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See all the hCG interview episodes
These are in-depth conversations one-on-one with hCG ladies where you get to hear their whole weight loss story and the tips that helped them succeed.

Read short written hCG testimonials
These are short testimonials of ladies who’ve written in their hCG diet results to me for quick motivation.

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Mandy was so kind as to share her weight loss progress charts – these might give you ideas on doing your own stats tracking, as well as seeing the way her weight loss and her inch loss played out over time.

Mandy’s daily planner and weight/measurement progress reports

Check out Mandy’s P2 and P3 Recipes Pinterest Board.

It has one of her favorites on there, a recipe for Radish “Rice”

One Last Mandy Tip:

Another P2 trick I learned was Coffee in a BLENDER!!! Oh MY!!! A few drops of stevia
and simply blend for a few seconds. It’s so weird how it froths up and looks creamy when it’s not.
Great mind trick for the coffee addict in me.

Download Episode 16 Transcript – PDF

(or read it below)

Transcript for our hCG Interview:

Rayzel: Hey guys! Hcgchica. Welcome this is episode 16 now of the hCG Diet Interviews. I have Mandy with me today. She’s done a few rounds of hCG and were gonna talk about several things today. All of the regular stuff of course. Everyone always wants to know about weight loss and inch loss and things like that but we’re also gonna talk about the topic of body image because that’s actually how we ended up kind of being in touch a little bit more. So, some of you may not know, a little while back, I got an email from someone struggling with body image and adjusting to her new weight. Because you know on hCG you tend to lose fat, you know, your weight fairly quickly and she was having trouble. So I actually told her, you know this is such a good question. I’m gonna ask my email list how they’ve dealt with that. I have actually almost 3000 people on my email list now. So I sent that out and I got all kinds of awesome replies from people just sharing like how they were able to adjust and how it is difficult doing that and so anyway, she had a really neat reply and so I was like “Oh, we should talk about this on our interview too”. Anyway, welcome Mandy.

Mandy: Hi

Rayzel: How are you today?

Mandy: I’m good.

Rayzel: Good. Good. I wanna talk about the body image thing first but before we do that let’s just talk about some basic stuff. Tell me where you started with your weight and where have you ended up. Just a couple of basic stuffs like that.

Mandy: I started at 200 and I ended at 120. It took a couple of years to get there but with actual hCG I lost 30 pounds. That was in the middle of my journey. And when I saw your body image question. I just jumped on it. Cause I thought Wow, somebody else went through that. When I was having issues with my body image I didn’t realize that’s what was going on because I was losing weight so fast. Your mind takes a while to catch up. I’m still dealing with it. I realized it does take a while for me, especially since I’ve gained and lost, gained and lost. It never really goes away, the adjusting to your inner image or inner self with your outer self.

Rayzel: So what are some things that you would think to yourself or that you would find difficult about the losing weight, being in a new body. What are some things that you would actually find yourself running into?

Mandy: Attention that you get from people. Unexpected attention that you didn’t get before. I noticed people were acting differently towards me or just noticing me in general.

Rayzel: How did that make you feel?

Mandy: I almost questioned it at first. “Why are you doing this?” Because I still see myself the same way when I look down and you don’t notice how different you look. The attention was the first thing I noticed that clued me in that I was changing.

Rayzel: Would that be from people you knew or strangers or both?

Mandy: Both. First the people I knew, I was dropping weight so fast that lot of them were like “What are you doing?” and back then when I first started back in late 2009 2010. I didn’t want to tell them what I was doing because hCG was very unpopular back then. Only recently, in the past maybe year or so has it been okay to say “Hey I’m doing hCG”. Cause there’s lot of support out there now. Then there wasn’t so I didn’t, I’d start to explain and then I would just get all kinds of negatives feedback. Then I got feedback now I get support, it’s changed. But then even strangers like when I asked your body image question in the email it reminded me of a story where I walked into this that I go into every day and I was getting my coffee in the back and I overheard one of the employees a perfect stranger about this girl that comes in all of the time and she’s lost so much weight, she looks like a completely different person. In my head, you know, I’m filling my coffee thinking, “Oh good for her” – Somebody else was in wait and then I came out from the back to pay for my coffee and the employee was “I was just talking about you”. I almost wanted to cry, “I was like “Oh my God that was me, that’s weird. I’m like “Why?” She was “I wouldn’t even recognize you if I didn’t see you every day.” And so, that’s when it started to hit me. This is a real thing. It’s like I remember waking up when I was losing the weight thinking, it’s all gonna come back. It was just. It’s still tough sometimes. My clothes, whenever I go to buy clothes, I still gravitate towards the large sizes cause my closet was rearranged from when I was in my 150s, 140s, 130s, 120s. I still have trouble getting rid of some of the big clothes.

