David Wallace

How I Lost 40 Pounds in 40 Days - The HCG Diet

August 19th, 2008 Posted in Personal

The last few weeks have been quite a journey for me. A little over 40 days ago, I weighed in at a whopping 247 pounds. That’s about 50 pounds more than I should weigh and is for the most part the result of eleven plus years of poor eating habits and lack of exercise. Today as I write this post, I weigh 210 pounds. How did I lose so much weight in such little time? It was due to a combination of taking the hormone HCG and a very extreme low calorie diet.

Before I get into the “how I did it” I must say that I had to first change my mindset about food. I’ve come to the place in my life where I really need to lose all the extra pounds I have put on since leaving manual labor some eleven years ago when I started my Internet marketing business. I went from a size 34 waist and 180 pounds to a 42 inch waist and about 247 pounds. The goal is to get back to at least a 36 inch waist and a weight of about 190 lbs.

Now, what about this HCG? HCG is short for Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin which is a hormone found only in women during pregnancy. It is produced in enormous quantities, so that during certain phases of her pregnancy a woman may excrete as much as one million international units per day in her urine. It is never found in the male, obviously because men don’t get pregnant.

Seeing that HCG is only found in women during pregnancy and never in males, it is something I had to take daily. Some take it by injection but I took it sub-lingual meaning I’d have to hold it in liquid form under my tongue for about 15 minutes before swallowing. I repeated this process twice daily. Having this hormone present in my body for 40 plus days along with limiting myself to a very strict diet of just 500 calories a day (you read right - 500 calories) allowed me to not only lose about a pound a day, but also to maintain a healthy physique in the process.

Now I’m going to try to explain how HCG works in layman’s terms. So please forgive me if this is lacking its proper medical terminology.

First of all one must understand that there are three kinds of fat that are stored in the body. The first is the structural fat which fills the gaps between various organs, a sort of packing material. The second type of fat is a normal reserve of fuel upon which the body can freely draw when the nutritional income from the intestinal tract is insufficient to meet the demand. The third type of fat which is entirely abnormal is the accumulation of such fat, and of such fat only, from which overweight people suffer. This abnormal fat is also a potential reserve of fuel, but unlike the normal reserves it is not available to the body in a nutritional emergency. It is, so to speak, locked away in a fixed deposit and is not kept in a current account, as are the normal reserves.

What HCG does is to allow a person to comfortably go about their usual activities on a diet of only 500 calories daily and lose an average of about one pound per day. Because the body needs more than 500 calories a day to function, fat reserves are used for energy. Under the effect of HCG, the overweight body is always able to obtain all the calories it needs from the abnormal fat deposits, regardless of whether it uses up 1500 or 4000 per day. The HCG allows you to live to a far greater extent on the fat which you are losing than on what you eat. Normal fat reserves (the healthy kind) are not touched. In the meantime, skin remains fresh and turgid, and gradually body weight returns to normal. The daily administration of HCG appears to have no side-effects other than beneficial.

When I embarked on this diet, I had pretty good hopes it would be successful simply due to the fact that my wife had come across so many testimonies from people who experienced success with it. Nevertheless, I knew I’d have to change the way I eat and exercise for the rest of my life unless I want to return to the fat man I had become.

I am reminded of the lyrics from Jethro Tull’s song “Fat Man” –

Don’t want to be a fat man,
People would think that I was just good fun.
Would rather be a thin man,
I am so glad to go on being one.
Too much to carry around with you,
No chance of finding a woman who…
Will love you in the morning and all the night time too.

Don’t want to be a fat man,
Have not the patience to ignore all that.
Hate to admit to myself half of my problems
Came from being fat.
Wont waste my time feeling sorry for him,
I seen the other side to being thin.
Roll us both down a mountain
And I’m sure the fat man would win.

Here is a brief chronicle of my journey over the period of several weeks to become once again a “thin man.”

Day 1

I weighed in at 247 pounds prior to starting diet. After taking the initial dose of HCG, the first two days consist of “loading” or in other words, eating lots of food — pretty much anything i want.

Here’s what I loaded up with the first day:

• 4 donuts
• 4 pieces of Papa John’s Italian sausage pizza
• 1 hamburger
• Whole order of Tom Kha Gai soup with side of rice (usually feeds 2 people)
• Whole order of Crispy Shrimp (8 jumbo prawns, deep fried and dipped in spicy sauce)
• 1 Dancing Deer brownie
• 1 Snickers ice cream bar

It is supposed to be difficult to eat SO much food and the HCG makes you feel full. While i did feel full, I didn’t have any trouble eating all this stuff.

