What My Skepticism Looks Like 30 Days in to the HCG Diet

Two posts ago, I blamed a recent home-stretch gain/plateau on eating ONE ELBOW of macaroni and cheese and on failing to take the proper dosage of drops for about a day and a half. For some of you, this seems like utter horse shit, and you have a hard time buying into a diet that would make such ridiculous claims. For others of you, the evidence that this is a bad idea is SO CLEAR that you cannot understand why I would make such a reckless and libertine mistake.

And this we return to my constant HCG diet theme of "some people think I'm crazy for this reason and other people think I'm crazy for that reason."

The truth of the matter is that no matter how much you love this diet and no matter how much it works for you, it seems you have to admit that there are a lot of strange, specific, and seemingly random rules that have no real scientific evidence behind them. In fact, some of the rules that were insisted upon when I started this diet 37 days ago are now being rethought, as more medical personnel and homeopaths are brought on board to the local team in an official capacity (ex: now they're saying you don't need to wait 30 minutes before and after drops; you can shoot for 10. You can have mint. No more grape tomatoes; they're too sweet. Etc.) It is very much an evolving, trial-and-error process. 

Conversely, no matter how much you think this diet is stupid and ridiculous with stupid, nonsensical rules, you have to admit it works pretty damn well and that the people who are actually doing it report that some of these weird rules really help them. All the people who were worried about me passing out, fainting, and freaking out have now seen that I haven't. It's safe, it's sensible, it's healthy, it's effective.

So I've just been thinking in the last few days about what makes sense about this diet and what doesn't; why I do some of the things that don't make sense (and will continue to) and why I don't do some of the things that do make sense.

In short: I'm ornery.

In long: I also have a strange combination of willing suspension of disbelief when it serves me, right along side relentless insistence on evidence when I want it. I can see how this could be frustrating for anyone coaching me through this process. This is why my scientific friends and family members are perplexed that I could "fall" for any of this voodoo, and my HCG friends and compatriots are frustrated that I don't fall for all of it. :)

Examples of HCG diet rules that make sense and/or that have some scientific proof behind them:

1) Eat 500 calories a day. It is a well-accepted, proven, scientific fact that eating fewer calories makes you lose weight. If you are a healthy person with extra weight to lose, it ain't gonna kill you to be hungry, and you will lose weight. Guaranteed.

2) Drink lots of water. Water is healthy. Drinking more water makes you retain less water, which helps you see a "truer" weight loss on the scale. Drinking water helps fill you up and can make you eat less. Water also helps your cells and metabolism function more efficiently.

3) Eat only organic foods (only grass-fed, hormone-free beef, organic chicken and other meats, pesticide-free veggies, no artificial sweeteners except for Stevia). Pesticides and chemicals and fake sugars are bad for you and can prevent weight loss, maybe even cause weight gain. There is some evidence that a lot of chemicals can wreck your metabolism. Believe it or not, one of the best metabolism/endocrinology books I have ever read is Jillian Michaels' Master Your Metabolism. Whatever you think of JM herself (I kind of love her), she knows how to hire experts who really know their shit.

4) Get plenty of sleep (there are lots of studies about this, but here is one). The general principal is that when you are tired, your body actually produces more ghrelin, a hormone that makes you hungrier the next day.

5) Eliminate carbs and reduce fats during reduction. You can probably lose weight eating 500 calories a day, even if you eat 500 calories on M&Ms a day. But getting rid of carbs and severely restricting fats will result in a healthier, more filling 500 calories. [note: I always forget that the purest form of the diet includes two melba toasts or grissini bread sticks a day. So I guess that makes it a low-carb rather than a no-carb diet. I forget because I haven't been eating them at all, and haven't missed them]. Recent studies show that it is not good to reduce fat and carbs forever though...most bodies need all the food groups in moderation, which means they need protein, carbs, and fats to stay healthy.

6) Get some gentle exercise. When you're on a VLCD (very low-calorie diet), it's probably not wise to exercise like a maniac, just so that you're protecting your energy level. But you don't want to do nothing, or you'll be at higher risk of losing some muscle mass while you diet. So walking, yoga, and light weight lifting will help you retain/increase muscle while losing fat.

All of these rules make perfect sense to me; they are sound, well-researched dieting truisms, and whether or not you agree that they are the best/safest/most effective way to lose weight, they are clearly linked to weight loss. I bet that anyone doing just those 6 things would lose a decent amount of weight in 40 days with or without voodoo drops and the rest of it. Did I miss any HCG rules that are sensible and research-based? If so, leave them in the comments.

