Kawarthas’s Wellness Living

Most people cite the reason they are dieting as their desire to lose weight.  This probably isn’t much of a surprise for many, but there’s very few of us that actually choose to eat healthier for its own rewards.  This isn’t necessarily a bad reason to want to diet, but this motivation is a lot different than someone who chooses to eat healthier for its own rewards (like lower risk of cancer and heart disease).  Typically people who try to diet to lose weight are ultimately unsuccessful, primarily for metabolism reasons and their bodies fighting against the effort over time.  Only about 5% of people who diet each year succeed in keeping the weight off for more than a year.

When dieting, most people complain of hunger and lack of energy.  This is expected as your body is going to induce hunger to try and goad you into eating more.  What’s worse, your body will also slow down your metabolism (cutting your energy) to preserve what weight you have.   This can be incredibly discouraging, but there are some ways to help.  Certain foods high in fiber like whole grains, apples, beans and some other types of fruit are great to help improve your metabolism.  The process your body goes through to digest this typically leads to significant metabolism increases.  Fiber is an important factor in determining how many calories your body burns on any given day.

If you’re struggling to fight off hunger throughout your weight loss/diet the use of water can be a great ally.  When you drink water your body will actually feel less hunger, but it also helps in other ways.  It moves nutrients you take in through food to the essential areas of the body and enables you to more quickly expel things that are bad (fats, carbs etc) before they are absorbed by your body.  Yes, there is some issue with water weight, but this is minimal (and not what is important to lose anyway).

Adjusting Portions To Control Weight Loss and Calories

One of the best ways to quickly control your weight is by changing your portions and regularly controlling them.  This is tough to do up front, but once you get over the hump within a few days of doing it regularly it becomes much easier.  You need to have a set portion with each meal (this single steak, or this piece of fish and a side salad).  Once you have that set up, your body will adapt to what you’re eating and your hunger will subside over time.  If you do struggle to portion things properly, having extra servings of vegetables, such as carrots or celery (which are low in calories) is a good way to still control portion size but eat more if you are particularly hungry.

Many people try to go “all out” whenever they decide they need to lose weight.  This can be a really poor choice, as your body will often not follow your enthusiasm.  If you have huge expectations for weight loss, you need to have a program that can deliver them or you’re just setting yourself up to fail.    When you go overboard your expectations can often be very different from what really happens.  You need to maintain a level of healthy skepticism about your progress and persist on regardless of the outcomes through this.  Eventually you will lose the weight, there’s very little doubt it will occur.  However, you must consider it as a sustainable goal that requires little steps to reach.

Taking your diet a single step at a time is critical for success.  If you try to rush results you will often have poor success.  Exercise is also a very important part of any diet, and something that many people overlook.  Exercising will help boost your metabolism naturally, but also cut out much of your hunger as well.  Something as simple as 15 minutes of running  a day can greatly improve your weight loss speed (by up to 80% thanks to metabolic effects).

The HCG diet is hands down the most popular and doctor recommended treatment for obesity in the world today.  It’s easy to see why this is the case once you take a long hard look at many of the studies surrounding its use.  Many researchers for several decades have investigated the use of this hormone and its impact on user’s ability to lose weight and stay healthy.  The results are quite promising indeed.  On average users of HCG lost 20 to 30 pounds per month of use, while also strictly following the protocol.  However, if someone just followed the protocol for dieting without the hormone they lost around 25% this level (or one fourth as much total weight).  For this reason it’s being prescribed all over the world by physicians to help people combat their appetite, increase metabolism and help them reach their desired weight.

Traditionally HCG is administered to patients via daily injections.  This is a highly effective method for delivery, but is fraught with issues for the user.  Many people experience considerable pain and discomfort during injections, as they must do it regularly which can be difficult.  Typically this injection is not administered via a doctor, but instead yourself.  In addition, it’s very expensive to do this (beyond the costs of the injection kits).  HCG purified from your doctor and regular checkups often run in the mid hundreds of dollars a regimen.  A regimen of 44 days often costs $500 to $1000.  This is difficult for many people to manage, as it’s almost never covered by insurance.  As a result, people often cannot afford daily injections.  A popular alternative that many people now use daily is HCG drops.  These drops are placed under the user’s tongue and absorbed directly into the body that way.  This can be a much cheaper, but equally effective way to take the hormone.  This is not without obstacles as well, unfortunately.

Selecting an HCG Drops Product: Homeopathic or Real HCG

Many people probably first stumble across homeopathic or “hormone-free” products when they begin to search for HCG diet drops.  However, these products do not typically contain any of the real hormone.  If they do, it’s just a few molecules.  Typically for injections you would receive well over 5000 IUs of the hormone (international units) over a regimen.  So do these products actually work?  Unsurprisingly to most you actually need the real HCG hormone in order to receive the results on this diet.  There’s no such thing as “imitation” or substitute forms of the hormone out there.  You need to take at least 150 IUs a day, as the studies have clearly demonstrated, to see the 1-2 pounds per day of weight loss.

There’s a huge difference in results when a person takes homeopathic (just another term for a highly diluted substance) when compared to real and pure HCG drops.  As an example, a person who is taking homeopathic HCG may receive a single molecule of the hormone from a dosage.  However, this is so little that it cannot even be measured by any tests, let alone used by your body.  You need a certain dosage for this to work.  If you do, the average weight loss for a full regimen is around 30 to 40 pounds.  Without it, you probably won’t lose over 20 pounds.

Identifying pure HCG can be a challenge, but it’s certainly possible.  Real HCG always requires refrigeration, and should have a finite shelf life, usually only a few weeks to a few months.  Good suppliers can extend this to around 90 days (if opened and refrigerated) but this is the maximum.  If you see a product that claims to last “3 months” it definitely isn’t real.  In addition things like the dosage specified, or other factors should be clearly indicated.  It should be listed in IUs or milligrams of purified powder otherwise it’s fake.  Many retailers market them as “3x, 6x” or some other made up value.  These products are not real.   While it’s certainly true that HCG works for weight loss and provides much in the way of results, it’s important to remember to get the real deal, and not one of these imitations.