Original email for context: I’m just curious if the HCG diet would slow down the healing of an injury. I was injured about 10 days ago while on the diet and I’m just curious if I should stop and start putting more food in my body to allow it to heal better.
I can’t say for sure since I’m not a medical professional, but my feeling is yes, it can slow an injury down.
I have this conclusion in my own head because I’ve seen certain things in my own life on a consistent basis with a similar principle. For instance, if I do a hard crossfit workout and get really sore – which means that you’ve created lots of tiny microfiber tears in your muscles (kind of like an “injury” in a way), I find that if intermittent fast after that, I am sore much longer than if I eat.
Since we are eating so little on the diet, including small amounts of complete protein, and our bodies need extra of all these macros to heal injured areas, it stands to reason that this process would be slowed down when we are eating a lot less than usual on a daily basis.
I found a really good article from a nutrition site I highly respect about the process and needs for injury recovery:
Of course the level of injury has a bearing on how increased your nutritional needs are and how long the recovery will take.
From the above article I linked to, they said this, “Energy needs increase during acute injury repair. In fact, basal metabolic rate (BMR) may increase by 15 to 50% based on the severity of the trauma. For example, sports injury and minor surgery may increase BMR by 15-20% ,while major surgery and burn injury may lead to a 50% increase in BMR.”
The above is mentioning sports injury and minor surgery- so if it’s just a slightly pulled muscle that will feel better in a few days, there may not be a huge increase in nutritional needs and your healing may slow down just a couple of days – that might not be something that concerns you greatly. For you, you mentioned being injured 10 days ago and it sounds like you are still dealing with not being recovered – so in this case, if you think that your healing seems to be slow, you may consider adding in more calories or take a break – depending on the circumstances.
