Losing FAT on the HCG diet
16.8 lbs in 25 vlcd days now on HCG Injections for my 3rd round. I’m at 34 lbs of fat according to my Omron Body Fat monitor.
My Ketones have dropped to 15 for reasons I’m unaware of. I thought to remove the stevia in my water temporarily to see if by some minute chance, the stevia could be causing a reduction in my ketones via a blood sugar increase (doubtful, but you never know with HCG). Since I’m writing this post way after the fact of this vlog, I can now tell you that it had nothing to do with the stevia. I think what it comes down to is simply that my body was using the ketones in my body more efficiently and they just weren’t spilling out into my urine anymore. I’m thinking this because I really hadn’t changed anything in what I was doing on the protocol from the first half of the round where my ketones were always at 40 and 80, and I was continuing to lose fat. Yay for efficient ketone use I guess huh.
Another note on Shirataki aka Miracle Noodles- they are literally making this second half of the weight loss protocol SO EASY for me this round. Remember that the shirataki noodles are simply soluble fiber. That is all. You can see another more in depth post I did about miracle noodles on the protocol here: https://hcgchica.com/the-story-on-miracle-noodles-and-shirataki-noodles-hcg-r3p2d17-19-129-2-10-5-lbs-body-fat-lost/
On to the importance of losing fat, not just “weight” on HCG.
Go online and google “5 pounds 5 pounds muscle” on google images. Wait, don’t bother! I’ll do it for you….click here.
Eye opening isn’t it? The volume that fat takes up is wayyyy more than muscle. If you lost 5 pounds of muscle, you wouldn’t visually look that much smaller- ie your pants would fit about the same. But if you lost 5 pounds of fat, you would shrink visibly quite a bit. And that is what is important right? To be visually smaller? I mean, if you weighed 102 lbs and looked like an elephant, you wouldn’t be too proud of the small number right? It’s the end result of what you look like that counts right? And not just for that reason, but many even more important reasons, we want to be concerned with losing fat and not muscle.
But why am I mentioning this? Don’t we all lose fat on HCG? Isn’t that what this protocol does? Well, when the protocol is followed properly, yes, you will lose mostly fat on the diet. However, in the days and times we are living in, many many people make various alterations to the weight loss protocol. This is not to say that they are all bad- certainly not. Some of the alterations I’ve made to my own protocol has resulted in continued fabulous fat loss. However, I have also made certain alterations to this protocol in the past that I believe led to excessive muscle loss instead of fat loss. So I’m bringing this subject up to encourage everyone to approach variations to the diet with caution and discernment. Don’t just randomly throw in an egg day or mac nut day because you’re bored or because you heard someone else did it and lost 3 lbs the next day. There are certain cases where I believe some variations, especially ones involving the addition of a significant amount of fat, cause that “extra great loss on the scale” the next day to come from muscle, not fat. That’s something you simply don’t want. It will ultimately harm your metabolism, make you unhealthier, and you won’t even look good to top it off!
That’s not to say that you won’t lose some muscle on the protocol regardless of how perfectly and purposefully you do the diet. Depending on how overweight you are, some muscle loss is to be expected and is even necessary in order to reach a normal amount of muscle mass for a person of your height and build. For instance- I am 5’1”. The normal amount of muscle mass for a person of my height is somewhere between 89-100 lbs. When I first started the protocol I had 112 lbs of lean body mass. A normal overall weight for a person of my height is about 105-120. If I were to have kept all my lean mass of 112 pounds, but ended up after weight loss at a total of say, 112 pounds, that would mean I would have absolutely no fat on my body at all! Not only does 0% body fat not exist, it would be super unhealthy- in fact, I’d be dead. We all need a certain amount of fat to be healthy and to be….um…alive. We have essential fat- our bone marrow is made up of fat, structural fat cushions in between our vital organs- this is necessary ya? Oh yeah, I almost forgot, much of our brain is fat!! After looking around I read in several places that while the brain is 75 percent water, what’s leftover is 60% fat! Additionally, enough fat, especially for women, is essential for proper hormone production and balance.
Getting off course here….so my point is that I had to lose some muscle in order to get to a normal body weight for my height. Our bodies naturally put on extra muscle when we gain weight in order to carry around all that extra fat we have. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to keep walking around. So when we lose that excess fat, we don’t need all that muscle we had. We just need a normal amount of muscle for our now normal body size.
As a person gets to the point on the diet where they are no longer overweight by very much, at this point, it is desirable however that most of the weight loss should be coming from fat. At this point your body is most likely not carrying excess muscle since you’re not that overweight anymore. In some cases with men, there is often 0% muscle loss while on the protocol. This is about the only time in my life that I wish I were a guy. We women do not have it so easy- I guess it has to do with the miniscule amounts of testosterone we women have in comparison with men. Oh well. We’ll make do just fine on our own won’t we girls?
On my 3rd weight loss round I believe I lost somewhere around 87% fat and my 4th round was 80% fat- to me these ratios are excellent and more than acceptable.
I hope this post was helpful- I feel like it’s important to draw attention to this because I don’t think the world in general has trained us women to be aware of fat and muscle weight- we have be finangled into thinking that we have to be a certain weight and be “skinny” without regard to muscle. Times are changing thankfully and this will help us to maintain our weight loss and stop the yo-yo dieting effect.
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Thank you for this. super stressed out with my first 7 days. I lost 7 lbs but all muscle. Going to monitor my sleep…heard the cortisol may have something to do with it.
This was my experience too. Fat went up, muscle went down. Lost 7.5, but most was muscle. It was recommended to not eat fruit in the evening and to cut out one slice of Melba Toast. We will see.