Category: From the Blog

As I have mentioned in a previous blog, I told you I would blog about my journey on the HCG Diet. Well, here it goes…

I have done one successful round of this diet before. It works. When I say works, I mean works wonders. I have never done anything like it, nor have I ever gotten results like this. It’s amazing. Let’s take a trip through the good and the bad.

The Good:

• Like I said, this diet works.

• It’s really not that expensive (doing it on your own and ordering the HCG, unfortunately, overseas) and if you follow it to the letter, you WILL lose weight.

• Not only will you lose weight, you will lose “abnormal” fat, not muscle, nor fat from strange places. You will lose it from locations you need to lose it from. Thighs, Belly, Upper Arms, Butt, you know, all those places.

• Following the letter, it’s easy to stick to. There isn’t much choice, so knowing what you need to eat that day isn’t a hard decision. Plus, that makes this diet even cheaper; not a lot of food to buy, no expensive brand weight loss products.

• It doesn’t last that long. That helped me A LOT. The most you can do on the low calorie “phase 2” part of the diet is 42 days. It helped me to say “It’s just 6 weeks out of your life, you can do this.”

• You will lose quickly. Some say a pound a day. That may be true for men but for women it’s a little less. More like .5 to .75 pounds per day. How wonderful it is to step on the scale every morning and see weight loss. I have done every other diet out there just about and never had I seen results like this.

In my first round, I lost about 28 pounds doing a 40 day round. That’s a lot. I looked at it as about 30 pounds in a little over a month. I looked better, I felt better, and finally felt as though my goal weight could actually be reached. I did have a set-back however. I started my first go around ending at Thanksgiving and end at Thanksgiving it did. After your Low Calorie round, you enter whats called a stabilization round, where you stay low carb but add back calories. Yeah well, I ate at Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was my very first day of Phase 3. Bad start. I did continue, beginning the day after Thanksgiving, with Phase 3 and stuck to it, but the damage had been done. I stabilized about 6 pounds up from my last weigh in on phase 2. Not too bad I guess. But see then came Christmas… My Phase 4 began, which is the round you slowly add back starches to see what your body can take and what it can’t, about a week to 10 days before Christmas. Well, that’s around the time I start baking cookies and fudge for everyone. Uh oh. Cookies. Yum. So, on the weight came. For shame. Again though, oh well. I knew I would indulge and indulge I did. At least I didn’t gain all the weight back, and thank goodness I didn’t start eating those things at my before the diet weight. Yikes! Regardless, here I am, back on the wagon. Now let’s take a look at some of the bad.

The Bad:

• You can’t buy it here. Well, actually you can, kinda. You can go to a clinic (or if you are lucky enough to find a Dr. that believes in the diet) and have it all done for you. However, it costs, A LOT. If you have the money, well hey that’s the way to go. Why not have someone give you all the necessities, weigh you, mix it etc. That would be lovely! Alas, I don’t want to spend money like that so I choose to do it the other way, which is, ordering it from out of country. It’s a pain in the butt, but there are good places to get it from, you just have to do your research.
• Homeopathic drops are no longer available. The U.S. FDA has done away with them. Again, there are places online you can buy it, even in the states I believe. I myself have never gone the homeopathic route so I don’t know much about purchasing it that way.
• You have to mix it yourself. Whether you go the way of injections (which MANY MANY do… apparently it isn’t that scary) or sublingual (under the tongue) you have to mix the medication. Now, you CAN buy it pre-mixed but the medication once mixed does not have a long shelf life. So, you order it pre-mixed, then there is travel time to you… It’s just not worth it. It really isn’t hard to mix though. It just seems scary, but really isn’t. Hey if I can do it, so can you. I take it sublingual, meaning I’m a chicken and won’t do injections.
• Scary things online, or the naysayers. You can find plenty of scary things online about this diet. Plenty. Course you can find scary things about just anything online these days. They way I look at it was like this… This diet began in the 1950’s. It has been done repeatedly since then. So, there is a long history with this diet. You would think, by now, we would have heard about those that did this in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s etc. with the problems they now have, but you don’t. Secondly, HCG itself is used daily here as fertility treatments. If it were so dangerous, why are we injecting mothers to be routinely? (BTW, you get so little HCG on this diet… don’t connect the fertility treatment with this!) All I’m saying is we certainly aren’t healthy as fat people either. Then there are the naysayers and boy oh boy you will find them. I just chose to not tell many people around me. Nay all you want. I look Goooood!
• The Food Choices. Yeah, this is a negative. Unless you commit and I mean COMMIT, you won’t do well. Again, this goes back to the “It’s only a month, I can do this” motto. But it’s hard, really hard. In my first round, I did great up until the last week to 10 days or so. I was so over the food. I didn’t want chicken. I didn’t want fish. I didn’t want celery or cucumbers. It was more than “just didn’t want” actually. The food started making me literally gag when I tried to get it down. It doesn’t taste bad by any means. I mean, it’s just chicken right? I don’t know what happened. I just got over the food. This is very bad. I started not eating at all. Very bad. Now, in ‘Pounds and Inches’ he does go into “meat aversion” giving some optional choices if that were to happen. I took those suggestions toward the end. I didn’t lose the weight as quickly, but I was still losing weight. So this go around, I decided to do a 30 day round rather than 42 days. Maybe the 42 was just too much for me.

