Rules For Shifting Calories

For a long time, nutritionists and other fitness professionals believed that a net calorie deficit was the only way to lose weight. Although this is essentially true, calorie-shifting diets can help establish a greater calorie loss by changing not only how many calories you burn, but how fast your metabolism burns them. For calorie shifting to work, however, you need to follow certain ground rules.

Calorie Shifting Basics

Calorie shifting is based on the idea that your body doesn't respond to eating habits as strongly as it responds to changes in those habits. If you consistently change how many calories you eat in a day, your metabolism will respond by operating efficiently -- that is, burning more calories in all activities throughout the day. This means a greater net calorie loss and more effective weight loss.

Baseline Calories

When calorie shifting, you still have to make sure that your average daily calorie consumption is still low enough to create the weight loss you want. To do this, you begin by setting a baseline calorie intake -- the average calories you want to take in to reach your weight loss goals. Health counselor Maya Paul recommends against cutting your daily calorie count by more than 250 to 500 calories per day.

Shifting Schedule

To ensure that you have as many low-calorie days as high-calorie days, you should set an eating schedule in which you alternate between baseline days -- days when you eat 300 or 400 extra calories -- and days when you eat 500 calories less than normal. For best results, you should adopt this calorie shifting schedule after you've maintained a successful regular diet plan that is beginning to show slow results.

Nutrition

Calorie shifting allows some greater flexibility in how much you eat, but you should still pay attention to what you're putting in your body. Healthy weight loss plans continue to follow the food pyramid recommendations of the USDA or Harvard School of Public Health -- you'll just eat less of each food in the same proportions. Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School also recommends a multivitamin for anybody undergoing a restricted calorie diet.