There are many different producers of HCG diet plans out there and many of them are wonderful and legitimate. Some of them may not be however, so proceed with caution when you are in the market for HCG.
HCG is expensive to produce (and therefore expensive to buy), so stay away from cheap products. If they do actually contain HCG, it might not be in large enough quantities to do you any good. Also look for products made in the USA or another country that has trusted regulatory organizations for pharmaceutical companies.
If you go the injection route for taking your HCG, you should need a prescription and plan to take the injections under the supervision of a medical professional. This can get expensive and time consuming, but can work for you if you are careful.
The HCG oral drops are less risky because they don’t involve getting poked with a needle everyday and you’ve got to figure that’s better for your body. They are also very easy to administer—you only need to take three small doses a day.
The administration method and quality of HCG are the biggest differences between most HCG diet plans. Once you get past those differences though, the actual diet itself is pretty much the same across the board.
The low-calorie diet was developed by Dr. Albert Simeons, the endocrinologist who discovered that HCG helped retain muscle mass and curb hunger when paired with a strict diet. As you’ve probably heard before, the diet helps to lose weight, not the HCG. The HCG just helps keep the diet from causing your body to ravage your muscles.
Really quickly, here is an overview of what the HCG diet actually entails. Remember, you wouldn’t want to do this diet without the HCG because it is very low in calories and may cause your body to draw upon your muscles for extra nutrition rather than your fat stores.
The first two days you start your HCG are called loading days. You basically eat as much as you can of whatever you want on these two days to signal to your body that food is not scarce. People often gain a pound or two on these days, but it comes right back off once you start the diet phase.
The diet breaks up your portions of food into three meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, you can eat something from lunch at breakfast time if that works better for you or spread out the meals throughout the day. You basically just need to stick to the quantities of food specified for each day.
For breakfast, you have as much coffee or tea as you want. Sound too good to be true? Well, keep in mind that you can’t have any cream or sugar with that. You can use liquid Stevia or saccharin to sweeten and you are allotted one tablespoon of milk per day so use it wisely.
The choices for lunch and dinner are identical you just choose different things for each meal. They each include a serving of lean meat (3.5 ounces) such as beef, chicken breast, fresh white fish, veal, lobster, crab, or shrimp.
There is also a serving of fruit such as an apple, an orange, a handful of strawberries, or a half of a grapefruit. For vegetables you can have spinach, green salad, chard, chicory, beet greens, celery, fennel, tomatoes (yes, they’re a fruit but you eat them like a vegetable), onions, red radishes, cucumbers, celery, asparagus, or cabbage.
The last item you may have is one piece of Melba toast—a cracker-like breadstick thing or an Italian breadstick specifically referred to as “grissini”.