Rayzel: What is it that you’re thinking when you think about that like when you gravitate towards the larger clothes or like you said in your closet like you still see yourself as being bigger then?

Mandy: Sometimes I do I think. Or Its just the fear of I might be that again one day.

Rayzel: I got you so it feels more like what you’ve achieved is like temporary or something. Like you said like you wake up, Oh my gosh, is it gonna come back? Yeah.

Mandy: Or I’m gonna just mess up. I know I’ll never be 200 again. But like when I first drop my first 80 pounds and I was at 120. I thought I had a good handle on things, you know, but I was single at that time and I live by myself. I didn’t have to share my life or my meals with anybody. So I actually maintained for a year and a half almost 2 years. And then I got into a relationship with my now husband. And I wasn’t expecting to gain the weight back cause I thought I could do it but then you get happy and in love and you just want to eat what they eat and then I stopped planning my meals, stopped getting on the scale, and crept up on me.

Rayzel: That happens, you know, I was thin when I got married but I have my little workout routine, I used to go workout late at night but then when I got married it’s like I wanna sit on my couch and snack with my husband now. That’s what I wanna do for fun because yes, I’m in love and [inaudible] husband. So it’s so true, your life does change and you have to find your new normal.

Rayzel: Finishing up on the body image thing. Tell me the whole thing about the clothing when it comes to that.

Mandy: When I was in 200 pounds I was wearing the size 42 in Men’s. I pretty much gave up on Women’s clothes. I would shop big T-shirt, big shorts. And when I started to lose the weight I was still wearing the larger clothes and I didn’t really know how to dress for my body anymore so my mom had a good idea, she’s said “Let’s go to Goodwill and just pick out some dresses, just wear them around the house when no one else is around just to get used to it.” I thought that’s silly but I did it and then eventually I started to go out to public places where nobody knew me and test my new body, test the new clothes. Then I would shop on Amazon or {inaudible} for more girly clothes. And then I would gradually start to wear it to work and as they one day I just kinda “Look at me now”. That’s how I got into wearing girl clothes and more size appropriate clothes.

Rayzel: I think that that is a fantastic way to ease into it because it’s true you’re comfortable wearing one thing and then now you feel like doing that is so not you in a sense because you haven’t been doing that so it feels really uncomfortable. So I thought that was great, like start out in your home, wear it around yourself and then go where there’s strangers where no one knows you. That’s such a good idea. Is those your mom’s idea?

Mandy: Yeah it was.

Rayzel: That’s fantastic. Then finally end up where people know you because by then you’ve kind of already adjusted to yourself. You’ve been in public with whatever it is on and I think that that’s an awesome idea. I think I was actually telling you in our original conversation that’s kind of what I did when I really like hats but when I was a teenager, and I was, when you’ve never worn hats and when you do it draws attention so you just have to get past that little thing where people see you doing something that they’re not use to and at first it attracts attention but then they get use to it. SO that’s really cool. That’s awesome. I think that that’s great. A great way for other people too cause you’re not the only one that I’ve talked with who wear Men’s clothes, so getting more girly could feel awkward at first. So that’s a great way.
I wanted to ask you know about your process with researching the diet when you first came across hCG because when you discover it, it can be so exciting, you know, what you read is you want to like to kind of jump in and do it right away. But there actually is kind of a lot to the protocol so I do recommend people research it for a while and try to be patient. So tell me what you did before you started the diet.

Mandy: Like I said back in 2009 when I first heard about it. I knew nothing about it, I didn’t know how exciting it was. I felt like, I was on the internet and you know, of course all the ads “Lose 20 pounds in 20 days”. Once I got past that like the more I research it, the more I learned, I realized it is not an easy quick fix thing and it was actually a hormone that I was going to be putting in my body and I’m a researcher, I’ve {inaudible} this inside and out over before I jumped into it and when some of the sites they were offering that they were hundreds of dollars. I wasn’t going to do that. I was looking for a do it yourself way and so it just took me, I actually research it for like 6 months, just a day and day and then I came up across Pounds and Inches, Dr. Simeons’ book and I downloaded that and read that front to back several times. And actually since there wasn’t vlogs and support groups out there, that was what I went to on a daily basis to keep myself motivated. I must have read that thing so many times. I think I still have my original around here somewhere. And anybody who’s ever asked me what are you doing and shows genuine interest in it, I won’t just say Oh yeah, I’ll get it for you, show you where to get it, let’s do it. I actually told them I’m not really gonna answer any questions for you, here’s the book, here’s the stuff, read it, learn it. I was like almost doing major surgery. You wanna know what you’re gonna be doing to your body because there are consequences if you do it wrong.

