Wow three weeks have just flown by. The last time I wrote on the blog was the day after the Los Conchas fire started. That fire is the biggest in New Mexico history. Last I heard it was something like 140,000 acres, which I actually have no idea how big that is but I'm sure it's pretty big. Sounds big.
I didn't mention this last blog but when I left for work on June 27th I hadn't heard that the lab was closed. I missed the train that morning, which turned out to be a blessing, and as I'm driving towards Santa Fe I see this hugh cloud and I'm hoping that it might rain, but when I get to it I see that it's all smoke, so I look up towards where Los Alamos is and it's dark up there and I think to myself that no one could possibly breath in that so I decide to call the hot line to see if maybe work was canceled. What the heck it's worth a try. The hot line says that the Lab is closed and I was passing an exit on the freeway and slammed on my breaks and took the exit and came home.
Apparently I was the only person in my family who hadn't heard on the news, or some other source that the Lab was closed. So I decided that I would start to clean off the side yard. I say side yard but it is actually the area out the outside of our fence next to the road that the city says that we're responsible for and every year they come and say that we need to weed it. Karen has planted some wild flowers there and they look really nice for a couple of weeks, but pretty scruffy the rest of the year. When we first moved in we tried putting down some crusher fines to keep the weeds down, but we didn't get enough delivered the first time, and perhaps we couldn't afford to cover it all at that time but I didn't finish. Also, the red lava rocks that we'd laid down had a bunch of weeds grow up in it and it looked bad. I'd been thinking of cleaning it up and decided to start while I had this unexpected time off. I started on Monday and thought it would take a day or two to finish. I actually finished with everything that Saturday so it took 6 days instead of a day or two. I think it looks a lot better now. Karen says she misses the wild flowers but I don't.
On July 4th we went to the ward breakfast in the morning with Goosy, then in the afternoon we went to a party with her that someone from her work was giving. Goosy really is growing up when she get invited to "adult" parties from work that we get to go to. (The Goosy growing up part gets way worse in this blog than this.)
The Los Conchas fire was gotten under control and we had to go back to work. On the first day that I went back Karen asked me about my crappy lungs and how I would fare in smokey Los Alamos. A few years ago I was tested for asthma and while I don't have asthma the doctor told me: "You have crappy lungs. It's a good thing you don't live somewhere with pollution like LA." I told Karen I'd be OK, but by 9 that morning I was starting to get very congested lungs and was losing my voice. I looked at the Park and Ride schedule and found out that the last bus had left about 3 minutes before, so I called Karen and asked her to come pick me up, and she very kindly came up and picked me up. I took the rest of that Wednesday off, and Thursday. I also went and bought a hepa filter for my cubicle for when I got back to help keep the air around me cleaner. It seems to have worked. Right now the air up there is pretty clean and I think that I'll start trying to figure out how to bring the filter home.
That Thursday Cathy called and said that she was going to be taking Grandma Evans to Arizona to see Aunt LaVon at their Arizona family reunion. She said that Beth (my cousin) would be there, Lisa would come as well from Mayer and did we want to go with her? Cathy loves to plan things out in advance. It was a lot of fun to be go and see everyone and get to spend time with my sisters, and to see my cousins. We hadn't seen everyone since the last time we went there. It was fun to spend time with Grandma as well, but she doesn't visit very well. We stopped at Earls in Gallup and ended up getting Karen about $100 worth of jewelry. Gooey went with us as well. It was a fun weekend, even if it was thrown together at the last minute.
I went back to work and the HEPA filter worked pretty good, but I had to leave my cage quite a bit, and my lungs started to get a little congested. It was especially bad when I walked to the bus stop because the fire was still burning down south and the smoke would get blown in and it was very smokey and that was bad. However, I saw that a couple of people had gotten the face masks that Occ. Med. was handing out. I asked if they worked and was told that they worked really well, so on Tuesday I went and got a mask and got made fun of, but it seemed to help a lot.
