My Personal Experience With HCG

I'm trying the HCG diet for a second time right now. It is for this reason that visions of gooey mountains of pizza will come suddenly and unbidden into my mind's eye, followed by a deep and sincere longing for bread, cookies, and all other things made of refined flour and sugar.

You've been living in a hole in the ground if you haven't heard about HCG yet, and you're probably thinking it's the biggest crock in the world simply because it's so hyped up. I can tell you that unlike most other diets (which for me includes eating healthier and exercising), it actually works. I studied it a long time before I took the plunge the first time in order to understand what it was I was putting into my body.

In a nutshell, you take HCG drops (or injections) every day for 23 days while following a very low calorie diet (500 calories/day) for 24 of the total 26 days. HCG is Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin, which is a misnomer because it isn't a sex hormone (oops! Those silly scientists jumped the gun!). It's a hormone that pregnant women secrete in order to allow the body to break down and utilize abnormal fat (that fat you can never get rid of no matter how hard you try) so that the bloodstream is constantly providing nourishment to the fetus even when the mother isn't eating every single minute. Taken by injection or sublingually, HCG allows the body to break down and get rid of abnormal fat when used in conjunction with a very strictly limited list of foods eaten in a precise order. And you don't even have to be pregnant! Goodness knows I've NEVER lost weight by being pregnant, even with all that throwing up.

I take the sublingual drops, which work just as effectively as the injections for me. If you're thinking of starting the diet, let me give you a few helpful tips.

1. Do NOT start the HCG diet when you know you'll be faced with a holiday or event that traditionally involves large amounts of family and food in the same room -- especially if you are the cook. I did my first session during Thanksgiving and the Christmas season last year, and I ended up cheating constantly because of the temptation. I'm no stoic. I like fudge. And mashed potatoes. And Christmas pudding with virgin brandy sauce. Although I still managed to lose 12 pounds in 26 days, my advice to you is to pick a very dull couple of months, say January and February or April and May. You can manage to skip the Valentine's chocolates (buy the chockies on sale right after Valentine's and stash them away for when you can put sugar back into your diet. Better yet, don't buy them at all) where the long weekends of Thanksgiving and Christmas will probably do you in.
2. Sublingual drops from a reputable source are just as good as the injections, I think. At least, when I was following the rules, I was losing an average of a pound a day. Every person is different, but that's my opinion.
3. When they tell you to eat as much fatty food in the first two days of the diet as you can handle, just thank your lucky stars and dig in. Skimping on those first two days means you'll have more side-effects like headaches later. Besides, at what other time are you ever going to have a diet that encourages, nay, DEMANDS, that you shove doughnuts and pizza and hamburgers down your gullet until you're ready to explode?
4. After those first two days, when you start on the restricted, strict 500 calorie a day thing, you're going to be playing mental games every single moment. The "no hunger diet" advertisement makes me die laughing -- at least for the first week. Your brain will be shouting at you how hungry you are, how stupid you are for thinking you aren't good enough and need to go on this stupid diet for stupid society, even if you really want to get to a healthier weight. Take it one hour at a time and keep yourself busy every single moment. Drink lots of water in the morning and then have lunch and dinner.
5. After the first week, your body will actually get used to it and be much happier. In fact, you'll start feeling pleased with how light and clean you feel inside, which is probably the effect of not grabbing a taste of every delicious food that passes your nose (I am speaking of myself here). As you see the scale go down every morning -- or nearly every morning -- you'll also have the incentive to keep going. When I'm weak, I also remember the money it cost me to buy the drops in the first place and that, once opened, they're only good for 30 days. That helps a lot, too.
6. If you are not already instructed to do so, take a liquid Vitamin B12 supplement every day. B12 helps the HCG get more easily absorbed into your bloodstream. I've found it helps me immensely.
7. Recognize that your body is going to think it's pregnant. I have no idea how this translates for men, but for me, my face is breaking out, I occasionally have a mood swing (not too many), and I tear up at tender commercials. Okay, that might be normal, but I'm saying that I DO feel pregnant -- minus the morning sickness, which is its saving grace. If I was throwing up and feeling nauseated all the time, no slick advertisement or thoughtfully written scientific paper in the world could make me do this again.
8. Follow the regimen. There are books now that have great recipes for the HCG phase. I keep it pretty simple, though, and my meals take about five minutes to prepare. Example lunch: 100 gram tilapia filet fried on a hot skillet with a touch of cooking spray and seasoned with salt and pepper; one medium sliced tomato seasoned with salt, pepper, and vinegar (I do cheat there because I douse them in malt vinegar and not apple cider vinegar, which often gives me a tummy ache); an optional two slices Wasa light rye bread (when I started last year, NO STORE IN THIS TOWN had any Melba toast. I figured I'd try Wasa, and I haven't noticed a problem, except that it's completely tasteless and so utterly dry that I have to pile my tomatoes on top of it for flavor. It is easier on my teeth than Melba toast, however.); an apple; and lemon water or Pero with no sugar.
9. Endure. If you're feeling really weak or light-headed all the time, you might not have a good source of HCG and are actually just starving yourself senselessly. I'd say stop the diet and eat more calories. Otherwise, do your best to stick with it. When I had a microscopic taste of Husband's fudge (seriously, so tiny you could barely see it!), I immediately had a carb craving so badly I almost lost it. I'm the principal cook around these parts, and tonight I made one of my favorites for my family -- chicken-chili-cheese enchiladas -- but I did not succumb to temptation. Husband helps me out by pretending the food I make is absolutely disgusting and pulls faces to show me he's barely choking it down, even when he goes for seconds. It's very kind of him.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Right now I'm on Day 8 and I've lost 6 pounds. Yes, I could eat an entire football team sculpted of pizza if you put it in front of me, but it's not bothering me so much. It's mostly because I like the taste of pizza and I like to eat, but I'm again recognizing the difference between true hunger and bored hunger.

This entire post, though absolutely true, is also a keyword experiment. We'll see what happens and I'll tell you why I would conduct such an experiment later.

UPDATE: 12/04/2012
For any of you who have read this wondering if you should try the HCG diet, I want you to know I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT! Not only do you pretty much starve yourself silly during the diet, but you are putting your body into starvation mode. This means that once you quit, you'll quickly regain all the weight and some extra because you've now damaged your metabolism and screwed up your hormone balance. You're losing muscle during the diet, and when you regain the weight (it's pretty much inevitable you'll regain the weight, mark my words!), it's fat. Fat tissue produces different hormones than muscle tissue. Fat tissue encourages more fat retention. Muscle tissue burns calories far faster than fat tissue. There are no miracle pills or diets.

Check out more at this more recent blog post.