Rayzel: That’s true. And I still think reading the original protocol is mandatory. It kind of gives you the premise behind of what it’s supposed to be doing. Because even if you make alterations to the protocol, you can do it in an informed way if you have those basics. I just got an email yesterday from someone who is like Oh I don’t know what the difference is, my friend is on hCG and on the protocol she’s on she can eat whatever she wants as long as it’s under 500 calories and she’s like and the list my doctor gave me it’s like so strict, do I have to do that. So I was okay, wow, there’s definitely still a lot of misinformation out there because if you’re eating like cheese, that could really be bad and then people think the diet doesn’t work. So I think that’s important.

Mandy: Yeah. I didn’t want people to say it didn’t work. Understand first you have to get the book and then they come back month later, “So what can I eat?” I’d say, “ No, you didn’t read it.”

Rayzel: Not getting out that easy. The information is there. What I wanted to ask you now about, you mentioned it a little bit with like getting newly married and stuff. But, what challenges to maintaining weight loss have you faced? Because that’s something I think we all go through. I think actually the vast majority of the women I’ve interviewed now have had a little weight regain here and there that they have to fix and I honestly don’t think there’s anything wrong with that because I think it’s real. I’ve had to do that myself just because I haven’t done hCG again for over a year and a half. I still make weight {inaudible} it’s not like I’m in the same exact weight every day. Real life happens. You mentioned being newly married was kind of challenging, how you had those challenges and kind of like found new ways to deal with them.

Mandy: That being the biggest one, I didn’t realize it until this last round, my fifth. That I was challenging just my calories, and with my P3s I never really stabilized until this last one. So it was a daily challenge for me, I was planning on my meals counting my calories and also after doing HCG and P3, learned about low-carb and then that delves into the ketogenic lifestyle. I got experimental, I’ve tried Ifs. I thought I can maintain my weight that way. Just after the wedding, actually just in January I would try myself, I’d learned how to lose weight really fast using keto along with IFs so Monday-Friday I would lose 5 pounds and on the weekend I would put it back on. Then on my cheat days they started to {inaudible} into Wednesday and then it spun out of control.

Rayzel: So far, let me just stop you for one second. For anyone who’s not aware, IF stands for intermittent fasting and then Keto stands for Ketogenic which is usually a real high fat diet with almost no carbs and I’ll put a couple of links to learning more about that. So give us exactly how you would do that, you said doing the week you would…

Mandy: I would do Ketogenic during the week where very high fat, I kept my carbs under 10% of my intake and my fat with anywhere almost 85% and I would drop weight really quick Monday through Friday and Saturday and Sunday I would let myself relax. You know, it’s a lot mentally too, it always hung yourself know waiting in ends, so I would let myself go, so I would let myself go and it got really exhausting.

Rayzel: So in the weekends you would have like cheat days where you would have carbs or sugar, whatever?

Mandy: Hmm.

Rayzel: Then you said with intermittent fasting you had that into what you were doing.

Mandy: So I’m gonna do ketogenic from noon to 8. That was at work so it’s easy but then I found myself I was able to wait till 2. So 2 to 8. I don’t know what happened. I need to research it more a bit. Mentally somehow my brain registered that as you need to eat a lot, gorge, you’re not letting yourself for all those hours so It’s okay to have a 800 calorie meal or dinner before you go to bed. And it just got to – I remember watching one of your videos about them cookie, been at a party and eating a cookie, just one, not hearing what anybody else was saying all you can think about is that cookie. My gosh, I’m like, that’s so me. I’m not unconsciously thinking what I’m gonna eat next, what I’m gonna eat later, planning my cheat days in advance. I think it’s when I realized I need to do another round of hCG when one morning on a weekend I woke up early like 6:30 to feed the cats or something and there was one ice cream bar on the freezer and I went and get it and I ate before my husband woke up. I was sneaking eating. After I was done I was like I’m a grown woman, I could eat whatever I want, what am I doing? This is out of control.

Rayzel: So you found for you that this created a negative scenario for you, and we’re not saying that IF or Keto is bad but for your situation and the way you were doing it was leading you down a bad path with food and eating.

Mandy: Yes. I didn’t research it enough, I don’t think so. I think it’s a good thing. I definitely want to try it again, do it again after I get my mental in order.

