Original email for context: My biggest concern right now is whether or not I can maintain my weight post phase 3, because I haven’t stuck to the 500 calories. I plan to stick strictly to the 500 calories or less after Monday, but my body would have only had 10 straight days of 500 calories as a pattern. I’m concerned that after the 3 days (off HCG but still at 500), once I enter into phase 3, I’ll start gaining weight with increased calories, since I didn’t stick to 500 calories every day as a pattern. Do you have any thoughts?
This is a common concern, but I’d like to put your mind at ease.
Women do the hCG protocol at quite a variety of levels of calories these days. Some do the 500 calorie, some now do 700-800 calories per day (on purpose). Some even a bit higher. Even for those like me who followed the 500 calorie protocol, the calories still vascillated from day to day- I wrote my post on eating less than 500 calories because some days on the hCG diet, I was just so not-hungry that I ate more like 350 calories.
The key to stabilizing your weight loss is not the requirement of eating exactly 500 calories each day on P2 prior. In fact, even in Dr. Simeon’s original protocol manuscript pounds and inches (I highly recommend reading this and it’s free) he said that a patient could eliminate anything he was not hungry for on a given day EXCEPT the 2 protein servings.
So a variation in calories on P2 isn’t a problem when it comes to maintaining weight loss in Phase 3.
If by “not sticking to the 500 calories” you mean you’ve been cheating frequently on hCG, with a lot of off protocol foods ie sugars and fats, while it’s not desirable, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it will make it not possible to stabilize your weight loss.From what I’ve observed, the key factor in stabilizing weight loss in P3, is to raise your calories gradually in P3, and to have a structured plan to follow that helps you do this. We have this with the P3toLife program now. The ladies who follow it stabilize (and sometimes continue to lose) super reliably.
