There is a doctor's office nearby touting the HCG injections as a way to curb your appetite and keep your metabolism from shutting down even when you eat an insanely low amount of calories. A friend of mine did the diet for about two or three months and lost about 60 pounds. I know the weight loss came from the fact that she was eating so little during that time, but she swears up and down that the injections helped her not to ever feel hungry. Do you guys believe that, or do you think it was the placebo effect and it simply worked because she THOUGHT it would?

I can't believe a doctors is actually advising it it's got to be placebo surely? And if not, well, the only time I'd want hcg in my system would be when pregnant! Surely it can't be good for you to inject stuff like that?!

What does it do? I mean, how does it work chemically?

I don't understand how it works. But it must be dangerous to have things like that injected into you, it can't be healthy at all!

I don't understand the science behind it either, but I'm very wary of hormone therapy in general, so I wouldn't use it for weight loss. I'm sure I'd lose much faster (for awhile) if I were only eating 500 calories a day too.

Oh you have to have 500 calories too? Well that explains it hahaha. Maybe they have a surplus of HCG they want to get shot of I should invest in aspirin and sell them as a diet pill when combined with a 500 calorie diet

No wonder there is weight loss then if it's just 500 calories!

Mitch, hormonally/chemically it's supposed to help your body lose weight by "protecting" it from metabolic shut-down when you severely restrict calories, similarly to how the actual HCG hormone works when you're pregnant. (HCG is the hormone that at-home pregnancy tests are checking for in your urine to confirm pregnancy. It's not in your urine unless you're preggo.) I just don't see how it could help with weight loss though, because that's the last thing you'd need to do if you really were pregnant.

I've been thinking about this too much could the theory behind it be that when you're pregnant, your body uses the calories/food more effectively? As in it makes sure the baby gets what it needs before you do. So maybe the thought is that if you're only eating 500cal, your body responds as if it were pregnant and puts those calories and nutrients to better use than it would normally? Although I'm not even sure that's down to hcg, I would have thought it was the placenta? Either way, eating 500 calories a day cannot be healthy! Even on those programmes with the super, super morbidly obese, they only cut them down to about 800!