Combine Calorie Shifting with Smaller Meals for Maximum Fat Loss!
Have you ever gone on a low-calorie diet, had great success for the first 2-4 weeks, and then stopped losing weight no matter what you tried? This is a common occurrence when starting a new diet, but these weight loss plateaus don’t have to prevent you from reaching your goal weight.
Calorie shifting is one of the newer weight loss discoveries that helps dieters lose weight steadily and quickly. Another weight loss strategy that is used by models, actors, and fitness experts is eating smaller meals more often. I’ll discuss how you can combine calorie shifting and eating smaller meals more often to maximize your fat loss!
First let’s look at Calorie Shifting. It’s a simple principle – take the caloric intake your body requires to lose weight (baseline), and shift your calorie intake up or down by a certain amount. The reason for calorie shifting is that when you follow any particular diet plan over a long enough period of time, your metabolism adjusts to the new caloric intake and can kick into a lower gear to conserves its’ fat reserves. This reduces or stops your weight loss – and results in weight loss plateaus. Calorie shifting solves this problem by fooling your metabolism. The higher calorie days keep your metabolism ‘up’ and during the lower calorie days you burn off excess fat. In this way, you never stay in low calorie mode long enough for your metabolism to slow down.
Before we look at an example of calorie shifting, let’s remember that fat preservation is designed to keep us alive as a species, since fat loss used to mean that we would starve over time. Through genetic programming, when we had periods of feasting we would store food as fat on our bodies. We would then use the fat later when food was scarce and our metabolism would slow down to preserve as much fat (energy) as possible. The problem is that only recently – in the past hundred years or so – food production technology has given us all consistent, abundant and inexpensive sources for most foods. Of course we end up getting fat and staying fat as a result!
A. Calorie Shifting Example:
- Find your daily caloric baseline to lose 1 pound per week. Each pound of body fat = 3500 calories. That works out to a 500 calorie daily deficit (3500/7days = 500) to lose 1 pound a week. Use the BMR widget below to determine your daily required calorie intake. It also tells you your daily required calories to lose 1 pound a week.
- Adjust your daily calories according to a loose schedule.For example: Week one, for 2 days out of that week increase your caloric intake by 200 calories. Week two, for 2 days out of the week decrease your intake by 300 calories. Week three, for 2 days you’d increase by 400 calories, and the fourth week you’d decrease for 2 days by the 400 calories.
- At the end of 4 weeks go back to 2 weeks of eating your standard weight loss calories. (Some plans allow for a day or two of cheating at the end of 4 weeks.)
What’s happened now is that the term ‘calorie shifting’ has been broadened to include other types of diet plans where you shift macro nutrients. Sometimes these plans are called carb rotation and other times they’re lumped into calorie shifting plans. One such plan has you shift between low carb/protein days and moderate carb/protein days. For example, on day one you eat a high concentration of veggies and lean proteins, and day two you eat mostly protein with a little fruit, and so on. The point of this eating plan is again to fool the metabolism.
B. Eating smaller meals more often:
So now that we know about calorie shifting let’s look at eating smaller meals more often. If you eat 5-6 smaller meals evenly distributed throughout the day, rather than 3 normal sized meals and a snack, your body actually burns more fat, assuming you eat the same number of calories total. With smaller meals, (or mini-meals) you eat 2 hours apart so that your metabolism continues to run efficiently, burning more calories than when you wait the normal 3-4 hours between meals. Mini-meals also keep the body from insulin spikes after larger meals, which keeps you from adding to your fat stores.
Putting it all together for maximum fat loss!
The combination of calorie shifting and eating smaller meals has been shown to boost weight loss efforts noticeably with dieters. That’s great news, but you may think that following a calorie shifting diet sounds complicated – and you’d be correct under normal circumstances. The good news is that the diet industry has a number of excellent plans that include some form of calorie shifting combined with eating smaller meals. These plans have automatic meal planners to make things simple for you, so you don’t end up counting calories either.
If you’ve struggled to lose weight in the past, we recommend that you give one of these new diets a try. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results. We’ve reviewed one of the popular plans – and you can read our review here -> FatLoss4Idiots
Read Our Top Diet Reviews: |
|
Great article, thank you. I am very interested in finding a diet that lowers my sugar intake. I currently have a sweet-tooth, and am finding it difficult to find meal plans, what to eat for snacks, etc. While diabetes is not something that runs in my family, I am still concerned and would like to be smart and take a proactive approach to my health.