This last weekend we had the youth conference and had a very interesting service project. We went to the Catholic cemetery and picked up trash and weeded. We picked up a ton of trash. They divided up the cemetery into six zones and I was working in the first zone and didn't realize how much was getting done until I took my first full bag on weeds to a trailer and saw how heaped it was. By the time we were done it was a mountain of trash. I was talking to the high councilor that was there and he said that the caretaker was pretty much overwhelmed with gratitude. It was a hot day, and Karen got a touch of heat stroke, and I was pretty wrung out so we left in the afternoon when Karen stood up to sing a song and said that she nearly passed out.
So that's pretty much what has happened in the last few weeks. Karen and I are in the 3rd week of the maintenance phase of the hCG diet. Karen is following the rules pretty good but I'm not. However, things seems to be going to way that I would like them to. I've gained 8 lbs but 6.9 lbs of that is lean body mass (muscle) and 1.1 lbs of body fat. I was worried about how much muscle that I lost during the dieting phase and I've gained about half of it back. I have to admit that I was hoping I would be able to gain the muscle and lose more fat. Actually I'm amazed that I'm able to gain weight at all with how few calories I'm eating. I'm averaging around 2100 a day, as well as I'm still exercising pretty vigorously in the morning (now that I have some more muscle) so I would think that I'd be losing weight but I'm not. The body is a pretty amazing thing.
I also went and had another HA1c test. It was 5.5 which averages out to 111 which is pretty good but I was hoping that it would be a little closer to 100. I don't know when I'll go back and get the next test I'll just have to wait and see. However I've gone from 7.6 (171) to 6.4 (137) to 5.5. That's pretty good and I'd have to say that I've got my BG better under control. I'm taking 2 grams of metformin a day because I like eating fruit, and I'm pretty sure that it would be higher without the metformin. In fact I've forgotten to take it a couple of time and I can see that my BG has gone up every time. Hopefully after the next round of the diet I'll get my weight down even further and the control will be better. I'll just wait and see, but right now I'm thinking that it's worth taking the the metformin to be able to eat fruit. Fruit is the only thing that I've added to my diet that I didn't eat before.
Showing posts with label hCG. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hCG. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Hurray Last Day of the Diet (this phase at least)
Today is the 43 day of the diet, the very last day, and I'm really looking forward to tomorrow and being able to eat again. It's going to be interesting to see what happens with my BG. My BG has been excellent on this diet. I've finally gone from taking 2 grams of metformin to cutting one of the tablets in half.
Karen had been telling me that I should maybe stop taking the merformin because I was getting reading in the 70s which is below normal. The morning that I woke up with a 78 was the day that I decided to try and stop taking it. However, in the afternoon of that day my BG was up to 106, so I decided to start taking half a tablet at a time. When I was telling Mom about it she thought that it's funny that I now think 106 is too high. Going to the half a tablet twice a day seems to be working nicely.
So the diets done pretty well. I'm down 33.4 lbs. Unfortunately I've noticed that I lost 14.26 lbs of LBM according to my scale. That's not very good, but they say that the scales are notoriously not very active, but that they can show you trends which can be helpful. The hCG Made Simple site said that you should exercise lightly. However, it also said that if your used to exercising you can continue, but if you lift weights that you should probably cut back. Well I couldn't do my body weight exercises. I tried but while I could do one day of them, the next day I was just wasted and couldn't exercise. Losing that much muscle mass probably explains what is going on.
The next phase is called the maintenance phase, and it says that
"Now that you have lost weight, it is imperative that you step up the exercise a notch and allow your muscles to tone, your metabolism to kick into full gear, and your body to secure itself as a fat burning machine!"
So that sounds to me like they're expecting you to put some muscle back on. I hope so. I really can't imagine that I'm not going to lose weight on this next phase of the diet. I'm supposed to have something like 2700 calories a day, or maybe that's back when I was 34 lbs fatter. Anyway I'm just going to follow the rules of their diet and see what happens. Hopefully I'll be able to put some muscle back on in this phase and maybe lose some more fat.
I guess that I could go back to using the calipers on measuring the fat percentage but that's harder than using the scale so we'll just see what happens.