And yet there are all these other strange, specific, and seemingly random rules that make no sense to me, but that HCG diet proponents swear make a huge difference in weight loss:

1) No mixing vegetables (You may have spinach OR tomatoes OR onions OR cucumber at each meal, but not more than one at any given meal, though it is preferable to mix it up from meal to meal). This makes no sense. I have not seen any good reason why mixing or not mixing vegetables at individual meals has any impact on metabolism or weight loss.

2) No oils at all, either inside your body via food or outside your body via oil-based moisturizers, bath products, or lip balms. You can't even touch oily/greasy food you're serving to someone else. This makes no sense. No one has been able to explain to me scientifically why HCG would make you so sensitive to oil that touching your kid's tater tot without a glove could cause a two-pound weight gain and a three day stall.

3) Some vegetables are allowed, and some aren't, on a seemingly random basis (example: asparagus is allowed; broccoli is not. Cucumber is allowed, cauliflower is not). It makes a modicum of sense to me that the starchy vegetables (corn, peas, etc.) and the sweet veggies (carrots, sugar snap peas) are verboten, but the super fibrous, healthy, low-carb and lo-cal veggies? NO SENSE.
4) Some lean, organic meats are allowed and not others (example: chicken is allowed, but turkey is not). Again, I understand why they ban fatty meats like pork, but the ban on turkey? NO SENSE.

5) Some fruits are allowed (strawberries, oranges, grapefruit, apples); others are not even though they seem similar in nutritional content to the allowed fruits (tangerines, clementines, blueberries, cranberries). Say it with me now: no sense.

6) The diet claims that if you take drops of homeopathic HCG and you will be less hungry, you will lose weight from the right places (hips, butt, waist) instead of the wrong places (face, boobs), you will lose weight faster, and you will actually cure the hypothalamus. There were two studies done on these claims. The first showed that injected HCG did impact hunger, body shape, etc. The second failed to corroborate the first's findings. In science-land, that means there is no proof. And that's for injected HCG. I don't think homeopathic HCG has even been studied. I do not deny that there is ample anecdotal evidence for the wonders of homeopathic HCG, but there are good reasons why research is not based on anecdotes (scroll down to the section of this post called "What is the difference between anecdotal and scientific data?" for a brief overview.
Read any HCG book, ask any expert about the food restrictions (no mixing veggies, no turkey, etc.) and they will tell you "Well I'm sure Dr. Simeons thought of that, and if he says it's not okay, then it's not okay" OR they will say "well whenever I didn't do that stuff, I gained weight." But to my knowledge, no one has any scientific proof of any of these things. They have case studies and they have anecdotes, which are not totally irrelevant, but are not the same. Especially when you're talking about proving something that doesn't make sense.

Okay, here I am, having lost nearly 30 pounds on the HCG diet, hating on the HCG diet. Except I'm not hating on it! I really am not. I think this diet has given me a lot of gifts. I just want to be honest about my experience with it. I have to live up to my subhead, man.

I have developed my own theory of why this diet's strange, specific, and seemingly random rules work and why I'm doing them anyway, even though I don't totally believe in them all.

I think it's because this diet provides a really strange and successful blend of being able to pay almost no attention to what/when you eat while also maintaining an almost hyper focus on the details that keeps you from falling off the wagon.

If you are eating 500 calories a day without following any of the HCG protocol (as Kristoise is*), then you have endless options. If you are also someone with a food problem (which Kristoise is not), then you would be constantly tempted to work in "danger" foods while still staying under 500 calories, e.g. "how many M&Ms can I have for 500 calories? If I have one pancake, can I skip dinner to make up for it?"  This kind of approach for problem eaters or food addicts makes it harder because you are constantly trading and bargaining with yourself and you are thinking about food ALL THE TIME. One of my main issues with Weight Watchers (FOR ME) all along has been that I think it encourages a different kind of eating disorder (FOR ME). To be successful on WW, I had to literally count every sip or bite of anything that I had. So WW may have cured an overeating disorder, but it fostered a new kind of obsessive eating disorder. The latter may be physically healthier (MAY be) but I'm not convinced it's a psychological improvement.

On this diet, I never think about food. There are only 2-3 proteins that I enjoy, 4-5 veggies, and 4 fruits. That is a pretty limited number of combinations. There is no thinking about what kind of salad to have, can I have extra red peppers instead of green, etc. There are no choices. Not thinking about food all the time frees me up to think about what makes me think about food. Ha. Does that even make sense? What I mean is this: if I never have to think about food, then when I start to really want a specific food or a specific feeling of fullness, I have more space to think about why I want it, what I would normally do, and what I should do. On WW when that uncomfortable feeling of WANT WANT WANT arises, I just eat 3 skinny cow ice cream sandwiches, still manage to stay under points, and call it a day. I learn nothing and make no real behavior changes.

