Centre for Optimum Health

Our body is amazing!!! The goal is to keep it in balance. And that’s what we are trying to do with the HCG diet.

Protein is one of the key components to the HCG diet, eating enough protein whether you are on the diet or not is so important. Protein is the fuel that our body needs to do everything. We find that patients on the diet that are not eating enough protein tend to stall and in some cases even gain weight. Why you ask, it’s because your body decides what to do with the limited calories we are supplying on the diet. The most important thing your body will do is keep your brain alive and then the heart. Then let’s add some stress in and then you’re running all over the place trying to get things done. Sound familiar. With all that activity and not enough proteins you will hit a wall and send your body into “survival” mode. Which means it’s going to hold on to everything, including your fat, for dear life.

How much protein is enough, then? A general rule of thumb is that a 150 pound person needs roughly 140 grams of protein a day. How do you get that? One ounce of any cooked meat is 7 grams of protein. One egg, or one ounce of cheese, is 6 grams of protein. You can see that it adds up slowly! This is why all of us at the Centre supplement with protein shakes for breakfast and whey shakes as snacks in the afternoons or at night.

Once your body knows what enough protein feels like, you’ll never go back!

Regardless of being on the diet or not…WATER is important!!!

Incredible as it may seem, water is quite possibly the single most important catalyst in losing weight and keeping it off. Water suppresses the appetite naturally and helps metabolize stored fat. Studies have shown that a decrease in water intake will cause fat deposits to increase, while an increase in water intake can actually reduce fat deposits.

Here’s why: The kidneys can’t function properly without enough water. When they don’t work to capacity, some of their load is dumped on the liver. But, if the liver has to do some of the kidneys work, it can’t operate at full throttle. As a result, it metabolizes less fat, more fat remains stored in the body, and weight loss stops.

The overweight person needs more water than one who is not overweight. Larger people have larger metabolic loads. Water helps to maintain muscle tone by giving muscles their natural ability to contract and by preventing dehydration. It also helps to prevent the sagging skin that usually follows weight loss. Shrinking cells are buoyed by water, which plumbs the skin and leaves it clear, healthy and resilient.

Water can help relieve constipation. When the body gets too little water, it siphons what it needs from internal sources. The colon is one primary source. Results? Constipation. But when a person drinks enough water, normal bowel function usually returns.

The body will not function properly without enough water and can’t metabolize stored fat efficiently.

So drink at least 64 ounces of water a day.

If you have any questions at all about HCG please give us a call at 

Most people think that a 700 calorie a day diet is a recipe for starvation but I’m here to tell you differently. HCG is amazing and you are truly not hungry. You are burning at least a pound of fat a day which means the hypothalamus, (the part of the brain that controls the way we burn and store fat), thinks it’s getting 2500 calories from the breakdown of your own fat. Not only are you not hungry but you have this sense of well-being and a lot more energy.  

For a lot of people it’s not only the physical aspect of so little food, it’s also the mental thinking that you are going to be starving on such little food. But that’s just not the case, you are actually at times surprised at how full you become on the smaller portions and wonder why you ate so much before the diet. Then you take that thinking after the diet and are able to maintain and even loss more weight. Most people eat for so many other reasons and you’d be surprised that being hungry is very low on the list. We can help you figure out why you eat and how to eat healthier.

           Recently in the news there has been a lot of discussion about HCG for weight loss. I have seen many advertisements and warnings in magazines of late, and Dr. Oz discussed it briefly on his show. He basically said “there might be something there, but more research needs to be done”.

         HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) is a hormone that pregnant women produce to release fat stores for the baby. In the 1950’s, a doctor by the name of A W Simeons successfully used HCG with a very low calorie diet to achieve weight loss in adolescent boys. The diet became popular in the 1970’s, fell out of favor, and then has regained popularity across the country since the 1990’s. We haven’t seen HCG much here in New York due to our restrictive prescribing laws.

        The traditional use for HCG in doses of 15,000-20,000 IU has been used to treat infertility in women, because it can stimulate ovulation.  Most of what we know about HCG is based on studies done in this setting, where it can cause premature failure of the ovaries. It is very difficult to find any studies done on the low doses we use for weight loss—500 IU/day for three weeks. Why? Well, it is impossible to do “long-term” studies on anything taken for only three weeks. Additionally, the dosage is so low over this short period of time it is difficult to discover the exact physiologic changes it produces. For those out there concerned about the safety of HCG, think of it this way: A pharmacist friend of mine once pointed out that men could take high doses of estrogen for three weeks and not suffer any long-term problems.

      If that`s the case, then what are the problems? Problems from HCG diet programs stem from two issues. The first is if you are ordering HCG off the internet, you don`t really know what you are getting. HCG is a prescription medication, so if you are ordering it off the internet it is most likely is NOT HCG, but either the homeopathic version (which by definition contains none of the original molecules of the substance), or it has caffeine or other stimulants which can reduce hunger but have serious side-effects.

       The second problem is the very-low calorie diet. It is physiologically unsafe for people to follow a 500 calorie-a-day diet without the use of medication like HCG that allows your body to release fat stores.  The way HCG works is through resetting the hypothalamus to release those abnormal fat stores called adipose that our bodies have forgotten how to let go of. By using HCG, we can release 2000 cal/day from fat stores, so really our body is getting 2500 cal/day. If we just try to follow a 500 calorie diet we can suffer severe medical consequences like dizziness, lightheadedness and even collapse. These are made worse if a person has underlying medical problems.

      HCG is a wonderful tool for weight loss. With medical supervision, HCG and a very low calorie diet can stimulate accelerated weight loss, and the ability to easily maintain that weight loss after the program is finished.  It is quite different from other weight loss programs because it allows our bodies to release fat stores, so we burn mostly abnormal adipose fat and not the healthy structural fat or muscle. I am excited about adding this to our practice because of the health implications of losing fat-blood pressure decreases, blood sugar, insulin levels and cholesterol all decrease with weight loss. Everyone gains more optimal health through weight loss!