Much to my dismay my friend has decided to take the HCG diet. I don't see how eating 500 calories a day is going to last in the long run, and it's also not healthy. I tried to talk to her about diet and exercise and she became angry and said that "diet and exercise doesn't work" so I dropped it. I understand her frustration but I definitely don't bust my butt almost every night for nothing. It takes work and it makes me sad that she will compromise her health to be thin. Super fast weight loss NEVER lasts in my experience...I wish she would listen but her mind is made up. I tried.

I guess it's none of my business how someone else chooses to lose weight.

/semi rant

It's always hard to know that something is bad for them, but not being able to do anything for them anyhow

The scenario that is most likely to happen is that she won't be able to keep that diet for a long time, and will end up seeing that it is not the true miracle.

You tried your best, but if the other person is not willing to listen, there is nothing much you can do about it You've been a good friend and you tried, and you'll probably still be a good friend when she'll come around disapointed about this 500 calories diet too. *hugs*

I have a friend who has tried lots of quick fix weight loss programs, with no lasting success. She's seen me lose almost 90 pounds over the past 14 months but still she won't try old-fashioned calorie counting, choosing instead to spend money on crap that doesn't work. I understand the allure of fast results but I find it hard to be supportive when she tries yet another of these "diets." But I try!

Good luck with your friend.

You'd think our friend's seeing us successfully lose weight by diet and exercise would make them want to follow suit. That's what stumps me the most..

It takes a lifetime for people to realise that losing weight and staying healthy is really a brand new way of living. In order to maintain and lose it means this is going to take a very long time. I often hear my friends saying that once they finish a diet they will start eating "normally". I have told them that you never eat "normally" (in the sense of what was normal before starting to diet) ever again. Yes I do have my occasional slice of pizza or chocolate bar but this is now done following a very planned way of living.

They don't seem to realise that at all.

Especially that bolded part. I don't think people realize normal. One of my neices has a child that is morbidly obese, she's 120 pounds and I think 7 now, but she could be 6. She has a chronic inflammatory condition that is worsened according to what I've read and what the dietitian said that is inflamed by caffeine and sugar. They don't want her to eat "differently" than other kids so she's got her McDonald's fix daily, soda and Red Bull are her main drinks (they don't drink water on my husband's side of the family AT ALL), and unfortunately the meds she's on cause her to have GI effects too. I remember asking why they think this is NORMAL eating because most people in the world do not eat fast food and pizza daily (they now add veggies to their meat lover's pizza to make it healthier I was told). It's really sad, but in the end there is NOTHING you can say to people who do NOT want to change. Now this girl is young and it's not her choice what she eats, but the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents won't even try (they all live together at my inlaws--FIL supports them financially and MIL is the shopper). It is sad, but I really don't think you can do anything or say anything other than "well I wouldn't do that." I've had 3 friends using hCG diet. One is still on it and she's already in a healthy weight range, but the other 2 start and stop it all the time...gaining and relosing the same 20 pounds over and over. Just because my one friend does okay doesn't mean I would do it, but she's super type A and she controls every ounce she eats LOL.

My doctor told me years ago that exercise does not work! Never understood that since most doctors encourage you to exercise. That has stuck with me all these years and for me it is right. If I exercise and don't watch what I eat i will not lose weight, just doesn't happen. But I look at it different now and I don't exercise to lose weight...I eat right to lose weight and the exercise is a bonus. I exercise for my health.

But a 500 calorie day is just crazy! I have learned that while I can't lose weight by exercising I also can't lose weight by not eating. You HAVE to eat to lose weight. What happens after she loses the weight and starts eating regular food? She is going to gain! Hopefully you can get this across to her eventually.

That goes for anyone. For me it's 50/50 to lose weight, I have to do both diet and exercise but anyone can out eat an exercise program. I also work out because I don't want to be a fluffy thin, I want to be a firm thin.

Exercise alone doesn't work for most people, but I wouldn't say it doesn't work. It absolutely does work.

Eh. I see a lot of people around here who follow diets that make me cringe, and I am aware my diet is likely to make them cringe. We all do what we feel is best for ourselves.

How do people become functioning adults and believe diet and exercise don't work?

Because it's hard for them.

As a side note, one of the things that I had to learn on this journey (and I really do hate the word, but I can't think of what else to explain what I've been doing now for 3 years) is that losing weight isn't just about eating less calories and exercising more.

(I exercised before I started losing weight.)

It's really about changing your mindset around food and staying healthy and maintaining your weight. Weighing a specific number doesn't really mean anything by itself. It's the impact it might have on your body because you lost weight or pick up exercising or started eating vegetables that is really the significant change.

And all of that is really hard.

People told me if I exercised and ate well, I would lose weight. Didn't happen. I did exercise. I did eat well (too well!).

I had to learn to take care of my body. Eating what others ate didn't translate "right" for my body. It made me gain or maintain the weight I had. Exercising didn't make me lose weight at all. I had to really think and figure out what it meant to "take care of my body" and then put that into action. And that's really the hard part -- figuring out what works for your body and sticking to it and actually making the time and energy to do it every day for the rest of your life.

HCG, like other crazy fad diets, promises magic in a drop or an injection. It tells people that they don't have to worry about anything, the HCG will take care of it.

My friend did HCG. 500 calories. Extreme, low carb restriction. It worked for her because she doesn't like food anyway. Restricting it made it easier for her because didn't have to think about what she was going to eat and she was skinny already -- she just wanted to lose more weight to go from a size 6 to a size 4 (she wanted to lose 15ish pounds).

