Women drop pounds with pregnancy hormone
Have you heard this weight loss trick? When you order food in a restaurant, ask for a to go box too. When they get to the table, put half your plate of food in the box and save it for later. That way you don’t eat too much in one sitting.
It’s a great tool, but sometimes practices like it just aren’t enough.
Many people are turning to a hormone called hCG to help drop the pounds.
It has worked for thousands, but there are dangers that have surfaced with its popularity.
Lynda Autry decided to lose weight after her mother was diagnosed with diabetes.
She didn’t want to follow down that path and so turned to Dr. Blough at Optima in Edmond for help.
Autry says, “I guess I just starting thinking about my own health.”
Dr. Blough is a weight loss specialist who started Autry the hormone treatment hCG, known to some as the pregnancy hormone.
He says, “I wanted something that could produce long term results for people.”
The treatment costs about $200 per month for drops and about $300 for injections.
The hormone reprograms your hypothalamus to use abnormal body fat in combination with a very low calorie diet to meet the body’s metabolic needs.
In other words, it turns fat into fuel, making the normal amount of food unnecessary.
Patients like Autry go on a 500 calorie a day plan for a few months.
Blough says, “I’ve used it in several thousand patients and never had an adverse event.”
The danger of the diet comes in to play when there’s no professional supervision.
hCG is not hard to find on the internet, but buyer beware.
Blough says, “We’ve seen a lot of hCG come out over the counter, off the internet and I’ve tested hundreds of those samples. Out of the hundreds that I’ve tested, only one of those had any significant amount of hCG in it.”
Sometimes there’s not enough of the hormone in the solution to sustain your body.
So even though people may lose weight off the over the counter creations, it’s only because they are eating too few calories a day.
If the fat isn’t being turned to fuel, you could be burning muscle mass or doing other damage.
Blough says, “I tell all my patients it doesn’t do any good to be skinny and dead.”
Dr. Blough uses the hCG treatment to retrain his patients.
With the hormone’s help they lose weight right away.
Autry says, “It is so exciting and I still can’t really believe it. I’ve lost 55 pounds.”
But that initial push is really a way to jump-start a true transition.
Patients like Autry learn what and how much to eat after the hCG.
They also discover how to make exercise a part of their routine.
Autry now walks an Edmond neighborhood every evening; time to reflect on her choice to change her life.
She says she would send others down the same road, using hCG with a doctor’s care to take weight loss in stride.
She says, “People notice that I’ve lost weight and it’s just fun. I don’t know if it will ever stop being fun for people to look at you and say, ‘oh my gosh, how much weight have you lost’? It just pleases me that people can see that I’ve lost weight. That’s very gratifying.”
If you have what’s called homeopathic hCG (the kind sometimes bought over the counter or on the internet), know that some doctors will test it for you to see how much hCG it really contains.
