Everyone knows someone that has tried the hCG diet, unless you have been living under a rock, or run with an exceedingly thin crowd.
I have a couple of pounds I would love to lose, so I decided that I might do a little research into hCG and find out if there is any center for the hcg diet. I reasoned that anyone who is ready to go on an ultra low calorie diet will lose significant weight, so why add hCG into the diet? Never the less, like everyone else I suspect, I know a handful of family and friends who have tried the diet, and who credit it with their success.
What is hCG
Human chorionic gonadotropin or human chorionic gonadotrophin - is a glycoprotein hormone that is naturally produced purely by women during pregnancy. It is made in enormous quantities; during certain phases of pregnancy a woman might excrete as much as 1,000,000 I.U.’s per day in her urine (thousands of times the dose in the hCG diet). Like other gonadotrophic hormones, hCG can be concentrated from urine.
Dieting with hCG
Dr. Albert T. W. Simeons, a British endocrinologist was living and working in India in the late 1950’s. Dr. Simeons noted in his studies of under nourished pregnant women that they lost fat rather than lean tissue as is usually the case when the body is subjected to a calorie deficient diet. He deduced that the elevated hCG hormone levels found in all pregnant women must be programming the brain to selectively mobilize expendable excessive adipose deposits, in order to protect the developing fetus. Somewhat later in his career, Simeons, while working at Salvator Mundi International Hospital in Rome, Italy, experimented with low-dose hCG injections in combination with ultra-low-calorie (500 cal/day, high-protein, low-carbohydrate/fat) diet. Remarkably, Dr. Simeon had been able to achieve the same loss of adipose tissue without forfeiture of lean tissue that he had earlier observed in the impoverished females of India.
HCG Clinical Studies
Dr. Simeon published his work in a series of papers and books, the most complete of which is called “A New Approach to Obesity”. Dr. Simeon set out to tested his estimation that the hCG hormone found in pregnant women would react in his test subjects in the same way, causing the body to burn excess fat, in response to a very low calorie diet. Dr. Simeon indeed observed that his subjects who followed a very low calorie diet plan enjoyed an increased metabolic rate - an increase as much as 30%, and a corresponding weight loss. More significantly, he observed that hCG “opened only the excess fat cells allowing excess fat to be burned”. No other time, only in the presence of hCG, does the human body make this happen. Simeon observed that in contrast to diets that purely restrict calories, hCG dieters burned the excess fat cells, sparing lean body tissues and needed fat, literally sculpting their bodies, losing inches as well as pounds. More significantly (at least to me) Dr. Simeon observed that his patients were able to maintain the low calorie regimen, without reports of the unusual hunger that plagues most low calorie dieters.
The Promise of hCG for Dieters
Most diets are either followed for are for life, or are finally ineffective, because when you reach your goal weight your hypothalamus (where you have a base weight set in the brain) believes it needs to be at your pre-weight loss weight, so it lowers your metabolism, switching it into a storing mode, and causing the body to re-gain the weight lost. The hCG diet addresses the core of the problem with weight management, according to Dr, Simeon.