The HCG Diet
- Ruveen Bharij
- Jan 22, 2020
- 7 min read
I remember the HCG diet being such an amazing diet for me. Back in 2011 after I had graduated and had bad experiences with the doctors, I decided I needed to lose weight. I was hardly eating anything and I was working quite a lot as an intern (Pharmacy interns are treated like donkeys in Kenya).
I started to lose the weight but it was a slow process. One fine day, at a family friend's house, she told me about how she was doing the HCG diet. What it entailed was using HCG drops everyday before your meals and you magically lost weight! I was intrigued. I had to try this out. So I asked her to order the HCG diet kit from the USA, there was a specific website aptly named www.HCGdiet.com. Then, me being me, I researched about how to do this diet on my own. Now, there is someone reputable in Kenya who will guide you through this diet, but I do not think it is fair to share that information without getting permissions at this point.
So what is the HCG diet and why does the fad diet work?
It is a highly restricted diet that requires you to eat 500 calories a day! The HCG diet also requires you to take a daily dose of the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG). Available in injections, pellets, sprays, oral drops, and pills. HCG is the hormone produced by the placenta during pregnancy. I used the Oral Homeopathic HCG drops.
In 1954, British physician A.T.W. Simeons theorized that HCG allows mothers-to-be to access fat reserves to feed their fetuses. He published a book, Pounds and Inches: A New Approach to Obesity, in which he suggested that HCG could help people access their fat reserves and achieve weight loss.
So, what Dr. Simeons theorized was that when a woman is pregnant sometimes she may not be able to eat, such as with morning sickness, so the HCG hormone is able to tap into fat stores so that the baby is fed. However, this is an oversimplified way to explain how hormones work during pregnancy and so it is difficult to say whether it is true or not. What Dr. Simeons did discover is that if you restrict your calories and take the HCG hormone, then your body will tap into using fat reserves for energy, with the help of HCG.
So why did I decide to do this diet? Well, because the HCG Diet claimed that you could lose about half a kilogram a day! This just seemed amazing to me! I had to try it. My goal was to lose 10kg and if I could do that in such a short time, even better!
So once I received my HCG diet and had done my research, this is what I had to do:
No Breakfast (Fine with me, I never ate breakfast).
Only water or unsweetened coffee or tea in the morning.
the only meals of the day were Lunch and Dinner
Lunch and dinner consisted primarily on one Protein a little over 100g (Beef, chicken, fish, seafood, fattier meats were off limits).
The meals could be accompanied with only ONE low calorie vegetable.
No cooking with oil.
No starches
No fats
Fruits were only grapefruits, oranges, apples, lemons, blueberries, raspberries and strawberries but only one a day.
Foods could only be steamed, grilled, baked or cooked in water. No Oil.
Drink 2 litres of water a day.
Do not weigh, but rather measure your body daily. The goal was to see inches vanish, not weight.
Do not use lotions or oils on the body that contain fats. (There was a list of approved skin care products e.g. Petroleum jelly)
Instill 8-10 Homeopathic HCG drops three times a day under the tongue at least one hour before each meal.
Before all this could happen, there was a loading phase of one week where I could eat WHATEVER I wanted in order to increase easily accessible fat reserves once I started the diet.
Diet phase (Phase 2) consisted of a whole month.
Maintenance phase was for a month after I was done.
This diet was tough. 500 calories a day is not enough food to function but somehow I was convinced that the drops would mobilise all that disgusting fat I had accumulated and give me the energy to survive. For the first two weeks, I almost gave up. It was hard!! I kept on going because I needed to be thin. I HAD to be thin to be accepted by society. For some reason it had been ingrained in me that if I was not thin then I wouldn't find a man to marry me. That no one would want me or accept me for who I was unless I lost the weight. So I kept going, through the nausea and the headaches. I did the diet for the 45 days that it stated I needed to do in order to reach my goal weight.
I lost 10kg in one month!!
I had reached my goal weight in no time! No exercising, no straining, just eating really bland, disgusting food. If you could call that eating. But, who cared right? I was getting compliments and attention. To this day, I have never looked as good as I did after I did that first round of HCG diet. I still wish I could look like that, but let's be serious, I was in my early 20's. My body was different back then.
