Losing Weight with HCG Shots - Personal Trainer Community - Forum

[Liz]

I had two girls stop me today and ask me what I thought about a method of losing weight that involves getting daily HCG shots at their doctors office. I had never heard about this "weight loss fad" so they explained a bit more to me.

Apparently, you get these shots everyday and you can only eat 500 calories per day for about six weeks. I was so irritated upon learning this and told them (in a nutshell), that DUH - anybody who cuts their calorie intake to 500 calories per day will lose weight! And in the mean time, they will also lose muscle, energy and enjoyment in life! Not to mention... they will feel HUNGRY all the time!

They went on to tell me that supposedly, the shots make you not feel hungry and it keeps your energy up. I don't buy it!

The worst part of it is, a rather "popular" doctor in my area is prescribing this in his medical spa and is looked up to as a fit celebrity in our local gym. I'm no doctor, but it just seems to me that this method of losing weight is ridiculous! Shouldn't doctors be promoting exercise and nutritious eating! The crazy thing is, one of these girls is very overweight and one could maybe stand to lose 5 pounds... and yet he told them BOTH that it would be perfectly safe for them! I understand giving someone who is obese something like this to lose a few pounds... just to get the ball rolling. But someone who doesn't need to lose that much?

Am I out of place to be bothered by this?

I am completely opposed to strict "dieting" because I feel like it totally messes you up in your MIND and your BODY. When you can't have something, you just want it more. When you stop the strict dieting, you'll go back to regular eating and gain the weight back. (Although, this doctor claims that it changes your metabolism forever and eventually you can go back to eating normally and will stay thin.) Of course, let's not forget that when you go on a strict diet, you set yourself up for feeling guilt and disappointment for when you slip up - which people will. AUGH!

If you can tell, I am strictly opposed to dieting and I want to find some reason why this HCG diet is bad. I looked briefly online to see if I could find something negative about it, but all the things I saw were positive.

Am I alone in my thinking on this? Have any of you heard of this HCG diet and if so, what do you think? Am I over reacting?

[jlling]

I looked this up (http://www.bodysolutionsrx.com/hcg_study.htm) and got a pretty good laugh. Its essentially the website saying that they did a trial, that wasn't double blind and was designed by the website owners. And if you know anything about trials, this one is a completle joke (ideal trials are double-blind randomized controlled prospective trials, ie. neither subject or tester knows who gets what, samples are randomized, there is only one variable being controlled, and its happening in the present versus retrospective which is looking at trials in the past).

edit: http://www.bodysolutionsrx.com/hcg_study.htm

Liz, I don't think you're in the wrong or out of place for criticizing a diet that requires hormone shots every day. Even before I looked up what hCG was, the 'shots everyday' sounded like a gimmik to get rich from.

From the studies I've seen in my undergrad, after being on any sort of weight loss plan that restricts calories soley as a means to lose will inevitably fail due to the subject reaching their goal weight, returning to their old habits, and gaining it all (if not more) back. The reverse showed true for those who gained weight eating more, then reverted back to their old habits.

However, adding a hormone injection into the mix throws me off since I don't know that much about hCG. My opinion on the matter is that once you stop using whatever it is you're using, you're going to lose the results (unless this hormone addition permanently messes with your body's metabolism, which should raise a few alarms in itself). 500 kcal a day and using hormones to keep your energy up... If ATP levels were an indicator of energy, hCG better mobilize all your fat stores to a lypolytic pathway to generate ATP otherwise I'm pretty sure the body is going to crash. And I'm pretty sure it will anyways since the body can never metabolize only fat as fuel and those 500 calories aren't going to be pure carb.

And on a morbid note, I'm a supporter of natural selection. This new fad plan should clean out the gene pool. :mrgreen: