With the recent surge in popularity for the hCG diet, you may think it’s a fairly innovative and modern new take on weight loss wellness. However, this diet was in fact invented in the 1950s by a British endocrinologist, Albert T.W. Simeons. So, did they get it right 60 years ago? Or have we simply run out of fad diets to offer the misguided public, and so have started dusting off the old wisdom?
Your body produces Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hCG) during the first trimester of pregnancy. In fact, hCG is the fateful hormone that your standard pee-stick pregnancy test is looking for. According to the brilliance of Simeons all those years ago, if you weren’t pregnant, but you injected yourself with hCG, your brain would be fooled into thinking you had a bun in the oven. This would then make your brain give the command to your body to start burning up all your fat to protect a nonexistent developing foetus. Plus, on this diet you eat something on the order of 500 calories a day – but this is totally incidental, of course. Any weight loss you experience will really be down to the brain-rewiring power of the pregnancy hormones you’re getting, right? No; it’s the 500 calorie thing.
There are several reasons why the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) isn’t too keen on the hCG diet. Firstly, depending on factors like age, build and activity level, the FDA recommends that your diet consist of 2,000 calories per day, give or take a few. However, they really don’t love the idea of women using hCG, which is approved as a fertility treatment, for weight loss, because of the involvement of urine. Yep, you read that correctly! The hCG diet practitioners extract the wellbeing-boosting hormone from the urine of pregnant women.
While hCG diet websites are all very careful to explain that this pee is really thoroughly cleaned before they give it to you, this only means that, instead of injecting yourself with the pee of knocked-up women, you’re just injecting yourself with PART OF the pee of knocked-up women. However, there’s always synthetic hCG, which doesn’t use the wee of pregnant women. It does, on the other hand, use the urine of pregnant rats. Which would you prefer?
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