In the United States, there are more people who are overweight than there are who are not. Consequently, thousands have tried different diets, and in most cases, found these diets to be sadly lacking. Most of them might get rid of a few pounds, but only a few, and they don't usually keep those pounds off.

But help has arrived for these folks: It's a revolutionary dieting technique known as calorie shifting. Whereas most diets fail to take into account certain natural tendencies of the body, the calorie shifting diet does recognize these tendencies, and uses them to your advantage.

Traditional diets all involve to some extent or another depriving your body of the calories and nutrients it needs to operate. They attempt to force your body to use up its fat to stay functioning. This approach can simply never work. Starving is painful - your body breaks down muscle to stay alive before fat, and after some time has passed anyone and everyone starving themselves will break down and eat.

Then of course, eventually you will start eating again - usually reverting back to your old patterns. Now things get really ugly. Your body still thinks there's a food shortage, and so as soon as you start eating, it starts converting more food into fat than ever before. It does this so that in the future, it won't be caught off guard again without a sufficient fat supply. So now, the result of your diet is more fat and less muscle. And you likely feel guilty because of your "failure" on top of it all!

So now let's consider how calorie shifting does things differently and gets better results. With the calorie shifting diet, you eat four or five times a day instead of just three. Your meals consist of foods you really like, but you alternate them with low-fat ones. And you never eat the same amount in consecutive meals, on consecutive days, or even in consecutive weeks. You're always doing your meals a bit differently, with one goal in mind: You never want your body to adapt.

Feel free to eat until you're no longer uncomfortably famished. However, never eat until you're full. The whole point is to make your body have to continue to adjust to the foods you eat, all the while causing it to tap into your fat reservoirs to replace the energy that you're stealing from it in the form of calories.

The net effect is that you are able to stay on the diet since you aren't starving yourself, while preventing any muscular damage by letting your body use its fat stores instead of muscle tissues to make up for the lower calorie intake.

As with any diet plan, a calorie shifting diet plan will benefit greatly from even a small amount of exercise every day - say a short walk to start. You may find yourself enjoying it, and increase your exercise amount later, or don't; it's completely up to you. The best thing about a calorie shifting diet plan is that there aren't the risks associated with exercise while starvation dieting. If you are using more calories in exercise, you will naturally compensate by eating more - a calorie shifting diet plan allows for that.

Calorie shifting is an approach to weight loss that keeps food enjoyable yet nutrious, and makes it easier to lose the pounds and then keep them off. It's something that anyone serious about long-term weight loss should consider.