Karen had been telling me that I should maybe stop taking the merformin because I was getting reading in the 70s which is below normal. The morning that I woke up with a 78 was the day that I decided to try and stop taking it. However, in the afternoon of that day my BG was up to 106, so I decided to start taking half a tablet at a time. When I was telling Mom about it she thought that it's funny that I now think 106 is too high. Going to the half a tablet twice a day seems to be working nicely.
So the diets done pretty well. I'm down 33.4 lbs. Unfortunately I've noticed that I lost 14.26 lbs of LBM according to my scale. That's not very good, but they say that the scales are notoriously not very active, but that they can show you trends which can be helpful. The hCG Made Simple site said that you should exercise lightly. However, it also said that if your used to exercising you can continue, but if you lift weights that you should probably cut back. Well I couldn't do my body weight exercises. I tried but while I could do one day of them, the next day I was just wasted and couldn't exercise. Losing that much muscle mass probably explains what is going on.
The next phase is called the maintenance phase, and it says that
"Now that you have lost weight, it is imperative that you step up the exercise a notch and allow your muscles to tone, your metabolism to kick into full gear, and your body to secure itself as a fat burning machine!"
So that sounds to me like they're expecting you to put some muscle back on. I hope so. I really can't imagine that I'm not going to lose weight on this next phase of the diet. I'm supposed to have something like 2700 calories a day, or maybe that's back when I was 34 lbs fatter. Anyway I'm just going to follow the rules of their diet and see what happens. Hopefully I'll be able to put some muscle back on in this phase and maybe lose some more fat.
I guess that I could go back to using the calipers on measuring the fat percentage but that's harder than using the scale so we'll just see what happens.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
The Diet's Almost Over!
I've got to tell everyone that I'm excited that this phase of the diet is almost over. I'm not really hungry while on this diet, but I do miss eating. We only get the same stuff everyday, and I'm even worse than probably most on the diet because I just eat the same thing every day.
I've learned a few things on this diet. One, it looks like I can maybe start eating fruit again. It hasn't hurt me while I'm on this diet, in fact this week I've had a couple of BG reading that are below 80 which is the below the low normal for BG. Karen thinks that I should stop taking the metformin, but I keep saying that I'm going to keep using it until I run out of it, and use it while I'm on the maintenance phase to see what happens when I'm eating more food. The second thing that I've learned is that it's very convenient to have food planned out. I put all my food in a bag and so I know what I have to eat all right there so it's easier to plan. I've read that this is a good way to handle a diet, but I've never done it, because I'm lazy. Of course it's pretty easy to put all of 500 calories in a little bag for a day, and I've actually forgot a couple of times to do that. I just need to make a commitment to doing this though because I think that it will help a lot.
As of this morning I've lost 26.8 lbs. That's great, but I'm more happy with what's going on my BG. Right now my 7 day average is 89, and by the way that's below 90. The 30 day average is 94 and the 90 day average is 105. This shows that the trend is down and that's great. I hope that it stays low when I get on the maintenance phase of the diet.
Speaking of the maintenance phase. The diet plan says that you should not let your weight fluctuate +/- 2 lbs from your weight on the last day of your taking the hCG. However the level of calories that they suggest is very low between 1800-2000 for a man. That's near the level where you body goes into starvation mode. I personally don't see how that level of eating won't cause you to lose weight during the maintenance phase. I'm hoping that I'm going to lose weight. We'll see.
One thing that I read about while reading about the hCG diet that was interesting. It said that our digestive track is basically like any other great ape, and that it's designed for use to digest food that we're eating all day long just like the apes. The cruise around all day grazing on whatever they can find. That make a lot of sense, especially with a lot of people saying that your diet will work better if you eat a lot of small means during the day instead of a few big ones. The hCG people said that eating a couple of big meals, a day especially when there are a lot of refined carbs in it, can overwhelm the endocrine system and it start locking away the fat as abnormal fat.
