Jennifer Lovejoy, PhD, Vice President, Clinical Development & Support:

Having spent many years of my life trying to help overweight people find credible, sustainable solutions to their weight problems, it’s always discouraging for me to hear about fad diets. But even worse than hearing about the latest new fad diet is hearing about diets that have been proven worthless or harmful decades ago, now being touted again as the “greatest weight loss secret”.

An unfortunate example of this is the “hCG diet,” which has recently experienced renewed popularity. This weight loss idea originated over 50 years ago, when a British physician reported that when he injected obese people with human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), a pregnancy hormone, and fed them a 500 calorie/day diet, they lost weight “without hunger.” The original report was not submitted for scientific review, but it generated a lot of press and many interested patients. Over the next few decades there were a number of randomized clinical trials done to test the true benefit of the diet plan. Unfortunately, study after study showed the same thing – there is no benefit to hCG injections beyond the weight loss someone gets from the very-low-calorie diet alone.

While it’s sad that people are wasting lots of money on a bogus weight loss plan, what’s really scary is the fact that hCG is potentially very risky. The doses of hCG that are given in some clinics are as high as 1000 IU per week. As a reference point, a dose of 200 IU per week has been used to treat reproductive disorders and medically shut down the brain’s production of key reproductive hormones. hCG may increase risk of certain cancers, and some doctors even worry that taking it for weight loss could prevent a woman’s ability to become pregnant in the future. Some clinics avoid the risks of injectable hCG by providing it as a pill or liquid. Unfortunately, evidence shows that oral hCG is almost immediately destroyed by stomach acid, so it’s literally like taking a sugar pill or drinking water.

One of the things that fad diets survive on is testimonials. You may know someone who has lost of a lot of weight on the “hCG diet”. It shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone that eating only 500 calories a day results in weight loss. What also shouldn’t be a surprise is that gaining the weight back after this kind of weight loss is extremely common. Losing lots of weight rapidly and eating so few calories turns on all the body’s mechanisms to defend weight and store fat – your metabolism plummets, appetite hormones increase, and your muscle tissue becomes more efficient so you have to exercise longer and longer to burn the same calories. The likelihood of the long-term success that dieters truly desire is minimal following this sort of crash diet.

It’s sad that there are so many who are willing to take advantage of people’s heartfelt desire to lose weight. Weight management is hard and many overweight people are vulnerable to these sort of hucksters after trying many times to lose weight without success. However tempting it may be, if you want to lose weight, I encourage you to care for yourself enough to thoroughly check out what you are putting in your body. In the case of hCG, even a basic “background check” shows that this is something to quickly walk away from.