Eating a ketogenic diet causes fat to be released from your fat cells and prevents fat from being stored. With this lifestyle, you eat higher amounts of healthy fats, very low to no sugars and processed carbs and moderate protein. You will experience how healthy fats significantly improve your health, taste better, provide you with better and more consistent energy and clarity, decrease food cravings and help you feel better than sugar and grain-based (processed carb) diets.

For those looking for faster fat loss or who have become stuck at a plateau on a ketogenic lifestyle, the HCG Diet may be for you.

The HCG Diet

HCG is human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone found in both men and women. During pregnancy, HCG is elevated in women. The HCG diet has been around since Dr. Albert Simeons published his book, Pounds and Inches: A New Approach to Obesity, in 1954. This diet has had a controversial reputation and is often thought of as a fad or lose-weight-quick diet. However, HCG has many benefits, including increased energy, improved endurance, burning excess fat and lowering cholesterol levels. Dr. Oz has investigated the pros and cons and agrees that in certain people this diet affords good, healthy weight loss without hunger.

The HCG protocol consists of extreme caloric restriction and daily injections. The HCG allows the body to access fat stores while consuming limited calories, providing weight loss of up to a pound a day. The critics of this protocol believe it does not allow for good nutrition and can have some side effects, but so do obesity, fast food intake and a sedentary lifestyle. HCG is available as oral drops, tablets and tinctures, but one is only able to achieve an adequate blood level of HCG with prescription strength injections. 

The protocol has three phases: loading; calorie restriction weight loss; and maintenance. The daily injection of HCG controls hunger and keeps one’s body from breaking down muscle during calorie restriction by promoting an anabolic state. Since hormone imbalance, including thyroid dysfunction and menopause, can cause weight gain and often makes weight loss very difficult, HCG provides a benefit by promoting balance in sex and human growth hormones. A safe and successful HCG protocol takes into account one’s age and level of health by adjusting both dose and appropriate calorie restriction and should be managed or overseen by an experienced healthcare provider.

Once you have lost the weight (fat) you want to lose, then you can more easily adopt a healthy eating lifestyle—a ketogenic, plant-based or other life-imbuing eating style that does not include sugars or processed carbs.

Remember, weight loss is not really the goal—fat loss is—all while maintaining or increasing muscle. Additionally, measuring weight is not an effective way of determining fat loss because muscle is so much denser than fat. The best measure of fat loss is waist measurement or, alternatively, how your clothes fit.

These protocols as well as how to transition to a ketogenic or other healthy lifestyle are now being offered at St. Petersburg Health & Wellness, located at 2100 Dr. MLK Jr. St. N, St. Pete. For more information, call 727-202-6807 and/or visit StPeteHW.com.