A few more things about the diet. It's hard to exercise on it. I started out tying to do my weekly turbulence training, and I started a new phase of that as I started the hCG diet, and I just was not able to do it. Karen was worried about me and now it looks like she's right. Anyway I finally started just doing the exercise cycle and pushups. I got to where I could do those again, and decided that I'd try going back to phase 1 of turbulence training. So I did that on Monday and the next day I'd gained two pounds! I just don't see how that happens, and I was totally wasted and could not even do the exercise cycle the next day. Later in the week I read an article on the Dr. Mercola site about it being possible for the body to gain muscle on a reduced calorie diet. Maybe that explains what happened. I don't know that I'm even going to try do turbulence training next time we do another phase of the hCG.
Well as you can see the hCG diet pretty much rules my life right now. One funny thing about this is no one has to worry about cooking me anything for Fathers Day, and next week is my 50th birthday, and no one can do anything for me because I can't eat anything. I guess that really show how central eating is to any celebration that we now have.
I've read some interesting books and listened to some interesting lecture series, but I'll be writing about them on my other blog.
I've learned a few things on this diet. One, it looks like I can maybe start eating fruit again. It hasn't hurt me while I'm on this diet, in fact this week I've had a couple of BG reading that are below 80 which is the below the low normal for BG. Karen thinks that I should stop taking the metformin, but I keep saying that I'm going to keep using it until I run out of it, and use it while I'm on the maintenance phase to see what happens when I'm eating more food. The second thing that I've learned is that it's very convenient to have food planned out. I put all my food in a bag and so I know what I have to eat all right there so it's easier to plan. I've read that this is a good way to handle a diet, but I've never done it, because I'm lazy. Of course it's pretty easy to put all of 500 calories in a little bag for a day, and I've actually forgot a couple of times to do that. I just need to make a commitment to doing this though because I think that it will help a lot.
As of this morning I've lost 26.8 lbs. That's great, but I'm more happy with what's going on my BG. Right now my 7 day average is 89, and by the way that's below 90. The 30 day average is 94 and the 90 day average is 105. This shows that the trend is down and that's great. I hope that it stays low when I get on the maintenance phase of the diet.
Speaking of the maintenance phase. The diet plan says that you should not let your weight fluctuate +/- 2 lbs from your weight on the last day of your taking the hCG. However the level of calories that they suggest is very low between 1800-2000 for a man. That's near the level where you body goes into starvation mode. I personally don't see how that level of eating won't cause you to lose weight during the maintenance phase. I'm hoping that I'm going to lose weight. We'll see.
One thing that I read about while reading about the hCG diet that was interesting. It said that our digestive track is basically like any other great ape, and that it's designed for use to digest food that we're eating all day long just like the apes. The cruise around all day grazing on whatever they can find. That make a lot of sense, especially with a lot of people saying that your diet will work better if you eat a lot of small means during the day instead of a few big ones. The hCG people said that eating a couple of big meals, a day especially when there are a lot of refined carbs in it, can overwhelm the endocrine system and it start locking away the fat as abnormal fat.
A few more things about the diet. It's hard to exercise on it. I started out tying to do my weekly turbulence training, and I started a new phase of that as I started the hCG diet, and I just was not able to do it. Karen was worried about me and now it looks like she's right. Anyway I finally started just doing the exercise cycle and pushups. I got to where I could do those again, and decided that I'd try going back to phase 1 of turbulence training. So I did that on Monday and the next day I'd gained two pounds! I just don't see how that happens, and I was totally wasted and could not even do the exercise cycle the next day. Later in the week I read an article on the Dr. Mercola site about it being possible for the body to gain muscle on a reduced calorie diet. Maybe that explains what happened. I don't know that I'm even going to try do turbulence training next time we do another phase of the hCG.
Well as you can see the hCG diet pretty much rules my life right now. One funny thing about this is no one has to worry about cooking me anything for Fathers Day, and next week is my 50th birthday, and no one can do anything for me because I can't eat anything. I guess that really show how central eating is to any celebration that we now have.
