Original email for context: (Sent August 25) My Dr. put me on a 700 calorie a day diet. Is this normal for hcg diet. I am 65 years old and at the time I weighed 206 lbs when I started. Also, I am losing weight slowly. But I have lost many many inches. I went from a 16 to some size 12 pants. I am at 192 lbs, started hCG the end of May.
So it sounds like you’ve lost a total of 14 lbs in about 12 weeks then correct? If you have lost a lot of inches, that’s certainly an indicator that you’re doing well overall. While the overall weight loss does seem low (it looks like this is around a .17 lbs per day average), you are eating a slightly higher calorie protocol, and you may have some hormone imbalances that’s making it slow going. That said, this doesn’t mean you need to do anything different. In my mind, whether the pace is fast or slow, we will all get to our goal if we are patient and work with the body we have to work with. Since 700 calories is only 200 more than the traditional 500, I doubt you would have lost a vast amount more weight if you had been doing the 500 calorie diet instead.
In considering what calorie protocol to follow there’s a few factors to consider – many a time, when a person is doing the traditional 3-6 week round of hCG, the 500 calories (on the right hCG dosage) is typically just fine for most people.
However, in your case, since you are doing this diet for a much longer period of time – 3 months so far or 12 weeks, in this case it does seem more wise to follow a higher calorie protocol to protect your body. Even still to be honest I am not a fan of doing hCG until finished losing weight as some clinics prescribe it. I have some concerns that this can cause adrenal fatigue.
I have a post on this topic here: Why Slow Your hCG Journey Down a Bit
Also, it is expected in general for the pace of weight loss to slow down quite a bit when on the diet that long. I’m not sure if your weight loss has been more of a slow consistent process for this 3 months, or if a much larger portion of it was lost at the beginning and then more recently very little at all. That might be one factor that would affect my own decision if it were me, as to whether I would do the hCG diet protocol in 1 long session, or break it up into 6 week rounds like the original protocol dictated and take breaks for your body to recover in between – when you do it this way, your body can often be more apt to lose weight at a better rate during the round because it’s had a break inbetween. I don’t have science for you here, this is just my observation in how I’ve seen us ladies do on this program.
I think 2 things though that I don’t know about that could be causing slower than usual weight loss for you to check into are:
What kind of hCG are you using? I really believe using the real hCG hormone, not homeopathic, preserves lean muscle mass and may even aid in protecting the metabolism while on such a low calorie diet. I have an article on this topic here: Homeopathic hCG vs Real Hormone hCG
What foods are you eating on the diet? While many follow a 700 calorie diet successfully, it does make a difference what foods are being eaten that make up those 700 calories. Some find that using things like coconut oil and MCT oil on the diet is fine, but for others it causes stalls and slow weight loss- so check into that possibility and if you have been using it, try removing it to see what happens (and replace the calories with additional protein and veggies):
If you want to just troubleshoot any other possibilities you can go here:
Possible Factors of Stalls and Slow Weight Loss on the hCG Diet
Outside of that, there may be nothing wrong at all and again it may just be that your current age and hormone levels allow for that pace of weight loss, and that is just fine.
