HCG Diet

What sort of diet is this?

Human Chorionic Gonadatropin is a hormone produced in women during pregnancy that burns away fat from the mother’s body.  While it’s role during pregnancy is to supply nutrition to the fetus, in the diet it simply helps to remove deep organ fat, or visceral fat.

Is this the drops?

No. The drops were unregulated and often impotent.  Many people were buying the drops of supposed HCG and not getting real results.  Fortunately, the FDA recently banned the drops to ensure that counterfeits could no longer be distributed.  Genuine HCG can only be obtained with a prescription from a licensed physician.

How can HCG help?

In the 1950’s, a British endocrinologist by the name of A.T.W. Simeons discovered that the use of HCG when treating certain medical conditions also promoted weight loss at an accelerated rate. While treating certain people in Africa, he noticed that those who consumed only 500-800 calories per day had controlled appetite and lost significant amounts of interior fat deposits (also known as visceral or organ fat).  While a person who normally consumed such low calories would typically enter into “starvation mode,” a bodily condition that actually encourages the storage of fat, people receiving HCG seemed to simply become more fit.  Today, advocates of the diet contend that daily HCG affects the signaling of the Hypothalamus in the brain to encourage fat burning instead of fat storing.  It is also believed that this helps the body to maintain its muscle mass during the low calorie diet as well as decrease hunger. Combining HCG with a low calorie diet has resulted in weight loss of 1-2 pounds per day for many patients. Since 1-3 adults in the United States meets criteria for obesity, many advocates of the diet propose that this could be beneficial toward achieving better health and fitness.

Treatment:

The HCG diet must be prescribed and supervised by a physician. Although preferences regarding specifics may vary slightly among physicians prescribing the program,, the basic principles of the approach include a low calorie diet and the administration of HCG for 23-40 days. The diet is normally consists of 500-800 calories per day with a dose of HCG from 125iu to 200iu daily.  The diet is rarely extended beyond 45 days, since the body builds up a resistance to HCG and should be permitted 3-6 months to reset before utilizing the diet again.