Welcome To The Food Addicts Blog

Welcome to my food addict’s blog. I decided to start this blog because I feel compelled to share some recent experiences with others.

What you need to know about me: I love to eat. I don’t really gravitate towards junk food with the exception of either ice cream or chocolate. My biggest problem is I eat good food, but do so to excess. Portion control is a skill I have struggled with my entire life.

I’ve tried many diets before, I think it is fair to say that I had the best temporary success with Nutrisystem, LA Weightloss and better diet and excercise control thanks to my BodyBugg. Still, with each of these diets I always ended up putting weight back on. With each failure I have seen my pants getting bigger and bigger.

My clothing is not the only thing to be affected by my weight gains. My health has suffered greatly. I’ve got the Holy Trinity of bad conditions. High Blood Pressure, High Cholesterol and Type 2 Diabetes. The icing on the cake is that I have the most severe Sleep Apnea one of my doctor’s has ever seen. Now please know that like eating I do most things to excess, so when I got apnea I went full bore and got BOTH kinds of apnea, Obstructuve and Central. Obstructive apnea is caused by tissues blocking the air way. This can typically be cured by losing weight. In my case, MRI and X-Ray have confirmed my airway is skinnier than my pinky, so even severe weight loss is unlikely to help my condition. Central Apnea is the more dangerous, it exists when the brain forgets to tell the body to breath. About 52% of my apnea eppisodes are from Central Apnea. I guess all the crazy technical knowledge I have took over where I am supposed to be sending out the Breath In and Breath Out commands.

At my worst, I was taking two medications for blood pressure, medicine for my cholesterol and medication for the diabetes.

Several months ago I saw a client I had not seen in a long while. She is a grandmother close to retirement age and was always heavy since I have known her. To my astonishment she had lost 40 pounds. When I inquired about how she had done it she informed me she had gone to her doctor for the HCG diet. She told me she has kept the weight off and that she no longer had sleep apnea. I let about a month pass before I even started to ask about this diet. To my surprise I learned of a friend (Terri Hirning) who had also done the HCG diet and lost about 24 pounds. She referred me to her doctor who was offering a 50% off sale for new patients. At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, let me tell you about the HCG diet.

HCG therapy was pioneered by a Doctor Simeon back in 1954. Basically HCG is a hormone that is extracted from pregnant women. When injected into belly fat and combined with a very low calorie diet, the HCG reprograms the body and activates the hypothalmus and makes the body burn fat for energy. You tend to lose a pound a day while on the diet. As stated the diet is restricted to 500 calories a day. Breakfast consists of Melba toast and tea (or coffee if you drink the stuff). Lunch is 3.5 ounces of a lean protein and as much of a single vegetable (from an approved list) as you wish. Dinner choices are the same available choices as lunch. For a snack, a single apple or orange or a handful of strawberries.

After hearing the doctor’s speech about it I decided to give it a try. My starting weight was 233lbs. For the sake of uniformity, all weight measurements I share are from my home scale, taken early in the morning. For uniform results I place my bathroom scale on the same squares in the bathroom. To eliminate variances I found with foot placement, I place a single foot sideways in the center of the scale. The other foot is held at my knee in what I believe is called the Yoga Tree stance.

The first 2 days of the diet are the best. You have to eat all the fatty stuff you want. These are your carb loading days. Loading up on the carbs is supposed to prevent the body from thinking it is starving. Under the doctor supervised plan I was on I had to inject myself each morning with the HCG solution. If you have never had to do that let me tell you that it is only scary the first time. After that it is not a big deal, but that first shot is tough to do. After a month on the diet, I had lost 24 pounds! It was here that I entered into phase two of the diet. I stopped taking the HCG and increased my caloric intake to about 1500 calories. I continued to lose a little bit of weight and lost a total of 28 pounds.

While on the HCG I had to stop taking my blood pressure medicine as my pressure got really low. My blood sugars were also steady so I stopped taking the diabetes medicine. Thinking these other improvements likely meant I also did not need the cholesterol medicine, I stopped taking that. At the end of my HCG program I went in to my regular doctor for my 3 month diabetes follow up. My blood work showed my diabetes was in check and I could stay off the diabetes medicine. I was able to drop one of my blood pressure medicines, but had to go back on the other. My cholesterol had raised 100 points, so I also had to go back on the cholesterol medicine.

It is important to note that while on the 500 calorie diet you are not tired, your body is getting all the energy it needs by burning your fat. As for being hungry…I was famished. Towards the end I found myself cheating with an extra piece of melba toast or a few pita crips or a few slices of salami. There is little doubt in my mind that had I not done that little bit of cheating, I would have lost even more weight. I did record it all, including my cheating in my food log.

At the completion of phase two I have continued to keep a log. Now I record some other important information. I make sure I record the following: Weight, Blood Pressure, Waking Blood Sugar. This helps me analyze how my body is affected by certain foods.

Although my weight does vary a bit from day to day, I can honestly say that I have been able to keep all the weight I lost off +/- a few pounds depending on the day.

After going to my dentist recently and discussing my success with the dental hygenist, I learned that she too had recently done the HCG diet and that she did it using homeopathic subligual drops that are available without a doctor’s prescription. I shared this information with my friend Terri and she and I decided to split shipping costs and order the subligual drops so we can each go another round on HCG to lose some more weight.

This about brings us up to date. I have the drops sitting on my kitchen counter just waiting for January to roll around when I will begin a new run on the HCG. I plan to share my progress and experience as I go through it this time. I’ll also share some of my favorite HCG recipes for those people looking to give it a try or just try to eat healthier. What I am REALLY interested to experience is that the sublingual drops give instructions to slowly add drops to your daily treatment if you are still hungry. So they are saying that you should not feel hungry when taking them. Considering how hungry I was while taking the injections, that would be a wonderful difference between the treatment types.