The HCG Diet, Yet Another Fad Diet

A reader sent me a note over the weekend asking me what I thought of the HCG diet. To be honest, I never even heard of it, but hey, I’m always open to learning about new things. So I turned to my trust search engine (hi Google!) and started researching. Here’s what I came up with.

What Is It?

HCG is a diet regimen in which you limit your daily calorie intake to less than 500 calories a day.  At the same time, you inject yourself with HCG, Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, a hormone found in the placenta of pregnant women.

Does It Work?

Assuming you’re still curious after hearing that you’ll have to inject yourself daily with hormones from the a human placenta, then yes, this diet works.  Dah! OF COURSE it works.  YOU’RE EATING 500 CALORIES A DAY! Heck, at 500 calories a day anyone would lose weight and the injections have nothing to do with it.  You can inject me every hour with hormones from the testicles of a rabid hyena and I’m still relatively sure I would lose weight on a diet of 500 calories a day.  It’s not magic folks, it’s simply starving yourself, and the hormone injections are just pseudo science intended to fool you.

Do I Recommend It?

In case that last sentence didn’t get the point across.  NO.  NO WAY.  NOT A CHANCE.  NO CHANCE IN HELL.  This diet is crap.  You’re starving yourself plus you’re injecting yourself with something that has no basis in science.  If you want to starve yourself, be my guest, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s healthy just because some one put scientific sounding words in the description.

Seriously

1. The diet claims you will lose .5 to 3lbs A DAY.  Even if you starve yourself you won’t lose this much.  3lbs lost a day means you burned 9000 more calories than you took in.  Unless you’re Michael Phelps, your metabolism just doesn’t work that way.  Anyone promising you more than 1 to 2 lbs lost in a week is either a quack or a liar, or both.
2. Speaking of liars and quacks, let’s do some research.  The guy who’s selling this diet, Kevin Trudeau, was busted multiple times already.  Once by the FTC for claiming his calcium supplement cured cancer and another time by the FTC because Trudeau “has misled thousands of consumers” about his weight loss plans.  This is the guy you want to buy hormone shots from?  I’d rather take stock tips from my 6 month old nephew.
3. While we’re on the subject of nutrition, the American Journal of clinical nutrition already looked into HCG and guess what they found?  It’s useless.  That was back in the 70’s, but hey, I guess everything old is new again at some point.

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Repeat after me, there are NO quick fixes.  There are no easy cures for extra weight.  There are no magic weight loss plans, no magic pills, no wonder drugs.  You want to be fit and healthy?  Eat healthy, be active and exercise.  It’s that simple.

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