Unless you have been living under a rock – or are one of those that enjoys a naturally thin body – you haveno doubt heard of the hCG diet.
Like most everyone, I have friends and family that have tried the diet, mostly with impressive results. I had a few pounds to lose myself, so I decided to dig in and find out what is at the foundation of that diet.
HCG – What is it?
Human chorionic gonadotropin or human chorionic gonadotrophin – is a glycoprotein hormone that is naturally made only by women during pregnancy. It is put together in prodigious quantities; during certain phases of pregnancy a woman might excrete as much as 1,000,000 I.U.’s per day in her urine (1,000 times the dose in the hCG diet). Like other gonadotrophic hormones, hCG can be concentrated from urine.
Dieting with hCG
Dr. A.T.W. Simeons, a British endocrinologist had been living and working in India in the late 1950′s. While in India, his studies scrutinized a cross section of pregnant women that were plagued by calorie deficient diets. To his marvel, Dr. Simeons recorded that these “starving” pregnant women, reacted differently to their substandard diet when correlated with non-pregnant women undergoing the same diet stress. The pregnant population selectively lost almost exclusively fat tissues, while at the same time preserving lean mass, and providing a disproportionate ration of nutrition to the developing fetus. Dr. Simeons deduction was the hCG had been responsible for the change in the means the body deals with a starvation diet. Simeons, while working at Salvator Mundi International Hospital in Rome, somewhat later in his career, experimented with low-dose hCG injections in combination with ultra-low-calorie diet. Dr. Simeon was largely able to obtain the same loss of adipose tissue without forfeiture of lean tissue that he had earlier recorded 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
According to Simeon, the hCG diet program addresses the basis of the difficulty with weight gain. Most diets are for life, because when you reach your goal weight your hypothalamus (where you have a base weight set in the brain) thinks 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.