This is a monthly series of my IG stories put together to show you both what I’m up to on a more personal level, as well as answers to things related to the hCG protocol and maintaining weight loss. Please note that the writing below may seem a little funky at times because it’s just taken from my verbal IG stories but I know ya’ll might not want to watch but you still might like to know the basics of what’s goin’ on.

Links mentioned in this personal update

• DietDoc
• Luteinizing hormone
• p3tolife.com
• intermittent fast
• hcgchica.com/buyhcg
• homeostasis
• drink enough water
• sleep enough
• T4
• T3
• adrenal fatigue
• cortisol
•  lyme disease

Q&A Time!

Q1: When you go for a mammography, there’s a question in the sheet that asks if you are in hormone. Will hCG show up in this test & bloodwork? And will the proper response should be yes?

So there, yes. It could potentially affect the results of your lab tests.

Q3: What do you do when you gain weight instead of stabilizing in Phase 3? My P4 starts Friday, my LIW is 122, now I weigh 129. So help me!

If that’s the case, it would be okay if your weight went up a little bit and you just have to stabilize on a higher weight. Of course you don’t want it to keep going up. So if that is what’s happening, that could be a problem. Regardless of whether you need to stabilize a little higher or you can stabilize within the 2 lbs, we do have to stabilize and be at the weight that we’re at eventually.

If that’s not what happening for you, you have to start troubleshooting on what could be the possible causes for that. Dairy and nuts can often be a problem for some people. Not only because it can cause inflammation, but also because it makes it easy to overeat. Additionally, you said you are starting Phase 4, if your weight does not stable and you’re weight is higher that you want it to be, I will not just start Phase 4. I definitely wouldn’t do that yet.

What I can tell you is my phase 3 program which is at p3tolife.com – the ladies who are doing that, they are stabilizing amazingly and these are women who have told me, “hey, I’ve 3 or 4 phase 3’s before and I never stabilized or I have to do  5 steak days. And I don’t have to do a single steak day this time. And I really feel satisfied.” 

So part of it is really just that sometimes we don’t know what to eat and how much in phase 3. It gets so vague for most. My p3tolife program that is just one option – you could basically start p3 over. Potentially, you could lose a couple of pounds the first week or two and then probably you’ll find yourself stabilizing out.

Lastly, when you are higher than you wanna be and you don’t want to do another round of hCG right away, you can do correction day. Which is basically intermittent fast day – you don’t eat all day and then you eat dinner. Those can work very well. So you would wanna do it 2 days or 3 days apart. Like a Monday- Thursday, Monday-Friday. It does take time but it’s a gradual way to lose weight.

Q3: Hi! I just finished phase 3 and it was really good but I started phase 4 and today I have to do correction day. I do have problems with my digestion also can a correction day be done with an egg day?

There’s definitely different ways that you can do correction days. On an egg day, you are eating eggs throughout the day. I do want to give a plug here for actual fasting -or you do not eat for several hours. One of the reasons why this could be one of the most effective ways to do a correction day is because when you don’t eat for a few hours, your hormones actually change. If you don’t eat, your body starts producing more growth hormones, a lot of bodily changes (physiologically) can happen that promote fat burning in your body, which just eating clean throughout the day won’t cause. So this is different.

For me, for a true correction day where you want to achieve the most for what you’re doing, I feel that a true fast day is the best thing. However, sometimes you’re really hungry or there are cases when you can’t do a fast, so as a backup – eating really clean, like just eating chicken breast for the day or the egg day – that could work too. So those are definitely other options for sure.

Q4: Hi Rayzel, why don’t you have a purity report for US hCG? Did they not provide you with one? Thanks for the time and all you do to keep us informed.

The endotoxin testing is testing for sterility, which is really important because when you inject something in your body, you’re bypassing a lot of your body’s immune defenses. So if there’s something in there, you could die or you could be really sick. Regarding the purity-testing, they cannot mail anything out ’til it has been tested and it has to legally fall between certain parameters. I think it maybe somewhere around 90 and 110% potency.

But the point is, for pharmacies, it’s not really worth the risk of trying to make the potency as low as possible and pass the  test. Because if it didn’t meet it, they would have to destroy the entire batch. And these people are making like a thousand vials at a time. So that would be a huge loss.

