Recently, I was on Amazon and noticed in their discussion forums a question about the HCG diet. I only became aware of this diet a few months ago, after someone on Facebook mentioned it.
If you’re unfamiliar with the diet, it is based on the work of a Dr. ATW Simeons, published in his book Pounds and Inches more than 50 years ago. The diet is based on eating 500 calories a day for several weeks, accompanied by daily shots of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), which he claimed would help mobilize stores of “abnormal” fat that is not normally available for your body’s energy needs. After several weeks, people on the diet transition to normal caloric intake with a diet based mostly on whole food (meats, fruits, vegetables, etc.). The cycle is repeated as many times as necessary to attain the desired weight loss.
Interest in the diet was revitalized in 2007 with the publication of informercial king Kevin Trudeau’s The Weight Loss Cure They Don’t Want You to Know About.
Now, anyone who knows me is aware of the fact that I am more than happy to deviate from the mainstream and embrace ideas that at first seem totally whacky, as long as there is solid reasoning and evidence to support the idea. So although I was skeptical when I first heard about this diet, I tried to keep an open mind when researching it. After reading from a lot of different sources, I came to the following conclusions:
- If you limit yourself to 500 calories a day, you’re going to lose fat pretty quickly, but doing so can be dangerous, and if you’re not smart about it, you’re going to lose muscle too.
- If you adopt a diet based on whole, natural foods, you’re probably going to have an easy time maintaining any fat loss, and may even be able to slowly lose weight.
- Numerous independent studies have shown that HCG is no more effective than a placebo when used in conjunction with this diet’s eating plan. Injecting HCG also has some potentially very serious side effects, and of course, it’s not free.
In other words, any successes of the HCG diet can be attributed to the first two points, and there are many other diets that use these principles, especially the second (and if you want to go with a very-low calorie diet for rapid fat loss, there are alternatives that are much more attractive). But because this diet includes injecting something that is not only unnecessary, but potentially dangerous, I’d steer clear of it.
Sifting Through the Garbage
In researching this diet, I noticed a couple of disturbing things.
The first is that, no matter what combination of search terms I used in conjunction with HCG, Google’s first several pages of results were dominated by sites that are owned and operated by companies or individuals selling HCG. To me, that suggests that there is a lot of money being made selling HCG to people who are desperate to lose weight, and the people making that money have a vested interest in people believing that HCG is an essential part of the process. In order to find more objective information on HCG, I had to go directly to sources like WebMD, Pubmed, Wikipedia, and the personal websites of weight-loss professionals that I trust.
The second is that any time I found any information critical of the HCG diet, the comments section would be inundated with people attacking the article, generally not by rebutting the facts but by sharing their own testimonials, usually along the lines of “I’ve been on this diet for 4 days and I’ve already lost 10 pounds.” This happened to me when I posted on Amazon, which caused me to want to write this blog. These people display almost cult-like characteristics, a phenomenon that has been commented on at a few of the fitness forums I visit. My theory is that these people are either being paid by companies that sell HCG, or they are people who have genuinely lost weight on the diet but suffer from confirmation bias preventing them from recognizing that the HCG itself has nothing to do with their success.
Further Reading
If you or someone you know is seriously considering the HCG diet, I strongly recommend that you thoroughly read some of the following articles and come to your own conclusions:
