What is the HCG Diet?
The British endocrinologist Dr. Albert T.W. Simeons created the HCG diet. Simeons, who was born in the 1900’s, discovered the powerful health benefits of HCG while researching boys with testosterone deficiencies. He found that when he gave the boys HCG injections, they began to lose abdominal fat as well as their appetites. Simeons created the HCG diet in 1967 when he published the book Pounds and Inches: A New Approach to Obesity where he presented his new findings to the world. The diet consists of coupling a very low-calorie diet with HCG injections to help you suppress your appetite.
HCG is a hormone that women produce when they first become pregnant. While it might sound strange to take HCG injections, many people who have lost weight on the diet claim that it helped them reduce their appetite so that they were better able to follow the food plan. When Simeons first began experimenting with the hormone, he gave underdeveloped boys several hundred units of the hormone twice a week. He soon discovered that by taking small, daily injections of the hormone, his subjects began losing their appetite without even restricting their calories.
HCG is made up of 244 different amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. Although it’s associated with a woman’s pregnancy, HCG can be found in both men and women, making it an excellent weight loss option for both genders. According to Simeon’s research, the hormone plays a vital role in controlling metabolism. It’s secreted from a pregnant woman’s placenta in large amounts. Then, it’s extracted in her urine and is often used to treat fertility problems. But Simeons discovered that both men and women could benefit from taking the hormone by allowing you to burn up excess fat and targeting the dangerous types of fat in your body, such as abdominal fat. It works by targeting the part of your brain that controls your appetite called the hypothalamus. This is an integral part of the diet because it allows you to eliminate processed foods and refined carbohydrates without carving them, which are often linked to obesity. The diet is designed to help you lose weight successfully without gaining it back.
Simeons also discovered that the injections helped his subjects change their BMI or body shape. He concluded that this was due to the loss of abdominal fat deposition from the hips and stomach. Simeons believed that this fat was being used as fuel, which gave his subjects energy even when he asked them to restrict their diets to 500 calories per day. As a result, his patients began losing a pound a day. When combined, the daily HCG injections and a low-calorie diet have the potential to help you drop pesky fat from your hips and stomach without feeling hungry.
Health Benefits of the HCG Diet
In addition to helping you lose weight and reduce your appetite, the HCG diet has several other health benefits. For example, during Simeon’s research, he found that the HCG diet decreased his patient’s blood sugar levels, which was a promising discovery for people with diabetes. He even discovered that by two to three weeks, his patients developed healthy blood sugar levels. Type 2 diabetes is characterized by eating too many foods that are high in refined sugar. By eating a low-calorie diet full of healthy foods and taking HCG injections to reduce your hunger, you could help stabilize your blood sugar levels or even reverse diabetes with a low-calorie diet.
Removing processed or refined sugars from your diet also decreases your risk of rheumatoid arthritis, which is a painful inflammatory disease characterized by achy joints. Simeons found that with just a few days of HCG treatment, his patients no longer needed to take long-term cortisone treatment for their arthritis pain. Additionally, HCG can be used to help patients with gout by reducing painful inflammation. Other benefits of the HCG diet include lower cholesterol levels and reduced blood pressure. According to the HCG diet website, when a woman who has high blood pressure becomes pregnant, her levels would often drop and then slowly creep back up after her pregnancy. Simeons believes this is due to the HCG hormone. Some studies indicate that after her pregnancy, a woman’s blood pressure remained low and never returned to being high.