I've read some interesting books and listened to some interesting lecture series, but I'll be writing about them on my other blog.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
hCG, Another "Ah Hah!" Moment
Mom and I have started the hCG diet. It's a diet that Darren, Patrick his father and Marilee his mother, who are all in our ward, have done and they've been very successful at it. I've been thinking that I would try it, and Mom has as well, and Mom decided that we would start immeadiatly, so we started on Monday.
Of course, as with anything I'm thinking about, I researched it first. hCG is a hormone that women produce only when they're pregnant. In fact it's what they use in pregnancy tests. In looking around for information I eventually found this pdf file on line called "Pounds and Inches" by Dr. Simeons. I found that book by reading a review of a book by someone named Kevin Tredeau. His book was called "The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About," but a lot of people say that he's really a charlatan, and that he's just implementing Dr. Simeon's diet, which you can find on line for free (although Amazon also sells it as a book as well). So I read "Pounds and Inches."
You can read a lot about hCG and Dr Simeons on Wikipedia. Basically though, Dr. Simeons was a gifted endocrinologist, and he wanted to find a solution to obesity. He felt that although there might be many causes to obesity, there had to be an underlying cause that would apply to all who were obese. While he was in India studying pregnant women in India on calorie-deficient diets, and "fat-boys" with pituitary problems. The "fat-boys" were young men who had unattractive deposits of fat and underdeveloped sexual organs (it's called Froliech's Syndrome). He noticed that the pregnant women seem to be able to carry the babies without depleting their lean muscles, and that low doses of hCG to the young men allowed them to develop their sexual organs, as well as lose weight, again without depleting their lean muscle mass.
When he went to Italy he developed the theory that there are 3 type of fat
It's Dr. Simeons theory that the reason that women produce this hormone is so that the fetus and women can survive during pregnancy. It makes all reserves of energy in the body available to the baby and the Mom. He also thinks that what happens during a regular attempt at dieting is that the body first burns off the normal fat, the the structural fat until there are not more reserves there, then it starts burning off the abnormal fat. This is why dieting can be so hard, and why people hit the "wall" so to speak. This makes since to Karen and myself for the following experiences in our lives.
So as I'm reading about this stuff it's hitting home to me. Then I read that the FDA has come out against it! Well that's like ringing a bell for me. Turns out that Dr. Simeons developed a very rigorous protocol at his clinic. First it is low carb, high protein restricted diet. OK I like that obviously. However it is VERY restrictive at 500 calories. a day. However, you don't feel hungry on the diet because the deficit is made up by all the fat that your body can easily burn because of the hCG. There are also very strict rules about types of shampoo, body soap, make up, deodorant, vitamins etc that you can use because many of these products have fat's and other things in them that can cause you to stop losing weight.
Dr. Simeons would inject the hCG into his patients daily; 125 mg. In the US you can get homeopathic blends of the stuff. The FDA has kindly pointed out that there is no evidence that homeopathic hCG works. Thanks FDA for trying to keep us fat, and diabetic. However, there can be vitamin charlatans out there so I asked Darren what he was using and he said he used the HCGMadeSimple.com site. He also said that he'd started using another brand but felt miserable on the diet, until he switched to the hCG from this site. He found this site because his uncle's chiropractor used it, and his uncle lost over 130 lbs on it. OK if someone proves to me that something works and it doesn't sound totally crazy I'm willing to give it a shot, and so is Karen. Karen got a membership at the site and bought the hCG. The site has a lot of very helpful information and I think it was worth it.
The results. We've only been on it for the first week, which included the first phase which is called the "gorging phase". Really that's what it's called, and the HCGMadeSimple.com (HMS) said that many people don't really gorge on this part because it seems counter intuitive, but it's important to have your normal fat reserves full for the diet. Also, the hCG is not effective during the first two day anyway. I didn't weigh the first day we took it the hCG, but I did gorge. I weighed the second day. HMS says to weigh right after you get up in the morning and do your business. I know this is true, because your weight can swing widely during the day, however, I like to weigh after I exercise because then I get the water weight loss of exercise, but then that's variable as well, but I've now repented.