Basically, no matter what US hCG company you order from, like those all in my site hcgchica.com/buyhcg, there are all gonna be the same. Which is nice to know – that the potency and sterility is regulated here.

With the purity report, the thing is, a lot of lab & Pharmacies, they don’t feel comfortable sharing some private information. But remember, too, just because you’ve seen one purity report on the blog – I have that there just to give you an idea of what’s done. But again, that’s just a purity report for one batch of hCG maybe from 2 years ago…So you’re safe ????

Q5: Is it okay to get a massage on P2 if no oil is used?

When you get a massage, depending on how hardcore it is, it releases toxins from your body. You can get inflammation, water retention from your muscles. They usually tell you to drink extra water after massage so you could flush out those toxins. I sometimes might not feel well after a massage. My thought would be just to view the idea with caution…It may have a little bit of unexpected effect and it’s up to you if you feel like taking that chance.

Q6: I’m really wondering how many times we can really do hCG without making our bodies extremely sensitive to weight gain with starches, sugars and flours. I keep seeing that a lot of people including myself easily gain a lot of weight in a couple of days after completing hCG phase 2 and phase 3. It kinda becomes like a yo-yo diet.

I think there’s a couple of aspects to this. And one of them you brought out,  is how many times can you do it. For me what matters is how many times in what time period? For once a year -I feel pretty sure that’s gonna be fine because I have almost an entire year in between each round. But if you’re doing like 5 rounds in a year, or 6 months, then it does very much makes sense to me that it’s gonna start being troublesome.

I think hCG or any diet is taxing on your body. And additionally, the amount of muscle that you are gonna lose on a round of hCG will vary from person to person. I still don’t know if you lose more muscle if you do homeopathic hCG VS injection hCG. I honestly don’t know the answer to that. And this is an important thing – if you do a diet back to back several times and then regain weight and then re-lose weight, you’ve lost a few pounds of muscle in each round. In the middle, if you don’t work out, you don’t regain muscle. And again this is going to happen in any diet that you yo-yo on. You’re going to be gradually worsening your body composition. You’re gonna be the same weight as you lose the 4th or 5th time, and that would obviously affect your metabolism, how much you can eat, what you can eat without gaining weight. I do think that is one factor.

So I think to counteract that – is by making sure to take even longer breaks than what Dr. Simeons suggested between your rounds. It gives your body a chance to be strong, to balance out and all of that.

Q7: My doctor recommended that I do two 40-day rounds back to back without a break, total of 80 days. I lost 25 lbs in the first 40 days and now I’ve only lost 5 and I’m 20 days into the second one. Any experience with back to back rounds – I fee like I wasted money on my second round.

Basically, yes, in a nutshell. Again, this protocol is taxing on your body -as great as it is but those breaks I think are important for your body to stay healthy. Our body wants homeostasis to stay the same and keep things in balance. Our bodies will always gonna be fighting us at some point to be on a normal state with whatever you’re doing with it.

So things when you start off – when you make a big change in your body, it will react first. Then it’s gonna be ‘hey, I think I wanna go back to a normal homeostatic level’ so it’s going to adjust even though you’re eating less or even though you’re working out 7 days a week. And then your body just starts getting tired and exhausted because you’re asking so much of it for such a long period of time. I don’t know if you’re on a modified calorie protocol (more than 500 calories) – but definitely in general, most of us do a lot better when we spread our rounds out and take a break in the middle to let our hormones be blalanced, let our bodies feel it has what it needs.

The other thing is it also depends on how much weight you have to lose. Definitely if you have more, it does come off quicker and as you get smaller – a smaller person’s metabolic rate is slower than a heavier person. That’s just scientific fact so you’re burning less calories per day. Additionally, in your first 40-day round, the results are a little bit skewed because at the beginning of any diet, you do have some water weight loss. That’s not fat and you don’t have same water weight to lose when you go to the next back to back round.

Q8: I accidentally added 2 mL of bacwater to my 1ml of hCG & water. Now what? Is it less potent?

If you did your dosage the same as if you had done it the right way, then yes, you are taking a half potency dose. So you don’t wanna do that.

