The 3rd reason that you may run into trouble in getting anywhere long term with the HCG Diet is:

Your Reasons for losing weight

are not deep enough

to carry you through the whole process.

You can read the previous 3 articles in this series if haven’t already:

6 Reasons for Failure on the hCG Diet and How to Avoid them: Overview

Reason #1: It’s Harder Than You Think

Reason #2: Check Your Expectations

Reason #4: Adapting Your Reasons for Weight Loss

Reason #5: Emotional Issues with Food and Eating

Superficial Reasons- We All Have Them

I think we all have you might call “superficial” reasons for losing weight- a party coming up, seeing someone we haven’t seen in a long time, wanting to wear small clothes, a trip to the Bahamas, or just wanting to see and by happy with how we look in smaller clothes- and I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with this.

Perhaps in a perfect world none of us would care one hoot how we were perceived by others, or whether certain people we know or don’t know thought we were thin or overweight.  Ideally we wouldn’t care and we would enjoy life just as much regardless of whether we were carrying 50 extra pounds.  For those of you who are there, that is fantastic- I feel like I’m getting pretty close myself, but it’s hard to know since I’m not overweight anymore, so I don’t want to be too cocky about it.

But I don’t think the vast majority of us are there yet- it would be a rare person who didn’t enjoy being a smaller size or wanting to feel good about how their body looked when they went to a party etc.  So that’s why I think we shouldn’t necessarily harp on these reasons for wanting to lose weight.  Lets just expect that these reasons for losing weight are there for the majority of us.  If you have already moved pass this entirely, good for you.  But not all of us have.  I think I’m getting there because I no longer care if I’m seen in public without makeup, or if i’m wearing baggy jammy like clothes at the park with my snowboots to keep my feet warm.  I think I probably look pretty silly but I honestly don’t care.  What I care most about these days is been physically comfortable.

But I digress…..

So lets just assume and agree that most of us have that little desire in us to feel good in a particular dress on a cruise or what have you.  That’s fine.

The thing is though that in addition to these reasons we need to have deeper, more long lasting reasons for losing weight and getting healthy.

Why Is It So Important to Have Deeper Reasons?

These reasons will…

1. Help you maintain the weight loss long term.
2. Prevent you from doing certain diet tricks just to lose more weight faster when it’s not actually healthy.
3. Prevent you from giving up when the scale is not going down as fast you’d like.

What Are Some Possible Deeper Reasons for Losing Weight?

I’m sure you guys can do better than me at coming up with your own personal list- but here’s a few ideas:

• Wanting to have more energy for your kids
• Wanting more energy for your grandkids
• Wanting to be ALIVE to see your grandkids grow up.
• You miss or would like to do some hobbies that require a certain level of physical fitness
• You want to grow old with your hubby
• You want to have better fertility and a better chance of starting a family (having a healthier body helps with this)
• Better cholesterol levels and all the different parameters that indicate either good health or “on the path to destruction”  In my recent interview with Nathan who lost 110lbs with the hCG Diet, he relates the drastic change in these levels just partway through the diet.
• Lowering your chances of heart disease.
• You have a chronic illness that won’t go away but the symptoms could vastly improve if you weren’t overweight.  My interview with Donna is the perfect example of this- she has MS and her symptoms greatly improved, while her need for an abundance of medications greatly dropped after losing over 100lbs with hCG.

• Simply, you want to enjoy your life which can often be much more easily achieved with a certain level of health.

So now lets talk about the 3 good outcomes that can result from having some of these deeper reasons for losing weight.

3 GREAT Outcomes

1.  Maintaining Weight Loss Long Term

Having important reasons for wanting to be thinner and healthier will help you make this a life-long change.  Probably every last one of us women has lost weight just to go to a party and then our motivation for losing or keeping it off was totally gone after the party was over.  Am I right or am I right?

It’s not that we won’t be pleased about being thinner at that party, but it’s not the end-all for satisfaction in losing weight.

We’ll go home after the party, and continue our journey whether it’s our weightloss journey or weight maintenance journey, because we have these deeper reasons.  These types of reasons are everlasting reasons- things that will never go away or become less important- they are constant.