I weighed 251.8 the first day, then 255.6 after the second day of gorging (See I'm good at something) or the third day of the diet. However, that morning my BG was 156! Yikes, and it stayed high all day only getting down to 129 at it's lowest. OK I did stupid gorging that I knew that I shouldn't have and I felt pretty miserable for it. However, today I weighed 242.2 and my BG was the lowest in the morning that it's been since I started monitoring again after the last scare of super elevated BG. Also, the diet calls for a couple of pieces of fruit a day. I did the calculations on the fruit and figured that if I cut the orange or apple in half, I might be OK, but I needed to check. Turns out that it's OK to do that. I'll have to make sure that it's still OK when I go off this 500 calorie a day diet but I've been eating fruit for the first time in 10 years or so this week, and really enjoying it. Also, I'm really not hungry it's amazing. Although, I do think about eating my next meal, I'm not ravenous like I've been on some diets that had more than 3 time the calories allowed in this diet. There have been a couple times where I've forced myself to eat the last little bit of food for the day. I mean I knew that I need it, but I could have gone without it. Karen's also lost around 5 lbs this week, but that's still really good. She hate's it that I lose weight faster but that's part of having a higher metabolism because of more muscle mass, and the fact that I'm exercising more than she does. The diets say that you don't have to exercise but if you do it's more successful. It also says that during the diet is not a time to start a new exercise program, but that if you've been doing an exercise program you can continue it. That's where I'm at, I've been exercising so I'm just going to continue. So I'm losing weight and my BG seems to be going in the right direction as well. Over all I'm really pleased with the results so far.
Of course, as with anything I'm thinking about, I researched it first. hCG is a hormone that women produce only when they're pregnant. In fact it's what they use in pregnancy tests. In looking around for information I eventually found this pdf file on line called "Pounds and Inches" by Dr. Simeons. I found that book by reading a review of a book by someone named Kevin Tredeau. His book was called "The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About," but a lot of people say that he's really a charlatan, and that he's just implementing Dr. Simeon's diet, which you can find on line for free (although Amazon also sells it as a book as well). So I read "Pounds and Inches."
You can read a lot about hCG and Dr Simeons on Wikipedia. Basically though, Dr. Simeons was a gifted endocrinologist, and he wanted to find a solution to obesity. He felt that although there might be many causes to obesity, there had to be an underlying cause that would apply to all who were obese. While he was in India studying pregnant women in India on calorie-deficient diets, and "fat-boys" with pituitary problems. The "fat-boys" were young men who had unattractive deposits of fat and underdeveloped sexual organs (it's called Froliech's Syndrome). He noticed that the pregnant women seem to be able to carry the babies without depleting their lean muscles, and that low doses of hCG to the young men allowed them to develop their sexual organs, as well as lose weight, again without depleting their lean muscle mass.
When he went to Italy he developed the theory that there are 3 type of fat
- Structural Fat: The kind of fat that surrounds and cushions your organs. (Karen found that their is structural fat on the heel of your foot that pads the heel, and that some people, herself for instance, start to have pain in their heels when they walk because they lose that fat.)
- Normal Fat: This is the fat that the body store excess glucose as, and draws on if for energy when needed.
- Abnormal Fat: This is a kind of fat that the body deposits when there is excess sugar, but because of a problem in the diencephalic region of the brain. (According to Wikipedia it's also know as the "interbrain". You can find out more about it as diencephalon.) This region get out of whack and starts to store this abnormal fat in a way that it cannot get access to it again.
It's Dr. Simeons theory that the reason that women produce this hormone is so that the fetus and women can survive during pregnancy. It makes all reserves of energy in the body available to the baby and the Mom. He also thinks that what happens during a regular attempt at dieting is that the body first burns off the normal fat, the the structural fat until there are not more reserves there, then it starts burning off the abnormal fat. This is why dieting can be so hard, and why people hit the "wall" so to speak. This makes since to Karen and myself for the following experiences in our lives.