Day 2

I weighed in at 250 pounds, gaining 3 from the day before which I hear is normal. This is what I consumed on day 2 of loading:

• Jack in the Box Croissant Breakfast sandwich
• Jack in the Box Extreme Sausage sandwich
• Dairy Queen 32 oz. Hot Fudge Milkshake (my favorite)
• 1 Taco Bell taco and 1 burrito
• Breyers Coffee Ice Ice Cream in Waffle Cone
• 2 hamburgers and 2 hot dogs, 2 servings baked beans and potato chips (birthday party)
• Bowl of Goldfish (the crackers not actual fish silly)

Day 3

I weighed in at 252 pounds - a total gain of 5 lbs. after “loading.” It’s pretty crazy I could gain that much weight after just two days of stuffing my face.

Now I begin the journey of eating just 500 calories a day which essentially will consist of two meals (lunch and dinner) of just 250 calories each. Each of these meals will consist of the following:

Breakfast - Nothing

Lunch - 3 ounces of lean meat which may consist of one of the following: veal, lean beef, chicken breast, fresh white fish, lobster, crab, or shrimp.

3 ounces of select vegetables which may consist of one of the following: spinach, chard, chicory, beet-greens, green salad, tomatoes, celery, fennel, onions, red radishes, cucumbers, asparagus, and cabbage.

1 selection of fruit with choices of an apple, a handful of strawberries, half a grapefruit or an orange.

1 breadstick (grissino) or one Melba toast.

Dinner - same thing as lunch

It is important to note that no matter what combination of items you eat (i.e. choice of meat, vegetable and fruit), the meals could not exceed 500 calories a day. So if I decided to have cube steak instead of chicken, I’d have to watch my vegetable portion seeing that cube steak consists of more calories than chicken. It was also recommended that I eat the same things for lunch and dinner on any particular day.

I mostly ate grilled chicken and cucumbers with a touch of lemon juice. Periodically I substituted white fish and cube steak and variations in vegetable choice included spinach salads and cooked cabbage. For my fruit, I always stuck with an apple.

I would also add that you can drink all the coffee and tea you’d like (unsweetened of course) but must also drink 2 liters or more water every day. I drank about 3 liters a day besides about a pot of coffee and a glass of green tea daily.

Sound boring? It mostly is but surprisingly, because of the HCG, I did not feel hungry prior to meals. Also when consuming these small 250 calorie meals I felt comfortably full afterwards.

As I think back now, most of my initial struggles steamed from the boredom that comes from not eating all the time. In other words I had spent a good amount of my time eating, snacking, drinking wine, etc. and now I had to find things to replace the time I used to spend eating.

For the duration that the HCG was in my body, I could not use regular lotion or use any conditioner in my hair due to the fact that the body can absorb the oils in these products which adds to calorie intake. I ended up using Corn Huskers lotion (which contains no oil) for my feet as I wear sandals most the time which cause my feet to get very dry. This worked out as well if not better than the oil-based lotions I typically use.

Another thing I thought I’d struggle with is the fact that I could not have my peppermint Lifesavers. My wife sternly warned me that I can have no breath mints of any kind and that many doing the HCG diet complain of having bad breath. However, I found a solution - Starbucks sugar-free peppermint breath mints. These are extremely small but powerful mints that contain zero calories.

While I am not going to bore you with the daily details of what I ate, how much I weighted each day, etc., I will say that I lost an average of about a pound a day. On day 42 when I stopped taking the HCG, my weight had gone from 252 pounds (weight after “loading”) to 210 pounds. That’s 42 pounds from my weight after loading or if you count from the weight I was prior to loading - 37 pounds. They say that you should count the pounds you gain after the loading phase which is why I can say I lost 42 pounds. Oh and as for the title of this post - “40 pounds in 40 days” - I had actually lost 40 pounds at the 40 day mark. Besides, it sounds better than “42 pounds in 42 days.” (I like round numbers)

I feel great right now. Everyone I know says how I look so different, not only in the size of my gut but the face, legs, arms - everywhere. I no longer get heartburn after eating certain foods or snore at night. I don’t even recall bouts of sleep apnea as I did before. I have about 20 more pounds I feel I need to lose and so will embark on a second but shorter phase in October where I have a period of about 4 weeks in which I will not be traveling.

I must truly thank my wife, Irma, for not only discovering this diet but doing all the research on it as well as preparing all the meals. She has done remarkably well on this diet herself but I’ll let her tell you about that in her own way.

If you would like to shed some of your “abnormal” fat by means of this diet, I’d encourage you to first read the eBook by Dr. A.T.W Simeons called “Pounds and Inches” and then do additional research online simply by searching the keyword “HCG” or the full phrase “Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin.” When you get ready to actually purchase HCG, you can get it at DrugDelivery.ca as well as many other places.

This is a very controversial diet, especially for males, seeing that you have a hormone in you that is only found in pregnant women. It has however been tested for years and always proved to be successful. Don’t worry men - you will not become pregnant nor develop female body parts. Most of the controversy will stem from telling people that you are only eating 500 calories a day. They will be shocked not only on the little amount of food you are living on, but how healthy you appear despite that. We kept the fact that we were taking the HCG secret for some time, at least until we were confident it was working.