For that reason, I think the strictness of this diet related to food (no mixing, only certain foods) is a huge advantage for someone who struggles with food even if it doesn't make chemical sense. I do not believe that the freedom to mix cucumbers and tomatoes in a single meal would stop my metabolism. I do think it would make me think about food a lot more.

So that's the bit about the diet being almost completely thoughtless when it comes to food. Yet there are so many other rules--no mint**, no gum, no artificial sweetener, no oil on your hands or face or body--that you end up thinking about the process of dieting a lot, which keeps you honest. It results in a situation that is unique to any diet I have ever tried: you rarely think about food, but you are always thinking about what will make you successful, and you are always thinking about self care. It's a very interesting approach.

I bet you almost anything that my stalls and gains were not actually caused by Thanksgiving turkey, one elbow of macaroni and cheese, or oil-based lip balm. Shannon, I know you are going to hate me for saying that, but I really think they were natural fluctuations that were caused by who-knows-what and resolved by who-knows-what. I bet when someone is eating 500 calories a day, they will have plateaus no matter what they do, and they will break plateaus. But when you're on a diet with silly and specific rules, you give credit or blame to whatever you did last. It you pet a horse on the day before you gained, someone, somewhere would be blaming the horse petting.

I BET that if you structured a similar diet with the same basic core principles (low cal, low carb, low fat, healthy foods) but changed the details and insisted with the same rigor on new rules (like no hair brushing, no nail polish, no chicken, no petting horses or other hooved animals) that you would have similar success.

The point is not what the rules are, the point is that you pay attention. That's why it works. Because once you start to slack on paying attention to silly, irrational rules, maybe you are also slacking on the food and exercise that is helping you lose.

My scientific brain (small as it may be) believes everything I am saying in this post. But my fear-based brain suspects that I will do this the exact same way if I do a second round in January because it has worked, and why mess with something that works? So why am I taking drops that I might not believe in? Why NOT? If someone told me to take arsenic to lose weight, I wouldn't do it. But when someone tells me to take something that is at best effective and at worst a placebo, WHY NOT? Why not follow the rules about mixing vegetables? Why not stay away from turkey? It costs you nothing to follow the rules, and they just might be onto something for some reason you don't understand.

The funny thing is, I have apparently gotten a bit of a reputation in our local group as a rebel; a doubter; a skeptic. I think Shannon thinks I am breaking rules left and right, willy nilly. But though I ask a lot of questions, I have broken very, very few rules. I have actually followed this protocol just about as closely as anyone. Turkey and one elbow of macaroni and lip gloss are hardly the kind of cheats that sink diets.

And if someone else were doing this diet, I would tell them to follow all the stupid rules too. Because why not? What have you got to lose? It's 40 days. You can do anything for 40 days.

So see what I did there? You thought I was going to write a big post about how stupid the HCG diet is. And I sort of did. But I still think it works and will probably still try it again.


*Kristoise chimed in the comments of my last post that she was doing a 500-calorie a day diet (inspired by this one) but without all the voodoo. It still works, even without the voodoo. She is a vegetarian, so she is eating eggs, grains, dairy, etc. and is still losing an average of 0.7 pounds a day. I will point out a few things:


1) people doing HCG usually lose a lot more than one pound a day in the first week
2) K only has 5-10 pounds to lose total, which should mean she is losing at a slower rate than someone with a lot to lose
3) K has no symptoms or history of food addiction or binge eating
4) She's been doing it for a full week
5) She says she is not starving or miserable, in fact, she reports less hunger in her first week than I did, and that was without the loading days or the HCG
6) the only element of the diet that she is mimicking is the 500 calories. No drops, no restricted foods, etc.

I asked K to write a blog post about what she's doing, how she's finding it, what she thinks, etc., and she demurred, worried that readers who have a lot emotionally invested in the HCG diet will find her post insulting or upsetting (because basically, she'll make the case that all you need to do to lose weight is eat 500 calories a day whether or not you take drops and mix vegetables.) I would not be at all insulted and think it would be interesting to read. She is a real scientist, yo. Besides, there are enough differences that I don't think her case or experience necessarily translates to other people who feel desperate for a weight loss solution. Anyway, chime in in the comments if you would be interested in a guest blog post about what it's like to do this diet without the drops and food restriction. Or chime in if you would actively not like to read that.

**no mint: as of last night and according to a new HCG book and a new homeopath that has been brought on board locally, the mint rule is now rescinded. Long live mint!