This is a question we are getting more and more these days, so here you’ll find out if we offer it and why or why not.
For those of you who haven’t yet heard, the HCG diet has recently grown in popularity. In short, Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (or HCG) is a hormone produced during pregnancy. With the HCG diet, this hormone is taken daily (through injections, droplets, or by other means) and you are required to follow a 500 calories per day diet. The 500 calories per day are made up of a very short list of foods you are “allowed” to eat. Proponents of this diet claim that you can lose up to 1 lbs per day without feeling tired or weak, and that it will “reset your metabolism.” They claim that the HCG injections help to suppress your appetite, making the extremely low calorie diet more tolerable.
These claims would peak the interest of most anyone, especially those who have tried other programs to lose weight and haven’t reached their goals. Whenever considering a new diet program, it’s important to evaluate the proven effectiveness of the program and even more so when it includes hormone injections. So that’s exactly what we did.
First, we looked to the FDA’s stance on the diet. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved any HCG products for weight loss. According to the FDA:
“HCG has not been demonstrated to be effective adjunctive therapy in the treatment of obesity. There is no substantial evidence that it increases weight loss beyond that resulting from caloric restriction, that it causes a more attractive or ‘normal’ distribution of fat, or that it decreases the hunger and discomfort associated with calorie-restricted diets.”
Furthermore, serious adverse events associated with