That will help us to not feel “stuck” when we make a choice to switch from white sugar to some alternative forms of sweeteners like maybe coconut sugar or honey or stevia.  Because we are actually choosing it.  It seems to me there is a big difference in feeling that these long term choices are our own choice vs. something that is being forced on us.  Feeling trapped and forced to change something seems to result in any changes made as temporary ones.  Taking back the power and making changes because you want them seem to last much longer and be more permanent.

2.  Not Doing Unhealthy “diet tricks” to Speed Your Weight Loss Beyond Normal 

Having deeper reasons for losing weight will help you to go about your weight loss in a mindful, healthy manner.

Sometimes when you are desperate to lose x amount of lbs by x specific date because of such and such a party or vacation, you will find yourself doing stupid stuff to achieve it that can actually hurt your body in the long term.

Who wants to share their experience on this?  Ooh me me! Pick me!

Okay, so I was going to be dancing in a recital, and in order to lose several lbs during the week leading up to the recital, I walked 8 miles a day, every day, hardly ate anything, and drank diet coke.  I think I “lost” about 8 lbs.  But I also got major shin splits and gained it right back afterwards because my entire point for losing weight had nothing to do with the actual long term health of my body- I was focused solely on 1 particular upcoming event.  In retrospect I don’t think it was a reasonable thing to do for my body.  Yoyo-ing up and down with weight can really take a toll on your body over time too.

On the hCG diet, having meaningful reasons for wanting to lose your excess weight can help you make smart choices as you go through protocol.  You won’t try to “speed up” the weight loss you’re experiencing at the sake of losing more muscle.

It can be easier to care about a certain number on the scale than to care HOW we get there.

I’ve done hCG enough times and seen it’s results in enough people now, as well as all the body fat testing from my own results now, to know that the protocol itself is a perfectly safe way and VERY efficient way to lose a great amount of fat quickly.

But you can still take it to extremes with this diet trying to get even BETTER results.

My question though is, if you introduce some type of “correction day” or do something off protocol that people are reporting is causing more weightloss than usual- where is that extra weight loss coming from?  If it’s coming from fat, GREAT!  But what if that extra weightloss is coming from muscle instead?  This is not good.  It can harm the balance of your hormones, you can lose excess muscle that your body needs, and your body will want to put it back on after the fact.  Sometimes it’s better to play it safe when you are not sure about this.

The best book that I have read on the importance of doing the hCG diet properly and how it affects a woman’s hormones for the good or the bad is Weight-Loss Apocalypse: Emotional Eating Rehab Through the hCG Protocol by Robin Woodall.  I highly recommend it if you want to know how this protocol is more than just a diet.

3. Not giving up when the scale is not going down as fast you’d like.

This seems to happen to the majority of people who do the hCG Diet – you won’t feel like this 100% of the time on your journey, but at the very least at different points during rounds you will feel like the scale is not going down at a pace you feel makes sense when compared with your efforts (eating 500 calories, denying yourself etc).

Having a longer term perspective because of deeper reasons for losing weight will help you get through these times without giving up. It’s something you can acknowledge that is yes, quite irritating, but it’s not going to stop you from your ultimate goal of health even if you don’t make it your x lbs lost by x party date. Which I really don’t recommend making goals like that anyways, because as I’ve said before, you really don’t have control over this.

There are some who have even stopped weighing entirely while on hCG just so that this factor is completely ruled out for them. Not everyone may want or need to do this, but it’s certainly something to consider if you are having a really hard time dealing with the unpredictability of the scale.

Watch Ginn’s Full Interview here

Finding The Deeper Reasons

I’m not any type of psychologist or anything so I can’t tell you what will help you discover these deeper reasons for being healthy.
Here are some ways that other sites have suggested for doing this:
1.  Journaling (you can do this with my Phase 2 Workbook)
2. Vision Board
3.  Reading books on self-improvement

Here are few of my fav self improvement books that have really helped me:

The Four Tendencies – Personality Profiles that Reveal How to Make Your Life Better

Better Than Before – What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits

Rising Strong – How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead

Watch Lynette’s Full Interview here

Watch Nance’s Full Interview here

Watch Kimberly’s Full Interview here

Watch Melissa’s Full Interview here

I hope that was helpful to you guys!  If some of you already have your deeper reasons for a healthier body firmly in mind, please share them in a comment here for others to be motivated by!

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