She did lose the weight. But she also has to restrict even post-HCG, she eats, MAYBE, 1000 calories per day, low carb. Her sister did it too, but she had a lot more weight to lose. She did lose it. Then she gained some of it back. So, she's doing HCG again. It's a never ending cycle.

It's not sustainable. It's hard to do HCG. The drops/injections don't do anything -- it's all psychological. And most people don't learn how to eat healthy afterwards for something that will last them their lifetime. Even my friend who was "successful" at it... she doesn't eat "normal". And she still has to restrict and exercise, like she did before HCG.

It's such a scam.

If she's set her mind to it, you'll probably be hard pressed to change it... especially once she starts seeing results. I had a friend lose 55 lbs on that diet, and it was fast! Everyone was very impressed. It was the smallest I'd ever seen her. She understood that such a radical diet was not a long term plan, but I don't think she recognized it as potentially dangerous. Her plan was to use weight watchers to keep it off, which worked for a few months before she picked her old habits back up. She's now bigger than before. I don't have a lot of room to talk because I lost 65 the slow and steady way and have regained most if it myself. The point is that to be successful you have to get into (and stay in) the mindset that this is for life. Anyone who's looking for a quick fix, probably doesn't have that mindset.

Because dieting and exercising the way we're taught to do it DOESN'T work.

It's very difficult to believe, and even more difficult to truly "get" that most of the expert options, and most of the "common wisdom" is just plainly, absolutely WRONG for many of us.

When a person had struggles to lose weight even on a drastic calorie reduction, they get desperate and either try desperate measures (like the 500 calorie diet) or they give up completely.

We've been taught a lot of b.s. and nonsense when it comes to weight loss and exercise, and our own experiences also lead us to make some pretty odd and erroneous conclusions about weight loss. We're even encouraged by the diet industry to see weight loss success as complicated and magical (you must follow their program to succeed, one false move, one tiny mis-step and the program will fail. Eat a single bite off plan and you've sabotaged your success).

We're taught that weight loss of less than a pound per week is failure, or at least incredibly slow success.... even though 90 - 95% of people who WANT to lose weight aren't losing .5 lb a week. So if you're doing better than 95% of our peers, why do we still feel like we're failing and falling short. If most people don't lose even .5 lb per week as an average, then why don't we consider .5 lbs a week as amazing, and even rapid weight loss.

Yes, most people can lose more than .5 lbs per week their first few weeks, and a few are even able to sustain even larger losses, longer... but eventually just about everyone's weight loss slows down to a trickle (either because of their physiology or because of the difficulty in maintaing the habits perfectly), and we don't really see that as normal (not really, because we see folks here and elsehwere crying out "what am I doing wrong, my weight loss has slowed to a trickle," as if we didn't already know (and sadly some of us don't) that the slowing is absolutely, 100% normal.

We're taught to have unrealistic expectations for weight loss. We're taught to judge ourselves and others harshly if they have trouble losing or can't lose quickly. We see the amazing success stories, but never the average ones (there's never a women's magazine cover story title that says "How I lost 10 lbs over the course of a year and a half" or "How I lost 105 lbs in over six years, but still have another 150 lbs to go, that I hope to get off over the next five to ten years."

It just doesn't happen. We don't want to hear those stories, even though they're just as much success stories than the "How I lost 100 lbs in six months," ones. But we're not taught to see that as success, instead we're told that if we're losing that way (even though it's far faster and better than the average) that we must not be motivated enough and that we're probably doomed to fail.

It isn't just the idiots, not just the lazy, crazy, and stupid among us who have false and even ridiculous beliefs about weight loss. We all do, because we've been taught them, either indirectly or by watching the way weight loss is done and portrayed in this culture. We encourage false beliefs about weight loss, to such an insane degree that no belief becomes too strange to sound believable, even to the most logical and well-educated among us; and even the experts aren't exempt.

I think it really speaks to how desperate people are to lose weight. You follow the advice, it doesn't work, so you fall into the trap of fad diets.

Just as I tell people who run to me begging me to speak to their overweight children: you can't force anyone to change their lifestyle—they have to do it on their own.

We all know diet and exercise works, but the problem is that it's not JUST diet and exercise that causes someone to lose weight. You have to change almost everything—and yes I mean everything—in order to lose weight. One's mind is the most important tool in this process and it's also the worst enemy.

It's painful to see someone you care about do something so unhealthy but speaking to them may not do much at all if they are truly set on losing weight this way.

Regarding the hCG protocol, I'd say don't knock it unless you have read the source material and understand it. I'm a long term loser and maintainer and lost over 50 pounds on it, healthfully, and maintained the loss well. It helped immensely with some hormonal dysfunction I was experiencing and as an appropriately used medical treatment, it's excellent. There's a lot of gimmicks and misinformation about it, most of all that it is a diet (false!), and that leads to obfuscating of how it actually works.

I had a fair number of people think I didn't listen to them, either, only to prove to them through my own trial, observation, and results that I was in fact better informed about my own health than they were, and they were advising me 'out of their butts', as it were. While your friend may very well be doing the protocol incorrectly and experience negative side effects from it, assuming someone is being stubborn or ignorant simply because they come to a different conclusion and choose differently than you, is quite a narrow perspective!

I disagree with her that diet and exercise does not work, but taking a therapeutic approach to dysfunctions in one's body that cause obesity, rather than just treating the symptoms and hoping the underlying issues magically resolve themselves, doesn't make one crazy. Doing the protocol and sticking to the maintenance rules is indeed a wonderful, healing, permanent solution for a fair number of people (including me, who approached with great skepticism and rigorously documented all my rounds).

Sincerely,
The educated, quite sane, well-informed, experienced dieter, who also made the same choice as your friend and whose health improved greatly because of it.