With over 40 years of research on HCG and the HCG diet, it is very easy to get bogged down in the data. I will attempt to give you the highlights of all of this data.
First, what are the proposed advantages of adding HCG, in small daily doses, to a diet? Supposedly it has an appetite suppressing effect. This is great if it is true, as it would make sticking to the diet much easier. I always tell patients “calories effect your weight, the type of calories will decide what the weight looks like”, which means that if you want to drop weight (and do not care if it is fat or muscle), drop your calories. If you want to loose a lot of weight quickly, you aren’t particularly concerned with your long term health, cutting your calories to 500 per day will certainly do the trick. In this instance, anything that suppresses appetite will help.
So question is: “Does HCG actually suppress appetite?”. The answer….maybe. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that HCG, when directly introduced to a cell, does increase Leptin. Leptin is a hormone that tells you that you are satisfied and encourages fat to be burned as energy. A few studies even suggest the when directly introduced to fatty tumors, cell size is reduced. This is very promising and does suggest that HCG would aid in achieving the desired results, assuming that it has the same effects when used systemically (effect on entire body).
That is the question that we will address in part 3: Does HCG have a systemic benefit for weight loss?
Tags: diet alone, HCG diet, Human Chrorionic Gonadotropin, weight loss