Your comprehensive resource to answer your questions about the hCG diet protocol.
I highly encourage doing your research before embarking on this HCG protocol. This page is a work in progress guys…..just so you know there is MUCH more to come.
Please also see my HCG HOW TO section for video and blog posts on this topic.
Hunger on the hCG Diet
I am hungry on hCG! Help!
What can be done if you are hungry on the hCG Diet? The most important thing NOT to do is to do nothing. DO NOT LET YOURSELF BY HUNGRY. If you are hungry on hCG, you need to take action to figure out the reason and fix it. Before we get into this however, please do keep in mind that you will experience mild hunger
When Hunger is Okay and Normal on the hCG Diet
– The first 2-3 days on the VLCD portion of the diet. Your body will be adjusting and you just may feel pretty hungry at a few points throughout the day. This will pass.
– At mealtimes. On the diet, it is necessary to take in the small amount of calories up to 500 and so you will find that around mealtimes- says noon and 5 or 6pm that you are getting hungry and need to eat your hCG meal. But once you’ve eaten your small meal of 200-250 calories or so, you should feel satisfied for several hours after that.
When Hunger is NOT okay and NOT normal on the hCG Diet
– It’s beyond day 2 or 3 of the VLCD and you are starving much of the day.
– You eat your hCG meal but are hungry again soon after.
– You can’t go to sleep at night because you feel hungry.
– If you eat to hunger, you find yourself eating more like 1000 calories in order to feel satisfied and normal.
Possible Causes of Excessive Hunger on the hCG Diet
– You’ve been using the same mixture of hCG for awhile now (ie. 3-4 weeks) and the potency is starting to go bad.
– The dose of hCG you are taking isn’t right for your body. Even if one dose felt good for awhile, as you lose weight, the dose you need may change.
– You accidentally left your hCG out of the fridge one day and kept using it after this without re-testing it to make sure that it was still potent after leaving it out unrefrigerated.
What to Do If You Are Abnormally Hungry on the hCG Diet
1. Test your hCG. While hCG CAN register on a pregnancy test, I no longer view it as reliable, and I explain why in detail with a very good example here:
An IMPORTANT message to my readers about Real Prescription hCG
This is the easiest and first thing you should do to make sure your hCG is potent. Please see the category on testing hCG here. If it’s positive, go to step 2.
2. Adjust your Dose. Being on the wrong dose of hCG is by far the most common reason for excessive hunger on the hCG protocol.
– BOTH a dose that is too high or too low will cause you excessive hunger.
– The proper dose for you that will cause you to feel no hunger eating only 500 calories a day is very individual.
How to Adjust Your Dose and Find the Best Dose of hCG For You
Let me give you the main spread first- In my observation, the large majority who do the hCG Diet will find that a dose somewhere between 125iu-200iu will be the right dose for them. Additionally, once you find your “sweet spot” of a dose, you may still likely have to change your dose as time goes on and you lose more weight- it’s been the observation of many that as people shrink they need smaller doses of hCG than they needed initially.
Many find that a dose of either 125iu or 150iu works best for them. A smaller number I’d say feel good on 175iu, and a minority feel best on 200iu. I would say in general a starting dose of 125-150iu would give you the most likely chance of being on a good dose right away, since those are the most common doses to feel not hungry on. If you still feel very hungry after a few days on the diet at one of these doses, try increasing your dose gradually (ie. try 175iu for a couple days- if the hunger is a little better but still not gone, continue to 200iu for a couple days and monitor your hunger). If you decide to make your starting dose at 125iu and you find that you are pretty hungry still after a few days, since this is usually the minimum dose of hCG a person would take, the decision is easy- you need to increase your dose. If you start your dose at 150iu and find yourself very hungry still after a few days, you have to decide whether or not to reduce or increase your dose as you either need to drop to 125iu or try increasing to 175iu- so in this case it might be a little harder to know which way to go.
