The debate is ongoing as to if the theory of calorie shifting can improve weight loss efforts. Ask a different expert and you will most likely get a different answer. It is a fairly new concept that has emerged in the diet industry, and it basically encompasses the idea of tricking your body by attempting to trick your metabolism into working overtime.
Metabolism is the rate at which our bodies expend calories and energy, the faster our metabolism rate is, the faster we burn off calories. The idea of calorie shifting is to mix up our diet and make our metabolism work hard because it never knows what to expect. There are a lot of diets on the market today with catch phrases of ‘low fat’, ‘low carb’ and ‘low calorie’. The problem with these diets is that they are not an effective way of losing weight. Why not?
Because its like this – when you start depriving your body of what it needs by diets such as those, it thinks you are starving it and therefore goes into a state of panic and triggers starvation mode. Starvation mode is like a survival mode, it keeps all the calories you take in and slows your metabolism down so that even though you are taking in less calories, you are not going to lose weight, and could even gain weight.
An easy example of this is as follows:
Take a diet of 3000 calories a day, assuming your body burns 2500; it saves the additional 500 as fat. Now, if you start a diet where you are only consuming 1500 a day, your body will not burn any additional calories, and slow down your metabolism to save those calories as fat.
So we know starvation is not the way to go for long-term weight loss, so what is? That is where calorie shifting comes in. If you eat a combination of different calories from fat, carbohydrates and protein for each meal in a day, you will then be consuming different amounts of calories per day. This will trick your metabolism and keep it working overtime trying to accommodate for the calorie shifting.
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