The HCG Diet Scam – How Many Bad Ideas Can You Pack into One Diet?

Just when I thought common sense was finally taking hold, another ridiculous diet from the past rears its ugly head to ruin the metabolisms and break down the bodies of a new generation.

It seems the hCG diet, from the infamous and laughable research done in the 1950s by Dr. A.T.W. Simeon on young boys with underdeveloped gonads, is making the rounds in men and women eager to subject their bodies to anything in hopes of losing weight quickly. Dr. Simeon believed that the use of the hCG hormone was causing these underdeveloped boys to lose weight, so he decided to switch his focus from injecting young boys with a foreign substance to help them develop genitalia to injecting overweight people with a foreign substance to see if they could lose weight.

But what is hCG? Glad you asked. It is a hormone that appears in pregnant women around the 14 week of pregnancy. It is believed that Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hcG) not only helps the developing fetus grow gonads (that’s the Gonadotropin part of the name), it also helps insure that the fetus receives plenty of nutrients during a stage in the pregnancy when the woman may not yet know she’s pregnant, and, in leaner times in history, may not be eating enough for two.

In short, Dr. Simeon thought that injecting healthy non-pregnant people with a pregnancy hormone was the key to weight loss. However, the only way it worked was when the subject dropped their calories to no more than 500 calories per day!

Really? That’s the amazing discovery? Doesn’t it stand to reason that I could inject small doses of Yoo-hoo Chocolate Drink into a person, or place happy drops of sunshine under a person’s tongue (hCG can also be administered sublingually – which doesn’t make it any safer or more effective) and they would lose weight because they are starving themselves on 500 calories a day!!

At 500 calories a day, it doesn’t matter what else you do, you will lose weight! You don’t need any quack telling you to fill your body with pregnancy hormones ( that should be a major RED FLAG!) if you are also going to eat only 500 calories a day!

So yes, I’m telling you that you will lose weight on the hCG diet. You can’t help but lose weight when you are starving yourself. But if you think you’re just losing body fat, think again. When you go on the hCG diet, you’ll also be instructed not to exercise during the 26 – 43 days you are on the diet. This is because you will be too weak to move on only 500 calories and because your body is cannibalizing itself – eating away at it’s healthy muscles – just to sustain itself. Your body will try to preserve as much fat as possible – regardless of what hormone you’ve added to the mix – because it believes it is starving and would rather sacrifice muscle than let go of the fat it may need in a month or two if this “famine” continues.

So once the diet is finished, the bathroom scale may announce a number you like better, but your health – and future ability to fight off body fat – has been compromised… so get ready for the Yo-Yo to bounce sky high. After a body has been through a famine – either real or self-induced (like this diet) – it is stoked to store as much fat as it can. It’s metabolism is shot, it has much less muscle mass (one of the reasons the metabolism is shot), and it wants more than anything to have more fat so that it can survive the next famine/diet. When you return to eating like a normal, healthy person, those fat cells will fill up again and reproduce faster than you can say, “What’s for lunch?” And without the benefit of the muscle you had before, or would have gained from exercising, you will weigh 10 – 20 pounds more than you did when you started the diet, most likely within 6 months after its done.

Remember, the hCG diet is not FDA approved. (hCG is FDA approved as a fertility drug, but not as a diet aid!) There have been absolutely no long-term studies proving the safety or enduring effectiveness of this diet. You are literally risking your long-term health and almost ensuring an unwinnable battle against excess fat in the future. Ask any reputable health professional and you’ll hear the same thing.

I know it sucks, but the truth is there are no quick fixes. Losing weight requires two things that are tough – sensible eating and exercise. Those are the only two things that have EVER proved to work, each and every time. No, you won’t lose 30 pounds in 30 days. But you will lose weight at 1 -2 pounds per week, you will gain self-confidence and the self-respect of doing what your body has been begging you to for decades, and you will never face that awful Yo-Yo factor again.

Do it right. You really are worth it.