It’s Not A Race, It’s A Journey

Calorie cycling more commonly known as calorie shifting is an eating pattern that allows us to go from low calorie and high calorie periods. 

Calorie shifting enables you to eat all the foods that you want to, it is just the number of calories that you eat on certain days differ. 

Calorie cycling can help to improve our weight loss goals, feel less hungry and actually enable us to stick to our goals. 

If you did a conventional diet, it is most likely you will fail. This is because once you come off the diet, you return to your previous habits. Also, alongside this, diets actually cause a negative impact on metabolism. This occurs because your body believes that it is in a dangerous state and wants to survive and save energy.

Dieting increases our hunger hormone ghrelin and decreases the hormone leptin that makes us feel fuller and satisfied. Through calorie shifting, this can reduce the negative impact on our hormones. 

One way to implement calorie cycling is to have higher calorie days each week. This could be 6 days low calorie, 1 day high calorie or 5 days low calorie, 2 days high calorie. Some may prefer to have routines. This may be to add more higher calorie days following a few weeks of lower calorie days. It all depends on how your body responds. 

If this is combined with exercise, then higher calorie days should be on the days you train more intensely and the lower calories for when you have less strenuous workouts. 

Many people do well with structure when it comes to weight loss but change is always good. The main ingredient is to choose wisely when it comes to eating extra calories.