It’s totally not a problem that you mixed it that way. What it means is just that you need to double your number on your syringe. So if you have a syringe and you normally go for a 150iu (if you mix into a 1:1 ratio) but you ended up mixing into a 2:1 ratio. On the syringe you might have done 15 units – but now, since you’ve added a whole extra ml, what you’ll do is you need 30 units on the syringe. To sum up, if you’ve doubled the mixing water, you have to double the number on the syringe of whichever dose you are taking.

Q9: What do you eat when you can’t eat veggies? Medical issues. You really couldn’t eat veggies rather than cauliflower and sweet potatoes.

For me, I would probably do mostly meat (extra protein) and cauliflower. And if you could do dairy, I would fill in with fat-free Greek yogurt. And I think with the fruits, too. I am hoping maybe you can eat the fruits.

The vegetables have very low calorie amount, so when replacing that with meat, you won’t need to add a lot. You might be able to add a 100 gram portion of meat or 50 gram portion and then yogurt.

Q10: I am 3 lbs over my last weigh-in. I tried an apple day it didn’t work. I tried a steak day and it didn’t work. Any other ideas?

If you’ve gained 3 actual lbs of weight, it’s going to take at least 3 steak days to get rid of it. And this is the process of how that would probably happen. When you do a correction day, especially like a fasting steak day, the majority of your weight loss the following morning is water. That means that very next day, most of it will come back. And that’s normal.

If you think about it, supposedly there’s about 3500 calories in a pound of fat. A woman’s metabolic rate – say you burn 1500 calories in a day or so. You have to burn 3500 calories before your actual weight loss has truly gone down 1 full pound of fat. If you burn 1500 in a day and on a fast day you still have dinner, so you might eat 600-800 calories. Your actual amount of fat burned on that fast day really only is 700-1000 calories. To get to 3500 calories, it’s gonna take you 3-4 fast days. It might be a little discouraging to hear that, but it’s the science of it. That’s just how it is.

If you do a correction day and you don’t lose anything, that could be possibly: you don’t drink enough water and if you don’t sleep enough. Your body is really doing the bulk of your fat loss when you sleep.

Q11: Bell peppers are not in the list for p2, but are they not good?

I will tell you on my final round of hCG, I was not eating the fruit and melba. I did use half bell pepper at a time. And it was fine. I also had mushrooms and zucchini and things like that. Since I was not taking the fruits, which kind of drastically changed the carb level of phase 2 for me, so that’s when I felt I really have more room with the carbs in the vegetables.

Q12: Have you ever done sublingual for yourself?

No, I haven’t! There’s sublingual drops homeopathic and there’s prescription hCG drops. I’ve only done the injections.

Q13: Almost everyone I know including myself gained the weight back after stopping hCG. I followed the diet. However, I have hypothyroidism. Could that be the reason why?

So you’re on Nature Throid – a form of dessicated natural thyroid hormone. What I’m wondering is, it sounds like you actually don’t have enough thyroid treatment. Because if you did, it should be different.  All of us who are hypothyroid, if you have the right amount and the right type of thyroid – that will usually go a long way.

One thing I’ve read about Nature Throid and all that is that there’s very small amount of active thyroid in it. The majority of that is T4, which is the storage form of thyroid hormone. And it appears that a lot of people have trouble converting the storage form of thyroid in their body into active thyroid hormone. The storage hormone is actually completely useless to you until it’s active. So unless your body is actually converting that nature throid (mostly T4) into T3, you’re not benefiting from that. Your metabolism will still gonna be low. So the other form of hormone that you can take is taking active hormone so that your body is not converting it.

I love the idea of going the natural route if it works, but if it doesn’t work – because some people’s bodies they are not converting it, it’s useless. For me, I am taking ‘liquid metabolism’. It’s for sure working – the type of thyroid hormone  I take because my body doesn’t need to convert it to anything. It’s definitely doing what it needs to do, to fuel my body and my metabolism. So that would be my first idea to look into.

The other thing is if you have hypothyroidism problems, the adrenal fatigue usually goes hand in hand with it. And weight gain is a big issue if you have adrenal fatigue. So if you’re having problem with one or both of those things, and you throw in working out every single day, that can backfire.