However, here's the problem with the HCG diet:
It claims that once you do the diet correctly, your brain will reset and will always make healthier choices when you eat than when you did before. Um... No. There's no way to change your brain chemistry to do that just by eating a restrictive diet.
It claims that you will burn fat and your muscles will not be affected. Again, no. There is no way to guarantee that I did not lose lean muscle mass during that time. Any restrictive diet will cause you to lose muscle first, because it is easier for the body to break down muscles for energy first and then fat later.
It claims that the HCG drops make your body use fat. Let's think about this for a second. Being on ANY restrictive diet will cause you to lose weight drastically. 500 calories a day is nothing. A normal diet for a woman states that you need to have 1500 calories per day.
Restrictive diets like this in the long run are just not good for your body. Many people claim they lose a lot by restricting their diet and doing a "cleanse" after the holidays so that they can lose something like 2-5kg at a time. Yeah.... all you're losing is water weight and many times some hard earned lean muscle mass that you spend so much time at the gym trying to maintain.
I did the HCG diet two more times after that. The second time around was in 2012, because there was a family member's engagement ceremony that I had to look good for. I remember the pressure to look good for this particular occasion, in case there was a potential suitor for me, I had to look a certain way. To this day, I will ALWAYS argue, that if anyone was interested in being with me it should be for who I am and not for how thin I am or how I look.
Looking back, this had been dangerous, I remember being at this engagement ceremony: hot sun, tired, fatigued and felt like I couldn't breathe. For what? So that I could lose 5kg in order to look thin for one day. To fit into a tiny outfit that I just HAD to wear. No one knows this, but I fainted that day. I have never fainted in my life. I had gone to the ladies room to get some rest from the heat but passed out in the stall. Once I came to, no one realised I had been gone a while. I rushed to get something sweet to drink, I knew my blood sugar was dangerously low as I had hardly eaten that day or the day before. I was so HUNGRY that I just ate whatever I wanted and was so much happier for it. Thank God for Rasgullas! (Indian Sweet dish) They saved my life!
The Third time I attempted to do the HCG diet was before I got married in 2014. I didn't even last two weeks. I had serious nausea, headaches and felt sick whenever I ate ANYTHING. I ditched the diet. I lost weight for my wedding the old fashioned way, eat less and exercise more. Because we all know that if your body is in energy deficit, it will lose weight. I had also gone back on the pill so with my PCOS in check and with me exercising, the weight came off but it was a long and slow process over a period of a year.
As you can see, fad diets are not good for you. It works, I can attest to that, but at what cost? Putting your body through so much so that you can look a certain way or be accepted by society can drive you to more serious health concerns in the long run.
Ditch the fad diets, focus on eating foods that are healthy for you while you exercise. I know it can be hard with all the social media and entertainment industries plastering images of young, skinny, beautiful women in order to make you feel like less of a person just so that you can buy into the lie that you are not good enough. This is how they sell fad diets, bogus meal plans and random protein shakes to make you think you are being healthy. (I have paid for so many meal plans online through PCOS websites, that I just gave up)
I know it is easier said than done. I feel you. I have grown up thinking from a very young age that I need to be thin and pretty to be appreciated. It was ingrained that that is how a girl should be. Now that I am overweight I feel like I will never be taken seriously or accepted by society. I look in the mirror and some days believe that I am fat and ugly.
To this day, I wake up thinking my body betrayed me and I should've lost my baby weight by now. I forget to acknowledge that this same body gave me my child. That this same body has never had a broken bone, a serious injury or been hospitalised for any serious disease. I am healthy. I should be grateful.
So ladies, take a step back. Stop comparing yourself to friends and family that lost weight from some diet or the other. Stop comparing yourself to actresses and models who have a whole TEAM of people to make them look the way they do. Stop comparing yourself. PERIOD. You are You. Love yourself for who you are. Self Love and acceptance is the key to being happy and being the best version of yourself.
Ditch the Fad diets, Look after your body, it's the only one you've got!
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