The last “bad” on the list leads me to this round. This round, I am “going rogue” as they call it. Let me preface this with… if you decide to try this diet and it’s your first time, DO NOT DO THIS. As a beginner, you MUST adhere to the diet itself in the ‘Pounds and Inches’ manuscript.  There are a couple reasons for this. 1. It’s been proven successful. PROVEN. What I am doing has not and is totally a trial thing that may or may not work on MY body with MY metabolism. It may not work with yours. 2. Once you get the hang of the diet, to the letter, and eat something not on the list, you will be able to tell whether it “affects” you or not. If you don’t do the diet straight out of the box, you will never learn what affects you and what doesn’t. The diet is successful straight out of the book for EVERYONE. What I might do, or another person, is not. Like beef. The diet allows you 3.5 oz. of very lean beef for a meal. Some people do great on beef, others will see a stall. It’s all about your body. Starting off adding or taking away things will get you lost.

Another preface: “Going Rogue” is NOT the same as cheating. We know exactly what we should NOT be doing. No starches, no sugars, low calories. You having a piece of chocolate cake and calling it “going rogue” is incorrect. That’s called cheating. That’s called not being on the diet. I once read about someone trying to do this with a “cake” diet. :shaking my head: Anyway…

Now on to what I am doing now. I am doing things differently and trying different things out. I began doing the diet straight on protocol this go around too, but the very first day I gagged a little eating my chicken. It’s like all the memories of those last few days of the last round came rushing back. Well, I know I can’t spend the next 30 days not eating anything, so off on my own I went. I am still minding the calorie count, the low carb count and the low fat aspects of the diet. However, I am adding things here and there to see what works. Such as, I purchased low carb strawberry yogurt from the market. This of course wasn’t available when Dr. Simeons did his study. Many things weren’t. Yogurt it high in protein, has the fruit you are allowed to have, low in fat and carbs (At least the one I purchased is) and I therefore use the yogurt for lunch. They say that it takes 2 days for you body to show it didn’t like it. So far so good with me.

I also have added tuna to the diet, although I don’t know if I will keep it there. You see, tuna, according to the diet, is not allowed. However tuna back then was only available packed in oil. Now you can get it in water. Tuna does have a high sodium count, so I buy low sodium packed in water. Thing is, you can’t use mayo… So it’s dry. I tried adding a spoonful of salsa in it, but it’s still dry. I still lost weight eating the tuna, but I will have to revisit it if I can figure out how to make it better.

Cottage Cheese is another I have added. Non fat cottage cheese is mentioned in the manuscript if you show an aversion to meat. I however bought low fat. Non fat I just don’t care for. So far so good. Still losing weight. I also purchased Broccoli. I haven’t yet added it so we will see.

I am adding things as I think of them. I may even try to add a steak, 3.5 ounces of course, to see how my body reacts. It may hate it. It may create a stall. Hopefully it doesn’t. If it does, I won’t do it again. If it doesn’t, well, hurray for me!

Anyway, that’s it in a nutshell. I am currently on day 4 of the low calorie part of the diet and have lost a little over 4 pounds. I am stopping at day 30 this go around and am hoping I will only have one more round to go (sometime right before summer) to hit my goal.

Thank you if you stayed with me through this whole rambling and good luck to you if you decide to try this! Remember if you need help or have any questions that I might be able to answer, feel free to send me a Private Message in our forum HERE!