I’m just giving you an example of what happened to me. I’m crossfitting 3 days a week consistently for 5 years now. For a period of time, I decided to make it 4 days a week. And then I moved to a new location of Crossfit where the workouts are way more intense than my previous crossfit. So here I was crossfitting an extra day a week now and the work outs are like killer  – like I’m-gonna-be-dead-in-the-end type of work outs – and I was  doing that consistently for a little while. And what happened was, my eating did not change at all. I’m a creature of habits so I tend to eat the same stuff that I have been maintaining on for a long time and all of a sudden, I had some fat gain. I was not overeating! I gained 5 lbs of fat and lost some muscle and I was working out more and harder than ever before.

So for me, my little guesstimation at that is I am getting adrenal fatigue so I actually backed off. I started modifying my work outs down to 20 minutes and I went back to 3 days a week. I also started taking a physiological dose of cortisol – so I take between 15-20mg of cortisol per day and I actually still do that. I have to because of my lyme disease and all that. Between doing that and reducing my work outs, my fat went back down and my muscle went back up. So for me that was really eye-opening.

Most people are actually thinking that I am taking cortisol for weight gain. But actually if you don’t have enough cortisol in your system, that can cause fat gain. For me taking that cortisol helps me maintain my weight, as well as it helps me feel better, too. I have a lot more stamina.

Just keep researching and don’t give up. And I do think again that the crossfit for me is a big thing for me to be able to maintain. Just to give you an example, I have 20lbs more muscle on my frame than someone else’s my height or average size. So that obviously means that my metabolic rate to maintain 20lbs more muscle than someone else my height is going to be higher and then I can eat more. And actually it’s not that hard to gain muscle when you lift heavy.

And just by far with the thought that seems everyone gains back the weight after stopping hCG, honestly, that’s the case with pretty much any diet. It’s just that we don’t have the tools to know on how to maintain. I mean this is gonna sound that I’m harping on this, but if you look for blogs of women who lift heavy weights, you will see many of them discussing about how they used to eat so little and then now they eat so much and they’re smaller than they have ever been.  Most of us think that we have to run 2 hours a day on an elliptical. You literally don’t have to do cardio like that. I don’t do cardio. Although my workouts are cardiovascular in some way but I don’t know.

I think that’s an important element as well as once I started tracking what I ate for a little while, sometimes we think we’re eating a certain way – it’s different than we thought. I mean, I eat healthy in everything, but I thought I was eating more protein. We tend to chronically eat less carbs than we need. So like the ladies in my p3tolife program they’ve been really surprised with how well they’ve been stabilizing even having a higher net carb amount than they would have allowed themselves to have.

Q14: Does being on hCG really ruin or slow your metabolism after you’re done and how about doing crossfit on P2? How long before you start to feel like it takes a toll on your body or does the hCG supply enough to get you through workouts especially if you are already used to working out to the extremes and what about muscle loss?

I personally think especially something like crossfit is way too intense to do on Phase 2. I feel like you’re just asking for an adrenal fatigue problem. Even though hCG helps your body to tap into your fat stores, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy for your body.

What’s easy for our body is eating carbs and our body is using that for glucose and for workout. So hCG is facilitating our body in using the fat stores but it’s still WORK for our body to breakdown the fat and use that for our fuel every single day. So if you add to that and you do really intense workouts – with heavy lifting the point is to cause muscle tears so your body can build back new stronger muscles. And the only way to build back stronger muscles is if you have enough amino acids or protein building blocks. On hCG you’re eating very little protein and it’s just enough to sustain you. So you can potentially lose muscle if you are doing intense workouts or too much exercise.

So that said, if you do a little bit of resistance training while on hCG, that can actually preserve your muscle better.

As far as hCG is ruining or slowing your metabolism, when you become a smaller person you will naturally have a lower metabolism regardless. So somebody who’s 200 lbs would have a higher metabolism than a 125lb person. So that’s just kind of a natural process of weight loss but if you gain muscle between your round, you’re not gonna have a problem. You’re going to have great metabolism at a small size.

I think the tricky thing of getting out of p2 that makes people wonder about the metabolism thing is that you do still need to gradually re-introduce calories in food. That’s really what I’ve seen across the board – it’s jumping into everything too fast. But the ladies in my p3tolife program, they are going from 900 calories at the start of p3 to close to 1500 calories by the end of week 3. And they are not gaining weight! Some even lose a little bit. So gradually re-adjusting your body to normal eating is what I think is the key.

 

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