Rayzel: I think that’s why it’s so important that everyone’s situation and you really can’t base it of what’s worked for someone else cause like you are similar a while back before hCG. I had tried to do a low carb during the week thing and then a cheat day. That was a very common thing to do in the past 5 years that you’d read online on other fitness blogs. But for me because I had kind of a binge problem. It’s kind of what you said like planning my cheat days too much and thinking about it all the time and then when it would come I would just completely blow it way over board. Then it would spill into another day because I’d be having so many cravings. So for me I just realized I can’t have cheat days because I’d get out of control with it. So you have to realize what work for you. Thanks for sharing that story because I think that’s important where we have to sometimes realize that maybe something’s not working well for us and then analyze what it is that’s going wrong.

Mandy: I love that about hCG. It’s so strict, and it gives the effect in order. It’s almost like that 21 day as habit rule. It gets you back into that minute and I’m the kind of person that I need strict rules.

Rayzel: It is kind of like a cleanse in a way.

Rayzel: Let’s move on to, you mentioned how you didn’t stabilized in your P3s before in other round. So let’s talk about Phase 3. Can you tell me what some of the lessons you learned from that like what happened in the different ones?

Mandy: My first P3 I remember I was so scared to leave P2 and I was trying to research like crazy how to do P3. How to up my calories fast, I wanted a meal plan. I wanted rules like P2 has. I couldn’t find anything. I kind of clung on to P2 for a little bit and I think I added maybe an extra hundred calories a day for the first week just barely inch my way up there. My 2nd P3 I remembered I was like, Okay, the weight didn’t come back. So I instantly started on eggs and cottage cheese. I’m actually forced myself to love cottage cheese. I’d ate it before {inaudible} days so that was something I’ve learned. But I’ve never got past 1000-1100 calories up until this last P3.

Rayzel: What would happen with your weight when you did that?

Mandy: I would continue losing. That’s how I end up losing. With the hCG I lost 30 pounds but overall 80 I just kept dropping. They say 2 pounds over, 2 pounds under, go back. In the first I was like no. This is great, I kept losing weight so I just kept going down and down that’s why I’m down to 120. I learned my body with P3s. In every P3 I’ve learned more about my body than I didn’t know before. Like I knew that sometimes I’d slept in later I would lose another pound. It is kind of weird I don’t know why but I also learned how to cook on P3 but actually back to what you said upping calories. Watching you, actually, I learned in one of your videos you said keep upping your calories in P3 and just if you go over 2 pounds, do a steak day. That’s why I decided to {inaudible}. I pushed my calories up to 1500 and as long as I stayed under 2 pounds I wasn’t losing, but I wasn’t gaining that, 130th stop at 136 as long as it didn’t get to 138 I was okay. So far I let my mind rest at that even if I got—I never actually got to 137. I dropped down to 133 but then I kept upping my calories and to my surprise I wasn’t gaining so my body could handle the extra calories.

Rayzel: How many calories did you find you could eat without gaining weight in the end?

Mandy: Anywhere between 1400-1500, which is comfortable mentally. Planning on meals is so much more fun. I can actually have my dinner and dessert and a bigger lunch, bigger portions, have breakfast. It’s just so much nicer not to have to say no to so many things.

Rayzel: Did that include exercise while you’re eating that amount of calories or no?

Mandy: Yes it did. Not as much as my other P3s. I hike on the weekends and during Monday-Friday I walk 30 minutes a day. But before with my other P3s, I was walking a mile almost every other day. I would sometimes get it to 8 o’clock at night. I need to go exercise cause I was also counting my calories in calories out and I needed that deficit of at least 700 calories. I exercise {inaudible} back then but now I’m more relaxed.

Rayzel: Cause you’re married and you {inaudible}. Thanks for sharing that cause in general I do sometimes get people emailing saying I’m losing weight in P3 is that horrible? Honestly I don’t think, if you wanna lose more weight, I don’t personally think it’s bad if you lose weight in P3 but you also at some point if you do want to be done losing weight you do wanna find what you can eat without gaining weight and it’s true we all wanna be able to eat as much as we can without gaining weight. Let’s just be honest. So, we don’t want to have to only eat a little bit if we can eat more so I think it’s cool, you can train your body, find out where that level is for you. I think like my caloric intake is a little higher I think cause of my crossfit. I don’t actually count calories but I know it’s definitely at least 2000. But my workouts are very intense though so I think that could be why. But yeah, just finding that, that’s cool.

Rayzel: You mentioned to me that you’re a calorie counter so I wanted to ask you what your favorite way to track calories is cause I don’t actually count calories so people will ask me and I don’t know. So how do you do that?