Lastly, if you’ve been on the protocol for a couple weeks already and feeling good on a certain dose but suddenly find yourself getting hungry, and you’re already positive that your hCG is still good, one way in which to find out if your dose needs to go up or down is to skip a day of hCG entirely- if you feel more hungry on the day you skip, this would indicate that you need more hCG in your system meaning to increase your dose, and if you find yourself less hungry on the day of no hCG, this would indicate that you need a lower dose of hCG.
See how to find your dose on the syringe for an explanation of finding these different doses of 125iu, 150iu, 175iu, and 200iu.
Do I have to eat the full 500 calories on the hCG Diet?
I will quote what Dr. Simeons said in his book pounds and inches here: “Those not uncommon patients who feel that even so little food is too much for them, can omit anything they wish.”
So in short, no.
However- do keep in mind, do not get carried away with this- you should eat to hunger which means if you are truly not hungry for 500 calories in a day while on hCG, and you end up eating say 300-400 calories instead some days, so be it. However, if you are technically hungry but purposefully trying to eat less than the 500 calories in an effort to lose more weight, this is not a proper way to view things (as I’m sure you’ll agree). Sometimes we can find excuses for ourselves to try to get quicker results in the short-term but we need to remember that it’s long term health that we should be concerned with.
Myself? The amount of calories I eat varies. I don’t actually weigh/count anything but the protein as Dr. Simeons instructed, however, just to get an idea, some days I’ll plug in basic amounts of what I ate into myfitnesspal just to check. What I find is that many days on the hCG protocol I’m so not hungry, especially at the beginning, that I only find myself eating 300-400 calories in a day. Other days I find myself needing not only the full 500 but sometimes even close to 600 calories, so that’s what I eat.
My hydrostatic body fat testing has shown that eating under the 500 calories when my hunger dictates has not been a problem for me- meaning I did not lose excessive amounts of muscle doing this, and I’ve kept off my fat loss from hCG very comfortably since then as well.
So if you let hunger be your guide, as Robin Woodall so wonderfully explained in her book Weightloss Apocalypse, you will get the best weight loss in the healthiest way out of the hCG Diet protocol.
What do you think of such-an-such brand of hCG drops?
Can you take a look at the ingredients on your bottle of hCG drops? There are basically three types of “hCG” out there now.
1. Prescription hCG – the real hormone
2. Homeopathic hCG – if it’s true homeopathic hCG it will contain something like “hCG – 10x, 30x, 60x, etc type numbers)
3. hCG Activator products – these do not contain any hCG at all, but contain amino acids. It’s claimed these these amino acids cause your body to make hCG. I do not know if I believe this at this point you guys. I like to keep an open mind.
When it comes down to it, my personal choice is that I really only feel comfortable using prescription hCG, the real hormone. One example given to me was the question, “would you feel comfortable taking homeopathic birth control?” Hmmm. Hormones are powerful! I do not think the hCG hormone is a placebo so, so the muscle sparing effects that hCG seems to create in the presence of such a low calorie diet is very important to me. However, I have to admit that I have seen some great results with homeopathic hCG as well, so I can’t knock it completely, and some choose to go this route and feel completely comfortable with it. I have not seen enough feedback from these hCG activator products (that don’t contain hCG) to feel comfortable recommending them at this time. The truth is, anyone will lose weight on a 500 calorie, regardless of taking any supplement or hormone.
The questions are:
1. how much of that weight loss is fat vs. muscle,
2. how is your hunger while ON the diet itself, and
3. how will the diet effect your metabolism during and after the diet (and thus ability to maintain)?
To me the hCG hormone is what kind of guarantees a positive answer to these questions, whereas I do not have proof of such with the other hCG type products at this time. The others MAY work, I just can’t be sure, and I feel best sticking with what I know can be relied on since I only have one body and no time for do-overs.
The current sources for real prescription hCG that I feel comfortable recommending, if you end up choosing to go that route, can be found here: https://hcgchica.com/buy-hcg-injections-worldwide/
And all my tutorials for injections are here to help you with mixing and injecting!: https://hcgchica.com/hcg-injections-tutorials/