarily intelligent machine. When you cut back on your energy intake (calories) too much, the body perceives this restriction as a threat. As a defense mechanism, your body protects its reserves. The stricter the diet, the more your body will go into famine mode in order to protect itself. Thus, your body slows down. It then becomes easier to gain weight over time. It has been shown that many diets avoiding food groups like carbs or proteins hurt the body because they deprive a necessary ingredient from it, causing potential health problems even after the diet.

What is the Main problem:
Any weight loss achieved through this type of diet schemes is of short term. In contrast, a healthy loss diet lets you eat a reasonable amount of food with a certain supply of all necessary food groups that still helps you to lose weight. And the most important fact is that the diet needs to be sustainable, without the feared Diet Boomerang or Rebound Effect.

Weight loss diets that are too restrictive can be harmful to your health and well-being. For example, cutting out milk products can deprive your bones of the precious calcium and vitamin D necessary for their strength. Eating too few grain products, especially whole-grain products, could mean less fibre and other nutrients that help digestion. There are many other examples as well!

A diet that finally worked best for me, as it avoids all the mentioned pitfalls, is the so-called Healthy Loss Diet with Calorie Shifting (or simply Calorie Cycling). This diet is known already since many years among bodybuilders and other body-conscious people as ideal method to increase the muscle mass without the increase in body fat, which occur with most long-term nutritional programs। This group of people is applying acute calorie cycling, consuming a high-calorie diet for 2 weeks followed by a low-calorie diet for 2 weeks, and then repeating this pattern over and over again. A modification of this bodybuilder diet resulted in an extremely fast weight loss diet which at the same time is healthy as it does not eliminate important nutritients from your diet plan. For me and many other people this healthy loss diet works very well as it does not starve you and at the same time produces a fast and continuous weight loss.

Several friends of mine tried as alternative to this calorie shifting approach the "Burn the Fat - Feed the Muscle" Diet that also has been developed based on bodybuilder diet plans. This diet also has been shown to be an alternative and very successful approach for reducing and controlling overweight.

Well, I tried the Healthy Loss Diet based on Shifting Calories and found it the best bet for me as I don't want to starve myself and at the same time achieve a fast and continuous weight loss.

How Does it Work?
Healthy Loss Diet using Calories Shifting is accomplished by constantly changing what you eat, so that your body doesn't get used to any routine. This causes your metabolism to remain high and your body to burn fat faster and more efficiently.

The Healthy Loss Diet with Calorie Shifting keeps the metabolism high at all times, so your body always burns fat, leading to a rapid and continuous weight loss.

The developers of this diet call it with some enthusiasm the "Beyond Calories" Weight Loss Diet as it really is a diet giving very rapid results that can be applied easily and by everyone. The diet, originally promoted as "FatLoss4Idiots" due to its simplicity, includes a detailled handbook and a menu generator which produces a personal menu to each user. You type in the food you like to eat, and the menu generator takes it into account, so you end up eating much of the food you like, but it always shifts it around. The Healthy Loss Calorie Shifting menu is comprised of 4 meals a day so you never starve. That's why so many people have been able to stick to it for so long and maintain their new weight once they lost the number of lbs. they wanted.

Now you might imagine why this healthy weight loss diet works so well for me and for so many people.

But how to start?
At the bottom of this page you find a Food&Calorie Finder that I used at the beginning to develop my personalized daily diet plans. When I recognized that this concept really works, I searched the web and found a commercial software package to design diet menus based on the calorie shifting diet concept. Since then I am using this software with really exceptional success. I found it quite easy to reduce my weight rapidly but for me the most important factor is that I managed to maintain my weight for now more than two years, just changing my eating style and planning once a week my daily diet. This allows me to take control over the things I purchase in the supermarket, considering also other personal health related facts.

To read more about the diet system I am using and to design my own diet menu plan, check out the following site: Healthy Loss Diet Menu Planning.