HCG – Losing 2 lbs a day?

Is it possible to lose 2 lbs a day or more on the HCG diet?  I see questions like this on the internet.  The long and short of it are no and yes.  Confused?  Lets use my mom as an example.

Here are the losses for the first 5 days on the protocol:

Loading: +6 lb gain; VLCD1: -3.4. VLCD2: -2.4, VLCD3: -2.6, VLCD4: -2.2, VLCD5: +.8

My mom’s results from her first five vlcd (very low calorie diet) days on the diet plan are pretty awesome.  Granted, there was some loading weight to get off as you’ll see, but she lost her loading weight pretty much in 2 days.  After the first week her overall weight losses became less- days of .8, .6, .4, an occasional 1.4 perhaps, even an occasional gain!  What changed?  Did she do something wrong?  Nope.

When I first started this protocol I didn’t know what to expect- four rounds later I saw a pattern and realized what everyone else who has done one or more rounds of the protocol knows- yes you can and most likely will lose upwards of 2 lbs a day the first week of HCG Injections.  But after that the losses will even out so that your average weightloss over the course of the entire round will be between .5-1lb per day.   So again, for newbies out there, the first week of weight loss on the diet is typically the week you lose the most weight- partially due to the loading weight yes, but it’s not only that- even the net loss in weight after accounting for the loading weight is usually the highest that first week as compared to subsequent weeks on HCG.

What does this realization mean to me?  For me, it means not only taking the whole diet plan seriously and doing it properly, but especially that first week, stick to protocol and reap the benefits!  Why am I saying this?  I known more than one person who after seeing a 3 or 4 lb weight loss on the scale after their first vlcd day on the diet, gets a little cocky and thinks, ‘hey, if I’m going to lose 3 lbs every day, I can afford to cheat a little here and there while i’m on the protocol.’  Then they proceed to throw away their best week of weight loss on cheats and then come to a very depressing reality in week 2 when they are losing only .2 (not 2 lbs) a day, that things weren’t as they had thought at first, at which point they give up.

Don’t be fooled!  You will not have big losses like this every week.  The first week is great, then often the subsequent weeks sometimes has substantially less weight loss averaging out to .5-1 lb per day by the end of your round.  Sometimes people forget the averaging part.  If you’re losing 2 and 3 lbs a day the first week, in order for your weightloss to average out to .5-1lb per day, you’re going to have to have days with very low losses, and sometimes none at all.

Okay, enough of that.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is that occasional person on the protocol who, no matter what dosage changes they try,  continues to feel hungry on the protocol.  It worries me when a person is hungry on the diet plan because it is not normal.  My mom is one of these people, and it has continued to bother me.  After doing a lot of research, I feel that it may have to do with Leptin Resistance.  She has had a leptin test before and it did show she was leptin resistant.  Basically what this means is that leptin is available and circulating in the body, but the cells have become resistant to it because of chronically elevated levels of leptin over the years due to excess fat, and because of this resistance your body isn’t able to use the leptin, which causes you to feel hungry even when you aren’t, leading you to eat in excess of your body’s caloric needs.  I don’t know the answer to fixing the seemingly unfixable hunger on the protocol that some have (in general this happens to very few people however), but I did find a couple of excellent articles that discuss how to fix leptin resistance and how it helped with stabilization and maintenance after the protocol.

I found a great article discussing leptin at Mark’s Daily Apple– you can read it here.

I also found a great thread where several individuals who appeared to have trouble stabilizing their new weights in p3 and experienced hunger during this phase, were able to successfully regain their leptin sensitivity, maintain their weight loss easily and successfully, and no longer have cravings and hunger by using the Leptin Reset and Paleo protocols together.  The article is entitled, Is anyone else having success or failure combining the Leptin Reset with a paleo diet and this weight loss plan?

The leptin reset information can be found here: http://jackkruse.com/easy-start-guide/

I plan on researching this further myself and seeing if this might work for my mom.  For anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of going through an entire round hungry the entire time, despite dosage changes, etc., might give consideration to doing a pre-diet of Leptin Reset for a time, and then embark on a 2nd round of the protocol to see if this changes their weight loss experience- it’s an experiment I’d love to see someone with this problem try.

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