Why the hCG Diet is Likely to Make You Fatter Over Time
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Oh, such irony. When I started the hCG diet, yes, I was skeptical. I know enough about physiology but I had a friend pushing the diet and she had lost some weight quickly. Well, what I didn't know was that her cycle seems to be do Omnitrition's version of the diet, lose quickly, gain it back, go on the diet, lose it quickly, gain it back, you get the idea. Poor thing appears to be on a self-destructive cycle.So, I managed one month of this diet before the low calorie portion of the diet caused some serious health issues. I had to stop.
During a visit for my heart problems, the doctor introduced me to my Basil Metabolic Rate (BMR). What is your BMR? Well, basically this is the number of calories you'd burn if you stayed in bed all day and did absolutely nothing. Of course, chances are you are up and about so you can easily tack on hundreds of more calories and still not gain.
What did the hCG Diet do to my BMR?
I was off the diet by this time and trying the diet without the drops because I found so many people online who had increased their calories to 1000 to 1200 and, without the drops, were losing the same amounts of weight. Best yet, they were having much better luck not getting fat again because they weren't putting their bodies into starvation and survival mode.
Side note here, the hCG Diet is the ONLY diet I've ever experienced where people routinely will go up a lbs or so starting a couple weeks in and have that happen every few days. This is a diet of 500 calories. If you don't see the problem there, you're in trouble!
Anyhow, the doctor originally okayed my hCG Diet without the hCG
(here is that story: www.squidoo.com/hcg-diet-without-the
-hcg ) but once he realized how serious my side effects were from the hCG Diet, he said I really needed to work on getting my health back and to please stay at least around my BMR.
Well, immediately the weight was coming back, even just below it!. This is the amount of calories at which I should be able to be a total couch potato and gain nothing! I'm not a couch potato. I'm a very busy mom who is out and about all day. Even eating those calories and eating healthy, yep, I was gaining. That was just proof that this did a serious number to my metabolism.
Of course, now, I keep talking to people who told me they too gained all their weight back and, many seemed to go over their initial weight. I don't want that to happen.
See, when you do this diet, you slow your metabolism way down. Your body goes into starvation mode. It starts drawing fuel where it can and, in my case, the doctor said my body was cannibalizing my heart. How scary is that. So your metabolism is slowed and it doesn't bounce back. I've heard women say it takes anywhere from a couple months to they've never recovered their metabolism. That is scary too. And, that is why you gain weight after this diet unless you spend your life playing 'Groundhog Day' and doing continuous cycles with this dangerous diet.
No doubt, this diet was a huge mistake.
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Member Comments About This Blog Post:
DJ4HEALTH4/14/2013 10:55PM |  | My sister-in-law was on that diet too but not sure how much she lost but she is also a nurse and went on it still. Delete Comment Report Inappropriate Comment |
| KIM___4/14/2013 4:34PM |  | I've had bad luck cutting my calories drastically. After a month or 6 weeks my body decides it's starving to death and will then eat anything that comes into my path. Slow and healthy wins the race every time. Delete Comment Report Inappropriate Comment |
