HCG & Me

I have been on a diet.  A diet that I didn’t tell anyone about except Russ & my kids; I felt kind of dumb talking about it because it sounded so extreme.  A diet that has worked better than my wildest dreams.

So now I’m going to talk about it!

 

Several years ago we bought a treadmill.  I worked and watched what I ate and lost some weight and felt pretty good about myself.

Then, 18 months ago, my doctor decreased my thyroid medicine dose.  At the same time, without announcing it, the medicine manufacturer changed their formulation.  My body did not approve of the change, but between our crazy travel schedule and the slowness of thyroid changes in the body, it was 6 months before I was taking the correct amount of thyroid hormone again.

Six months and 15 pounds.

I was so frustrated, and couldn’t motivate myself to work towards losing this weight again.

I heard about the HCG diet from one of my cousins and another friend at about the same time.  My cousin learned about it from an MD in her ward that was on it; my other friend is a naturopathic doctor.  So I figured it came pretty highly recommended.  Once I read the protocol, written by an Italian doctor about 50 years ago, I decided that it made sense to me and I wanted to give it a try.

The short version is:  In 5 weeks I lost 22 lbs and lots of inches. 

Please excuse the fact that my black shirt doesn’t match my black skirt.  I was so excited to wear this new skirt that I bought on my shopping trip with Ramona that I didn’t realize that I would need a shirt that could be tucked in to wear with it.  And for the last 22 years I have carefully bought shirts to wear untucked, to cover up the fat in my hips and tummy that I’ve had since being pregnant the first time.  (Sure, the tummy got markedly worse after my last pregnancy.  But the hips were about the same from my first pregnancy, regardless of what I weighed or how I exercised.) 

So now the long version, if you’re interested.

Dr. Simeon’s protocol uses the hormone HCG, or Human chorionic gonadotropin.  Normally when you diet you can lose your normal fat reserves (which is good) and your structural fat.  (This is bad, because structural fat is fat your body actually needs.)  Dr. Simeons realized that when a patient was given HCG their stored fat (normally inaccessible) moved to different places on their body.  His theory was that patients taking HCG and eating a restricted calorie diet might be able to burn that stored fat, and that was true.

I used homeopathic HCG, and it worked great and was very reasonably priced.  Here is how the diet works:

Phase 2—HCG drops 3x a day (We ignore Phase 1 which was made up by someone else—but everyone calls the starting point of Dr. Simeon’s protocol Phase 2.)

• first 2 days—eat everything you can, and lots of high fat foods.  This fat loading is to help get through the next 2 days when your body won’t have enough HCG in it yet.
• next 21-40 days—very low calorie diet.  This sounds extreme and people were just horrified when they heard about it, but I promise after the first 2 1/2 days it wasn’t bad at all.  I had to figure out where during each day it was best for me to eat (the protocol recommends skipping breakfast but my body needs a little protein in the morning) but aside from that it was not a problem.  The HCG definitely keeps you from being hungry—I remember thinking about phase 3 and wondering how I would ever be able to eat 1500 calories a day! 
• last 3 days—stop taking the HCG but do 3 more low calorie days so that the HCG is out of your system.

Phase 3—No carbs and no sugars for 3 weeks, but whatever else you want.  This is to help your body’s fat burning mechanism reset so that when the diet is done your don’t store an abnormal amount of fat again.  I’m almost done with this phase and my weight has stayed just the same.  In fact I’ve had to increase what I’m eating some days to keep from losing any more.  (Phase 3 is to stabilize, not to lose more.)

Phase 4—The last phase is where you gradually reintroduce regular food into your diet, weighing each morning to check your body’s response to the new food.  This way you’ll know what your trouble foods are and be able to be careful eating them.  From everything I’ve heard and read, if you’re moderately active and eat a relatively healthy diet, you are able to maintain this weigh loss. 

I can’t tell you how excited I am about this.  Having most of my wardrobe not fit has never been such fun!