All of the claims I make in this article are based on Pounds & Inches a New Approach to Obesity by Dr. A.T.W. Simeons. I don't know if they are true or not but that's why I'm trying the diet.

I am fat. Not the whip your head around and wonder how you sit in an airplane seat fat but the kind of insidious overweight that persists year after year. Four years ago I reached my max weight at 230 pounds (I am 5'8"). At that point I launched off on a starvation diet that lasted eight months that got me down to 170 pounds. I was eating roughly 1200 calories a day and I burned about 450 calories working out daily. In the two and half years since then I have gained back half of that weight. Today I weigh 200 pounds.

My wife Amy came across the HCG diet and she did a grundle of research that led her to believe it would work. Since I'm game to try anything, I thought I'd give it a shot. I didn't really understand what I was about to get into. Here's the essence of the information in the Pounds & Inches a New Approach to Obesity article.

The human body stores three types of fat. The first type surrounds and protects the internal organs and is necessary for life. The second type provides a daily use store that the body dips into whenever it needs immediate energy. The third type, one that evolution never intended, only occurs when the part of the brain that governs storing fat, the diencephalon, believes that the daily use fat store is filled to capacity and pushes the fat into permanent fat storage. This third type of fat, the permanent fat store, is very harmful to the body and often occurs at the waist and chin in men and hips, waist and chin in women.

From Dr. Simeon's article, "The diencephalon governs not just fast storage but also breathing, the heart beat, digestion, sleep, sex, the urinary system, the autonomous or vegetative nervous system and via the pituitary the whole interplay of the endocrine glands." The diencephalon will not take fat from the permanent fat store until and unless the daily use fat store is completely depleted and much of the fat surrounding the organs is also depleted. This is why those who diet often feel terrible - their bodies are in an unhealthy state and it takes near starvation to reduce the fat in the permanent stores. My Dad has dieted much of his life and he looks terrible when he diets. His face gets gaunt, his finger nails get brittle and he has to starve himself to lose weight. This jives with the idea that he is first depleting the fat needed to keep his skin facile and that he needs to create energy for activity.

Dr. Simeons claims people become obese when the diencephalon in the brain malfunctions and the body stops putting fat into the daily use store, where it will eventually get consumed, and instead puts it into the permanent fat stores that, barring ongoing starvation, will never get used. He claims that the diencephalon can malfunction for three reasons:

1. Inherited genetic factors leading to actual malfunction or a predilection to malfunction
2. Strain on the diencephalon in its governance of other systems causes it to focus on those other systems to the detriment of accurate fat storage (mild diabetes for example could cause this)
3. Sudden, large intake of food when the diencephalon had previously become accustomed to much lower amounts of food or energy requirements

Pregnant women naturally create a hormone, now known as HCG, that allows the body to treat the permanent fat stores as daily use fat stores. The body does this to ensure the fetus gets a constant supply of energy whether the woman eats or not. HCG also releases any non-calcified arterial fat into the blood stream probably for the same purpose. A pregnant woman's blood sugar level remains high enough that she feels "full" because of HGC in spite of vomiting and little intake of food during morning sickness. Dr. Simeons found that if you give this hormone to men and women, obviously not pregnant, that their bodies will do the same thing: keep the body feeling full by tapping into the permanent fat stores even when you don't eat. It's important to note that there are no known adverse side-effects for men taking this hormone (in fact it actually increases testosterone levels initially and is often used by body builders before a performance).

Taking HCG for a month or so gives the diencephalon a rest often allowing it to recover from whatever disorder ailed it and thus Dr. Simeons asserts that quite often, depending on the cause of the diencephalon dysfunction, those who have had a course or two of HCG can no longer get fat from overeating. In fact, Dr. Simeons claims that the only way a person can become obese is if the diencephalon is malfunctioning. So, giving the organ time to heal fixes the problem and according to his data the majority of those who take HCG keep the weight off many times longer than any other dietary approach to obesity.

So, the diet is really quite simple. You take HCG and reduce your caloric intake dramatically to cause the body to use up the permanent fat stores and keep you feeling full all the while. That's the theory. You must also not take in any fat whatsoever or the body will use it instead of tapping into the permanent fat stores. You are allowed 500 calories a day of very specific foods that have literally zero fat. Dr. Simeons has been running people through this diet for many years and claims that greater success has been found by eating specific foods to get the 500 calories. The diet lasts no longer than 40 days with permanent results seen usually after the 23 day mark is hit. On average, people lose a pound a day on the diet.

There's one other aspect to the diet. The first two days of HCG use the individual gorges him/her self on as much fatty foods as possible to build up the daily use fat stores to prevent hunger and ensure energy levels remain high during the diet. It sounds counter intuitive, I know, but then the whole diet seems too good to be true. I would have thought it a hoax were it not for the excellent explanation Dr. Simeons provided of how he came about these findings and the scientific approach he used in their application. Still, it could be bunk. We'll see. Day 1 is tomorrow: gorge away!!