The Diet in Review

I feel like my tag line (a skeptic takes on the HCG diet) requires me to do a little retrospective of the last 43 days. You know...misty, water-colored memories of the way we were.

When I started this diet, I thought it was absolute horse shit. I had seen a couple of good friends do well on it and had resisted joining them for months while I maintained a small weight loss and recovered from a serious ankle injury. But once my weight started creeping back up and I regained in a month what it had taken me 15 months to lose, I just panicked. I did my research. I talked about it with everyone I know (and most people fell into two camps: very in favor or very against). I weighed pros and cons. I carefully considered. And then I just did it, telling Shannon privately not to be embarrassed or to feel like a failure if I dropped out after a few days. I honestly did not think I could hack being super hungry.

And I was super hungry for the first week or so. I'm told it could be because I didn't load up properly or it could be because I had a lot of sugar detoxing to do. Who knows. But I was super hungry. And you know what? It didn't kill me!  I felt otherwise fine. And I lost a shit load of weight the first week (13.8 lbs the first week alone). I started adjusting my expectations and planned to lose 35-40 pounds; after all, if I could lose almost 14 the first week, surely I could lose 26 more in FIVE additional weeks, right?

Weeks 2-5 were actually pretty easy. I ate mostly chicken and lean, grass-fed ground beef with occasional fish thrown in for variety. I pan fried my meat with no oil in a nonstick pan and usually ate it over a salad of spinach or mixed greens, though I did a lot of cucumber and tomato too. I varied my fruit as much as I could considering I was only allowed to have 4 different fruits. I tried to vary the time of day I ate. I did light exercise (yoga, walking) 3-5 times a week (the advice was to exercise a lesser amount but every day, I did more but not every day). My cheats were so minor that I think they hardly count as cheats, considering I could have binged on pizza or something.

I felt GOOD. I felt physically fine, mentally sharp, and mostly upbeat and positive. I felt so good that I forgot to take my crazy pills for a week (wellbutrin and lexapro) and had a bit of a crash, which manifested itself mostly in feeling really pissed off at everyone all the time. But mostly I felt less depressed and less anxious than I have in years. My theory is that sugar really tweaks my anxiety, but it's a theory I look forward to testing in a very conscious, deliberate way either during maintenance or on my next gorge days.

I don't think I had quite as much muscle strength or endurance as I normally do, but I had plenty to do my daily activities with ease plus some light exercise. I had way more energy at night in the 8-11p.m. time frame than I usually do.

I replaced some of my bad eating habits or routines with better habits: I've been exercising with friends a lot this month (shooting for 3x a week of either walks or pilates classes at the gym). I've been knitting at night while I watch TV (mostly Intervention), which feels relaxing and productive. I know watching TV is not ideal and that reading or doing something around the house would be better, and hopefully that will work well for me soon. I have been blogging a lot here and reading up on the diet, which I think has helped my daytime cravings and habits.

Week 6, I started to get hungry again, and I started to suspect that my body was just DONE, but I stuck with it mostly for bragging rights--I wanted to be able to say I finished the whole t hing. But I lost very little weight (in the following chart, you can see I lost only 1.4 lbs in the last 10 days. That would be a pretty normal rate for me on Weight Watchers, by the way; about a pound a week.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that I didn't lose a little more. My goal was to lose 35-40 pounds (I have now learned that the MD associated with my local group says to stop at 34 no matter what, so I didn't even have a realistic goal in the first place!) and then be better positioned to lose the last 20 or so the old-fashioned way. But I have about 30 left to lose, so I feel fairly certain I'll be doing another round in late January/early February to get the last 30 off. And wouldn't it be nice if I could do it in 4 or 5 weeks instead of 6 weeks? I think Holly (a commenter) is going to do it with me then. Olivia can't start her second round until later in the spring because of various other life commitments, but I know she'll be following along and trying to actively participate in her own maintenance.

So, hearkening back to the pros and cons I did at the beginning before I knew what this diet was about, let me give a new perspective on the pros and cons.

PROS (of this diet, as opposed to diets in general):

1. You lose a lot of weight very fast. This allows you to maintain enthusiasm and will power because it gives you instant gratification.

2. You're eating super healthy food--organic meat, fruit and vegetables, which just makes you feel really good and healthy.

3. Anyone can do this--it's so short! It's only 40 days (or less even). If you hate it, you just have to hang in there for 6 weeks. Anyone can do that.

