What is the HCG Diet?
HCG works on fat. It is known as the pregnancy hormone. It’s chewing away your fat. Basically, what you’re doing is you’re detoxing it through your liver, kidneys. You’re flushing it with a bunch of water and you’re excreting that fat on a daily basis. You are sticking to 500 calories. Your daily intake is less than you’d prefer it, but you’re actually not hungry because your body thinks you’re eating about 2500 calories a day.
Most people do lose about a half a pound to a pound a day. We have two programs; 26 and 46 days. At DreamBody we only use prescription-strength, injectable HCG for our diet patients. We have seen other companies promoting liquid HCG, intranasal HCG, sublingual, under the tongue HCG. We find that these methods just don’t work as well as injectable. We’ve been doing injections for about three years with our patients and the success rate is extremely high. Most liquid HCG that you take by mouth is very watered down and if you can get it over the counter, it’s probably 95 % water.
The patients that we see coming in for HCG are men and women, all ages. The most important thing to know is with women if you’re still menstruating that you do the diet after a cycle. But everybody’s a candidate. It’s a very, very safe diet. HCG is definitely safe for both men and women. Men think that yeah there’s a chance of pregnancy because it’s the pregnancy hormone and that’s not true. It actually works a little bit better on men. Men seem to lose more weight on the diet and in a little bit of higher dosage it actually increases men’s testosterone levels. Overall, they feel better.
Some precautions that you should take on HCG would be eliminating or doing very little exercising and avoiding constipation. That’s probably our number one complaint because of such few calories. Drinking a lot of water, knowing that ahead of time, preparing your body for that, is a big help. Most people lose about a half a pound to a pound a day on the HCG diet. I’ve seen with larger men that they lose a little bit more than that. Most of our patients that come in for HCG also inquire about liposuction. They can definitely be done hand-in-hand.
We do a fair amount of both diet recommendations; liposuction and HCG. The liposuction, though, is permanent. HCG is not, but they’re both pretty successful. HCG can be done at the same time as liposuction, just prior to a procedure or just after a procedure. You get the ultimate best results doing both because you’re getting every bit of fat off that you can. Eating 500 calories a day on the HCG diet is definitely safe while you’re taking your injections. Only because the HCG is chewing up about 2000 calories of your fat. You’re putting in 500 so your body’s thinking it’s eating 2500 calories a day so you’re not hungry throughout the day. HCG actually preserves lean muscle mass so the HCG will not attack any part of the muscle. It just attacks the fat.