How Does HCG Cause Weight Loss?

HCG

HCG is short for human chorionic gonadotropin. It is a hormone that pregnant women naturally produce. This happens shortly after conception. The use of HCG in weight loss was first studied by Dr. A.T.W. Simeons, who studied impoverished pregnant women on a restricted calorie diet.

Weight Loss

Dr. Simeons experimented with daily injections of 125 mg of HCG combined with a 500 calorie per day diet, and found that his obese patients lost a large percentage of fat. The problem with Dr. Simeons' experiment is that the weight loss resulted more from the ultra-low calorie diet than from the HCG injection.

Hypothalamus

It is not clear exactly how HCG works for the purposes of weight loss, or if it even works at all. Dr. Simeons proposed that HCG triggers the hypothalamus to protect lean muscle from being lost and targets fat deposits instead. This is an unproven theory.

Safety Warning

Both the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and the Journal of the American Medical Association warn consumers that HCG is neither safe nor efficient as a weight loss tool.