When I ran into a friend last week, I had to do a double-take. He had lost 30 pounds since the last time I saw him, and it had only been a matter of weeks. He looked great; I was floored. His secret? The hCG diet. I did a little research online and found out there’s a lot of misinformation out there, so I got together with my afore-mentioned friend to help get the facts straight. Here are 8 facts aobu the hCG diet you should be aware of.
It’s important to know this little fact about the hCG diet — it’s nothing new. The diet’s been around, in one form or another, for decades, since a British-born physician, Dr. Simeons, released his detailed diet to the public in the early 1950s in a book called “Pounds and Inches.” His inspiration? He noticed that women who lived in famine-struck Africa were delivering healthy, well-nourished babies, and that they themselves were healthy while pregnant. The secret, he found, was a hormone, called hCG.
What exactly is hCG? Its “real name” is human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone related to pregnancy. It’s this hormone that Dr. Simeons believed enabled pregnant women to deliver healthy babies, even when they were on an extremely calorie-reduced diet.
So aside from being pregnant, how else can someone get hCG? There are several ways to get hCG for your diet… depending on how you feel about needles, you can get it by injection. But for the rest of us, the ones who don’t like needles or injections, there’s an oral spray.
Now into the nitty-gritty facts about the hCG diet. While you’re taking the hCG, you’ll be drastically reducing your calorie intake. How drastically? You’ll be consuming about 500 calories per day. This is about ¼ of the calories of a regular maintenance diet… and that’s where the hCG comes in, preventing the starving feelings you’d get from such a reduced-calorie diet. My friend did use the spray, and though he only consumed 500 calories a day, down from the estimated 2,800 per day he used to eat, he wasn’t hungry. Ever.
Where do those 500 calories come from? You’ll follow an incredibly specific meal plan, all day, every day, for months. Be prepared to give up almost everything you eat and enjoy right now (including mint tea), and get ready to eat a lot of apples.
This is another important fact about the hCG diet — because your calorie intake is so dramatically reduced, strenuous exercise is not recommended. Once you’ve lost the weight you want to lose, you should add exercise, but during the weight loss phase of the hCG diet itself, you shouldn’t exercise.
I’ve seen kiosks at the mall, books at the store, ads online, all promising the amazing results of their own version of the hCG diet. Beware, as most of these are costly scams. It’s best to stick to the original Simeons diet, or a modern update, like the one Daniel Millen describes in his journal entry here. getridofmyweight.com
After reading all these facts about eh hCG diet, you’ve got to be wondering: does this weird diet work? The answer is, yes. If you find a legitimate source for your hCG, and if you stick to the meal plan, you can lose up to 50 pounds in just a few weeks. Like any other diet, you must stick to it, and like any other diet, it does require maintenance after the fact. But if you follow the diet, and use the hCG, you can lose weight. A lot of weight. Quickly.
Now that you’ve seen these facts about the hCG diet, are you curious to learn more, or even to give it a try? What surprised you on this list? Or is there another fact about the hCG diet you’d like to share?
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