Well I found this thread (I just KNEW FreeRepublic.com would have content on this diet) and wanted to report my experiences in case other folks are researching what it’s about.
First off, there sure are a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the diet on the thread. Let me first say, yes, this diet works because it limits you to 500 calories. However, one should ask, how can someone stay on a 500 calorie diet for weeks? The answer has to be something in addition to personal willpower.
Yes, if you’re marooned on a desert isle, you’ll lose weight in the same manner. However, any similarities end there. On a desert island, you don’t have any options. You’d eat what you could scavenge, and you’d be lucky to get whatever calories you could find. On this diet, you eat from a very restricted list of proteins and vegetables, and add only a couple fruits from a selective list as well.
It is not a “made up” diet. It was invented or discovered 50+ years ago by a doctor who, while treating a class of young boys for a hormone deficiency, found that almost all of the treatment group lost weight while on the medicine. It was from this discovery that he investigated how he could apply that to obese women. He came up with a very unique, but highly effective routine that saw 1 pound per day losses.
A fundamental difference between this diet and simply crashing at 500 cals per day is that the hormone, HCG, signals the body to use fat stores for additional energy and not lean muscle mass. I think rational people would expect a starved body to burn whatever metabolically it could during times of starvation. This does not happen if the hormone is taken at the correct dose.
There are many followers of this diet who have monitored their BMI during the course of the diet and found that the weight loss is almost entirely attributable to reduced body fat. A very modest amount of muscle mass is lost too, but this is expected as the body is suddenly not carrying 5-10-15% of the weight it was.
Ok, so that said, my experience on this diet was highly successful. I indeed lost 1 pound per day, just like the protocol said could happen. I was extremely rigorous in my adherence to the diet, not cheating once during the 30 day effort. What’s more, I have lost more than 4” off my waistline. Even more interestingly, in the post-diet regimen, I followed the recommended procedures and lost even more from my waistline, even while not technically dieting. I was certainly not limiting myself to 500 calories!
If you’ve read this thread, you might have seen a nurse tell of a patient who was admitted to the ER and has permanent brain damage due to heart failure, all because of this diet. Come on now. Claiming someone had a heart attack because of a single factor is, well, asinine. Just like Hank Gathers didn’t die because of basketball, someone does not end up having a heart attack because of a single, external influence, except in the most rare of instances. There is always a laundry list of contributing factors. It’s not like they had a broken bone, and you can point at a bicycle and say they fell off it onto that pavement.
I wanted to add one additional feature that this hormone seems to have. When taken in the proper dosage for the subject, the typical hunger feelings are not experienced even though you are limiting yourself to a calorie amount akin to a single, small meal for an entire day, I can report that this was certainly the case for me, as I never felt the hunger one would expect with such a small caloric intake during the entire diet regimen.
I encourage anyone interested to visit the forum: http://hcgdietinfo.com/hcgdietforums/forum.php and read up on what hundreds of people are doing. That site is terrific.
Gunthor, I would love to hear what kind of experience you had if you followed through on this diet.
“Gunthor, I would love to hear what kind of experience you had if you followed through on this diet.”
I started the drops on 16 February at 290lbs. I ended the drops 6 weeks later at (drum roll) 254lbs. Yes, I lost 36 lbs in six weeks. My wife dropped only 20 but she cheated a lot. We have suffered one side effect....apparantly HCG is used as a treatment for infertitlity, we are pregnant. We did not think this was a possibility for a couple of personal reasons.
I had regained about 11 lbs so I restarted the drops 4 days ago. I have already dropped 10 lbs. My ultimate goal is 200lbs give or take....by Thanksgiving. I will have lost 90 total pounds in less than a year, without a rigorous exercise regimen. I will, once I have reached my goal weight begin regular excercise 4 times per week just to maintain that weight loss, I am not interested in being heavy again after losing all that weight.