By Erin Ferrell, Columnist
Erin Ferrel
Taking pregnancy hormones if you aren’t pregnant or even female sounds insane. So why are thousands, if not millions, of people doing it? To lose weight of course.
The latest fad diet, which was actually recycled from the 70’s, is the hCG diet, which involves doing just that, taking the pregnancy hormone hCG. The way hCG works is that it funnels calories to the fetus to provide more in-utero nourishment. So how does it work as a weight loss regimen?
Short answer: it doesn’t. This chemical has been tested and tried and all trials indicate it has no effect on weight loss. Yet so many people have found this diet to be a successful means of losing significant amounts of weight in an insignificant amount of time. This doesn’t contradict the results of the trials, or the opinions of medical researchers at Yale and Harvard it’s simply what tends to happen when you starve yourself.
The only reason I care about this is that my father is doing it. He’s been told by his doctor to shed some poundage, and I guess he cares more about the speed of the weight loss than the healthiness of the method. He obviously doesn’t see the irony in the fact that the diet he is on to help him be more heart healthy could actually damage his heart. He also does not see the perversity of a man taking a drug that is only effective in pregnant women. If this drug were at all useful to my father, I would have bigger issues.
In addition to receiving injections, which are only legal because it is used legitimately as a fertility treatment, the hCG diet requires a 500 calorie per day limit. That is less than half the recommended calorie count for those trying to lose weight. At 500 calories a day, your body does not receive the energy it needs to run itself, and keep your mind focused on schoolwork, career or just life in general. This could cause any number of long-term health fiascos.
Having spent the last year reforming my eating habits and subsequently losing somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 pounds, this get-thin-quick mentality irritates me. Any time weight loss is easy, skullduggery is afoot. It took time and nachos for me to put that weight on, and it took time and a lower-fat nacho recipe to take it off. The inherent issue with quick-fix crash diets is that after holding yourself to a strict diet, resuming your former eating habits will have you crash landing back into whatever level of fatness you had been at prior to your diet.
All the pregnancy hormones in the world are not going to stop that from happening.
Exercising and eating right works. If you need extra help like I did, Bariatric specialists can provide solutions that don’t sound like something out of a Dystopian Sci-Fi movie.
This column initially appeared in the March 9 issue of The Campus newspaper.
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