Who's down with HCG? Indy.

The following is the second installment of Indy's terrifying diet series. Read the first here!
 

One of the anesthesiologists I work with did a fellowship in what amounts weight management, and a few of my coworkers let her walk them through the HCG diet. If I hadn’t watched my officemate drop literally 40 lbs in one month, I too would have been skeptical. This is where I should state that I have no vested interest in this diet, and I would not be surprised if, ten years after having completed it, people were to suddenly drop dead. I weighed this possibility and decided that it was worth the risk. I asked her if she could get me started.

Apparently in the 1950s some doctor was over in India during a famine and noticed that all of the pregnant women were delivering healthy babies despite their severely restricted diets. Years of head scratching, pontification, and laboratory data later, he decided this phenomenon was a result of the hormone HCG or human chorionic gonadotropin hormone. Apparently our creator has a plan for everything. HCG allows your body to preferentially draw its energy from fat stores so that pregnant women aren’t breaking down muscle and other vital tissues in order to support a growing fetus. My coworker also told me that it decreases appetite, but having lived 9 months with a pregnant wife, this was a bit counterintuitive to me. Still, I wanted to believe, so I did.

The diet more or less works in three phases. The first lasts two days in which you are supposed to eat as much fatty food as you can. I was pretty confident I could handle that part. The second is trickier. You drop to eating a maximum of 500 calories per day, and only super healthy nonfat noncarb foods are preapproved. According to the gurus, you are not supposed to feel super hungry during this stage. This stage lasts for a minimum of 21 days-up to a month. The third stage, you go back to around 1800 calories per day but continue shunning carbs and junk food.

It starts with a lot of bloodwork. I counted 9 large vials of blood that were taken for various and sundry tests. Everything came back normal for me with the one exception (surprise surprise) being my cholesterol. 243. Seriously? My being overweight was going to eventually lead to atherosclerosis and heart disease? Wait, I feel like I had read that somewhere. No time to stress. Just more motivation as far as I’m concerned. With the prescreening taken care of, I picked up the HCG drops (to be held under my tongue for 2 minutes every 12 hours) and about 12 bottles of vitamins and was ready to go.

To be continued. . .