I started out at 186 pounds. This morning I weigh 155 pounds. My BMI is 23.9! My Body Mass Index (BMI) is officially normal! I am ecstatic. I jumped up and down and danced around the house singing silly victory songs I made up as I twirled and jumped. Oh yeah! That’s especially sweet. I am physically ABLE to jump! All this in less than five little weeks!
My goal is 134, but I can go as low as 123 on the BMI calculator and still be "normal". My perfect size may be somewhere between the two.
I have lost 31 pounds. My husband has lost thirty-five pounds. Between the two of us, we have lost a whole regular sized seven or eight year-old child. No wonder I can jump now. I don’t have the equivalent of more than three ten-pound bags of potatoes to haul around. Try walking around for very long in a grocery store with just one or two of those. Fat people really do have strong muscles. They need them to make it across the room or to the car. I feel lighter than air right now. I walk 100% faster and I have a spring in my step. I’ve also noticed that my posture has improved. My energy is astounding. I’m digging into projects that I had been putting off and looking for more to do.
GETTING hCG:
Our family doctor prescribed hCG for me, but when I tried to get my prescription filled, there was no place to go. No one had it. I called every pharmacy in town. It seems that the fertility clinics have first dibs on most of the available hCG. I eventually found a clinic two hours from my home that had it. My husband joined me in seeing the doctor there. They have their own hCG source and supplies. They gave us our protocol workbooks and directions, tape measures, needles, alcohol wipes, tiny bottles of hCG liquid, and counseling with three different specialists.
We had plenty of questions and we received abundant, answers, information, and advice. I was nervous about the shots, but a nurse demonstrated how to inject the hCG using her own belly.
“I used to be afraid of needles, but now and my tummy is just a pin cushion for teaching people to do their own injections.”
“I don’t know if I can do this…” I hedged, holding my new, sterile, practice needle gingerly.
“We use needles that are very tiny, the kind used for subcutaneous insulin shots.” she explained, and popped her needle into a pinch of flesh on her belly.
She didn’t even flinch. She could have been applying a bit of moisturizer.
“Okay, I’ll just do it.” I said as I pinched my inch, aimed the needle, took a deep diaphragm-type breath, and put the needle in.
“Oh! It didn’t hurt! I hardly felt it at all.” I pulled it out and soaked in the feeling of victory. “I can do this.”
“I knew you could. It just looks scary.”
That was just over four weeks ago. I’m in the middle of week five. I took 150 IU of hCG six out of seven days during the first month. Last week I noticed a bit more hunger than I had been used to so I upped my dosage to 170 IU. I take one day off from the hCG each week so that my body doesn’t build a resistance to it.
Other hCG dieters usually take a few weeks off after about a month on the hCG and then start another round on it and the diet to lose additional weight. They continue this pattern until they reach their goals. Our doctor said that he has seen excellent results just taking the one day off each week and that the weight loss that continues without the three week break encourages and inspires his patients.
WHAT I EAT AND DRINK:
First: Enough water to float a ship, two glasses before each meal and several 20 oz. bottles of water in between. I also have coffee in the morning or tea or both. I eat some fruit, usually some organic strawberries or a half or whole granny smith apple with cinnamon or apple pie spice on it.
I drink about two pots of green or herbal teas during the day.
Lunch is a massive salad of organic baby green, or spinach, with cucumbers, celery, a little onion and sometimes some tomato with three ounces of white-fleshed fish, or chicken breast meat (no skin), or very lean beef, grilled on a George Foreman grill or a new grill I just bought at K-Mart for about $10.00. It’s made by Proctor Silex and it's small enough to tuck into an overnight bag to use when I travel. It grills exactly enough protein for two, or one 3 oz. portion with room to grill a bit of red pepper or onion slices. Onion and garlic powders with a little organic apple cider vinegar make my salad dressing.
Dinner is about the same as lunch. I try to vary the vegetables, protein type, or seasonings at each meal and I have fruit as a snack or desert. I also make soup using organic broth, water, “Real Salt”, cayenne, garlic, celery, onion, lettuce, spinach, and add in vegetables such as; summer squash, cauliflower, or broccoli. I add my chopped up, grilled protein of choice and I have a filling meal.
I take calcium, magnesium, zinc, glucosamine, msm, Alpha Lipoic Acid, NAC, C, A&D, E, Fish oil capsules, and borage oil capsules. I also take a multi when, except for the last couple of weeks. I am away from home and didn’t bring them. I’ve noticed that if I forget to take at least two or three fish oil capsule daily, I end up not having a BM for days. The fish oil solves this in less than a day, often in just a few hours.
Because it is summertime, and hot, and I’m drinking at least a gallon of water daily, I recently added 99 mg of potassium to the supplement list. It really helps me when I notice I’m feeling tired. Electrolytes go fast in the midst of oceans of water and summer heat.
I did cheat a few times and used apples, cooked oat bran, with ground flax seed, and psyllium seed on top to cleanse the terrible stuff away. The weight melted like ice cream on a hot sidewalk as soon as I got back on track. I hated that I had wasted time that could have brought me closer to my goal. Nothing I ate tasted good enough to be worth getting to my goal a week or more late.
WHAT’S GOING ON:
The YOUTUBE videos of fellow hCG dieters have made me believe that this really is a weight loss CURE, not a fad diet. They all say the same thing, after getting off the diet and transitioning to more normal eating, they are amazed, day after day that they wake up each morning, still skinny.
I have tried to stay on a diet very much like the hCG and couldn’t hang in for more than a few days. People say, “Well, you do know that you would lose weight on 500 calories a day, even if you didn’t use hCG.”
My answer is, “Then go ahead and do that. Try to stay on a 500 calorie a day diet without hCG and let me know how it goes.”
Without the hCG, it is just too hard to do. Perhaps if someone had anorexia nervosa they could manage it. I don’t. I look forward to reaching the maintenance phase. I have a fairly realistic view of my body shape. If anything, I tend to see myself as thinner than I am, because I was a skinny child and normal to very slender before my pregnancies. I like that the scale and how my clothes fit are extremely honest.
I felt very brave facing the scale after I cheated. The harm was about five pounds in one day. The foods we cheat with are notorious for their high sodium counts, adding pounds of water in hours. One day of only eating raw apples caused all my gastronomic sins to vanish. The scale scared me into repentance and getting serious about this. I’m grateful and glad.
Before now, I was afraid of my scale, and with good reason. I didn’t want to face the truth about my size. Unfortunately, hiding the scale didn’t hide my rear. You might say it was “scenic” rather than shapely. It took up the whole door mirror in my bathroom.
I began to feel agoraphobic. Is there a fancy name for a mental illness that makes fat people into shut-ins because they don’t want anyone to see them waddling around in public? I felt like crying while I tried on everything in my closet, hoping to disguise my arms, my waist, my legs, my butt, and even my puffy cheeks. I needed a burqa, veil included. “Statuesque” morphed into “bovine”.
Here I am though, wearing pants I had hidden behind all my big clothes for almost two years. I am officially no longer in the overweight BMI category. I only have 21 pounds to release. To me, it looks so close I can almost taste it…
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