4. I had plenty of energy the whole time while still losing weight rapidly.

5. My body fat monitor says I have lost fat and increased muscle, despite losing 31 pounds in 43 days.

6. The limited choice of food actually frees you up from thinking about food all the time and figuring out how to game the system. You only have a few choices.

7. My sense of taste is greatly enhanced.

8. I understand more about the difference between cravings and hunger and hope to take that knowledge with me into maintenance and beyond.

9. This has been tremendous validation of my willpower for me, considering I haven't had much faith in it. I almost think a total detox diet like this was the only way I could get out of the sugar rut I was in. Had I done WW or a similar program, I would have cheated because I would have still been eating sugar, which would have let to binges.

10. It is relatively easy, or at least it feels easy. While I have blogged at length about how I think some of the rules are really dumb, they really aren't THAT hard to follow, whether or not you believe them. I swear. I know it looks hard, but it really wasn't. I am giving you the straight skinny here--I'm not selling drops or anything.

11. HUGE health benefits. I have lost 31 pounds, reduced my BMI from 34 to 29 (from obese to merely overweight), and some recent lab tests confirmed that this diet (probably in conjunction with the massive exercise program I undertook from January through July) has reduced my bad cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and raised my good cholesterol. The last time I had labs done was in early 2008 right after having a baby, so it's been almost 3 years, but the exercise and diet are the most likely culprits for the positive changes in my labs.

12. Discipline and confidence--it has got to be good for my weight loss efforts and for my psyche overall to really believe I can do something instead of constantly feeling like a big failure.

CONS (of this particular diet, as opposed to diets in general):

1. I was worried about the impact of this diet on my almost-6-year-old daughter, and in fact she was very aware of it. No matter how I tried to explain it to her in terms of health and shrinking my body to make intense exercise safer, she was constantly offering me food. Somewhere along the line, she learned about Karen Carpenter (probably because her horrible Christmas carol is on the radio every five minutes) and in the last few days has asked me if I am starving myself and if I'm going to die "like that singer." I look at it as an opportunity for education, but I would never, ever, recommend that SHE ever do this diet to lose weight (unnecessarily extreme, at least for anyone under 21), which I recognize is highly hypocritical.

2. It ain't cheap. The drops cost between $20-60 a pop, depending on where you get them and what you get. I needed three "pops." I am lucky to have a friend who has been coaching me to prepare for starting an HCG clinic, but some people also pay hundreds for the coaching.

3. Eating is a pain. We eat out a lot, we eat with friends a lot, and there is just no way to do that safely. The food is too specific. So I had to either eat before I went or bring my own food, either of which leads to questions and logistical annoyances. Plus, the food is so limited it gets boring.

4. I felt a little like a crazy person. I have a lot of smart, rational friends and relatives who looked on this diet at best with bemused acceptance and at worst with hostility. This diet just SOUNDS crazy, and when you tell people about it, they think you are crazy. That won't bother some people, but it was really hard for me. The social support for a radical diet like this is just not there the same way it is for other kinds of eating regiments.

5. You get sort of obsessed with your weight and the diet, which could be a bad thing for people with a history of certain kinds of eating disorders. I thought about food very little, but I thought about the diet a lot. I think it would be hard to be very successful without that kind of focus. But I will say my productiveness at work flagged in the last few weeks, what with maintaining this blog and researching recipes and such.

6. There remains little or no scientific evidence of the validity of this diet, which can make it hard to power through when motivation is flagging (which is why the quick weight loss is such a good reinforcement). There are very few case studies out there on the interwebz of long-term, successful weight loss. There are very few studies of any kind either about the HCG diet in general or the homeopathic HCG drops in particular.

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On balance? Not the slightest regret. I am so glad I did it. It started out as an experiment, and now I am 31 pounds lighter in 43 days. The real proof will be whether I have kept it off in 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. I feel like I have some things in place that will help me succeed on the maintenance plan, and I have learned a lot about my own body that will serve me well in the next round.

Would I recommend it to someone else? A qualified yes. If you have at least 20 pounds to lose, if you have a history of issues with food, if you feel like you have tried lots of other things and failed, and if you are prepared to really commit to this 100% for 6 weeks of weight loss and 6 weeks of maintenance, then yes, I would recommend it for you.

If any of these conditions aren't true, I would consider a more traditional weight loss program first.

Thoughts? Comments? Agree or disagree with any of my pros and cons?