Mandy: I use a wonderful website called FatSecret.com. It’s what I originally found back in 2009 when I first started counting calories so it’s why I stuck, I have a history there, and it’s just it’s so easy. Actually I’m kind of addicted to it, I’m trying to get away from it. That’s the other thing I’m trying to learn with just, I mean, I know what’s bad to eat and what’s good to eat. But in the mornings and I plan my breakfast, lunch, dinner and we’re using that website and it’s just so easy to count calories that way. And if anything’s not in there I can just Google it and then I can just enter it and Voila! It’s there.

Rayzel: So you said you do that in the mornings for your whole day, pretty much? So actually one of the reasons I’m put off from it is because, well there’s more than one, but I feel like it’s a pain and I have other reasons too but if by doing it all at once in the morning. So you do always know what you’re gonna eat for the whole day then?

Mandy: I don’t vary much. My breakfast is always the same 2 eggs, 2 pieces of bacon and I do MCT oil in my coffee. So that’s always just a click, click, click. Lunch is usually the same too Monday through Friday, just celery, peanut butter, cottage cheese or salad, kale, whatever. That’s much the same. It’s my dinner that’s usually the one thing that varies. It remembers what you’ve eaten the day before so just plug it in.

Rayzel: You mentioned that you had some muscle fatigue when you were on the diet. Did you figure out what you thought that was or what might have felt to resolve it.

Mandy: I think so. It’s weird, because when I first did my first couple of rounds of hCG I didn’t have this muscle fatigue problem. It seems like with every round I do it gets worst. I don’t know if it’s just my age or before I did hCG I detox so much that I didn’t ate salt but I did find that magnesium, potassium and iodine that once I got on those supplements and started taking more of that in since I wasn’t getting that on that food and I drinking too much water too. I was probably flushing out more minerals than I was taking in. It was in my thighs. It seems like each of my legs weighed like a hundred pounds. It just got so heavy it made my round very tough, very difficult and I told my husband. He’s like you’re not happy doing this, stop doing it. It’s not the diet, I’m not hungry. It’s my legs, it’s so weird. I researched it. I couldn’t find any, nothing out there in the internet. Some people were just saying use cell salts, up your magnesium, up your potassium. In some days, I would think it’s working, in other days no. But of course, towards the end of my round I finally figured out that my {inaudible} It seemed to be working. Or it could’ve been a combination of just stopping or getting off P2 and starting to incorporate more food. I don’t know. We’ll see if I do another round if it comes back or not.

Rayzel: But it always go away when you get off of P2?

Mandy: Yes.

Rayzel: I think I recall Dr. Simeons talking about that didn’t he, in his protocol?

Mandy: About fatigue?

Rayzel: Yeah about muscle fatigue in the legs. I kind of remember that.

Mandy: I’ll have to go back and research that.

Rayzel: Yeah I think he did. He had an explanation about fat from between your muscle being lost and stuff. I don’t know if that’s true. He gave an example of somebody who would run a flight of stairs his legs would feel so heavy and he would say, I don’t know if it’s true or not. There wasn’t as much science available then as now. But I do hear that complaint now and then. I do think that the important thing to know is that it does go away when you get off of Phase 2. If anyone else has any ideas on how to fix that or what’s causing it please post in the comments below. We all wanna feel better on hCG. Actually speaking of iodine, I’ve been doing a lot more research on it lately, just because it is really related to thyroid health and so I hope to bring out some more information on the blog about that eventually so I think it can be a really good thing for people.

Mandy: That’s good. You know, are you up, are you down? What are you doing? Just quick text every morning. It was great. I’m helping my cousin now and it’s you know having someone else to answer to. Accountability is important because I was never a cheater but the same time when something goes wrong. {inaudible} He goes, Hey let’s dissect it, what did you do yesterday? It’s good to have a buddy to go through.

Rayzel: That’s great. You really can’t underestimate having support in whatever way it is. If you can find a buddy that’s awesome or like for me that’s why I originally started vlogging on YouTube when I—You know I never had plans on making how to videos, just it was on there something important, like Hi, I lost a pound and oh I cheated and then people will give their input in the comments and it’s just giving air to your feelings or like you said saying what happened whether it’s good or bad and it helps you get back on track and feel more positive.

Rayzel: Well thank you so much for coming on here today Mandy. I really appreciate it and I hope things keep going with your happy marriage. Sounds like you’re doing really well. Everyone thanks for watching I hope you enjoy. Stay tuned for our next episode 17. You guys take care!

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