- Karen has always lost weight overall during pregnancies. Meaning that she genearlly weighed less after delivery than before the pregnancy started.
- Karen says that her feet hurt when she tries to diet, which would follow that she's burning structural fat of which the pad on the heel is part of.
- I can follow a pretty rigorous diet and exercise program, and I know that I'm losing weight and getting smaller, but I my big ol' gut and double chin never seem to get much smaller.
- When my Dad died, he was skin and bone, everywhere except for his little pot belly that he always had.
So as I'm reading about this stuff it's hitting home to me. Then I read that the FDA has come out against it! Well that's like ringing a bell for me. Turns out that Dr. Simeons developed a very rigorous protocol at his clinic. First it is low carb, high protein restricted diet. OK I like that obviously. However it is VERY restrictive at 500 calories. a day. However, you don't feel hungry on the diet because the deficit is made up by all the fat that your body can easily burn because of the hCG. There are also very strict rules about types of shampoo, body soap, make up, deodorant, vitamins etc that you can use because many of these products have fat's and other things in them that can cause you to stop losing weight.
Dr. Simeons would inject the hCG into his patients daily; 125 mg. In the US you can get homeopathic blends of the stuff. The FDA has kindly pointed out that there is no evidence that homeopathic hCG works. Thanks FDA for trying to keep us fat, and diabetic. However, there can be vitamin charlatans out there so I asked Darren what he was using and he said he used the HCGMadeSimple.com site. He also said that he'd started using another brand but felt miserable on the diet, until he switched to the hCG from this site. He found this site because his uncle's chiropractor used it, and his uncle lost over 130 lbs on it. OK if someone proves to me that something works and it doesn't sound totally crazy I'm willing to give it a shot, and so is Karen. Karen got a membership at the site and bought the hCG. The site has a lot of very helpful information and I think it was worth it.
The results. We've only been on it for the first week, which included the first phase which is called the "gorging phase". Really that's what it's called, and the HCGMadeSimple.com (HMS) said that many people don't really gorge on this part because it seems counter intuitive, but it's important to have your normal fat reserves full for the diet. Also, the hCG is not effective during the first two day anyway. I didn't weigh the first day we took it the hCG, but I did gorge. I weighed the second day. HMS says to weigh right after you get up in the morning and do your business. I know this is true, because your weight can swing widely during the day, however, I like to weigh after I exercise because then I get the water weight loss of exercise, but then that's variable as well, but I've now repented.
I weighed 251.8 the first day, then 255.6 after the second day of gorging (See I'm good at something) or the third day of the diet. However, that morning my BG was 156! Yikes, and it stayed high all day only getting down to 129 at it's lowest. OK I did stupid gorging that I knew that I shouldn't have and I felt pretty miserable for it. However, today I weighed 242.2 and my BG was the lowest in the morning that it's been since I started monitoring again after the last scare of super elevated BG. Also, the diet calls for a couple of pieces of fruit a day. I did the calculations on the fruit and figured that if I cut the orange or apple in half, I might be OK, but I needed to check. Turns out that it's OK to do that. I'll have to make sure that it's still OK when I go off this 500 calorie a day diet but I've been eating fruit for the first time in 10 years or so this week, and really enjoying it. Also, I'm really not hungry it's amazing. Although, I do think about eating my next meal, I'm not ravenous like I've been on some diets that had more than 3 time the calories allowed in this diet. There have been a couple times where I've forced myself to eat the last little bit of food for the day. I mean I knew that I need it, but I could have gone without it. Karen's also lost around 5 lbs this week, but that's still really good. She hate's it that I lose weight faster but that's part of having a higher metabolism because of more muscle mass, and the fact that I'm exercising more than she does. The diets say that you don't have to exercise but if you do it's more successful. It also says that during the diet is not a time to start a new exercise program, but that if you've been doing an exercise program you can continue it. That's where I'm at, I've been exercising so I'm just going to continue. So I'm losing weight and my BG seems to be going in the right direction as well. Over all I'm really pleased with the results so far.
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