So who wouldn’t lose weight eating just 500 calories? Why would you need to pay for expensive HCG injections when the calorie limitation will cause you to lose just as much weight in itself?

The HCG proponents (sock puppets) share their wisdom. The tiny HCG amount supposedly enables you to draw from your fat stores, and the HCG makes you not being hungry.

How funny then that the Kimkins starvation diet produced the same results, without the HCG. Kimmer suggested 500 calories or less. Lean protein, just as the HCG protocol does. People following Kimkins did lose a huge amount of weight, quickly. But they also suffered health complications due to it.

There is no reason to think that HCG would work any different, in my opinion. The dieters starting out on Kimkins didn’t feel hunger initially either. Ketosis does that to you.

Here is a study that shows no difference in weight loss or hunger with or without the HCG:

Our investigation was designed to retest the hypothesis of the efficacy of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) on weight reduction in obese women in a clinic setting. We sought to duplicate the Asher-Harper study (1973) which had found that the combination of 500 cal diet and HCG had a statistically significant benefit over the diet and placebo combination as evidenced by greater weight loss and decrease in hunger. Fifty-one women between the ages of 18 and 60 participated in our 32-day prospective, randomized, double-blind comparison of HCG versus placebo. Each patient was given the same diet (the one prescribed in the Asher-Harper study), was weighed daily Monday through Saturday and was counseled by one of the investigators who administered the injections. Laboratory studies were performed at the time of initial physical examinations and at the end of the study. Twenty of 25 in the HCG and 21 of 26 patients in the placebo groups completed 28 injections. There was no statistically significant difference in the means of the two groups in number of injections received, weight loss, percent of weight loss, hip and waist circumference, weight loss per injections, or in hunger ratings. HCG does not appear to enhance the effectiveness of a rigidly imposed regimen for weight reduction.

[Am J Clin Nutr. 1976 Sep;29(9):940-8. Ineffectiveness of human chorionic gonadotropin in weight reduction: a double-blind study. Stein MR, Julis RE, Peck CC, Hinshaw W, Sawicki JE, Deller JJ Jr.]

Getting calories from body fat doesn’t mean that you get ALL nutrition your body needs. The body fat doesn’t contain vitamins or essential fatty acids. And don’t fool yourself that a vitamin pill will provide what should be gotten from food.

Coincidentally, many Kimkins dieters complained about “excessive” hunger around week 4 – 5. The HCG protocol is following the 500 calorie diet for 3 weeks, when food is added.

But how many of the HCG dieters stop at 3 weeks? Perhaps they, just as the Kimkins dieters, decide to fight the hunger by filling up on non-calorie food such as broth and diet soda? After all, they all want to get to goal as quickly as possible.

And how many of the HCG dieters regain the weight like most of the Kimkins dieters did? A 500 calorie diet teaches you nothing about how to eat to maintain weight loss.

HCG is just another quick fix, in my opinion. A magic pill for a desperate dieter that wants to find an easy way to get the weight off. And of course, HCG is a big money maker for the companies selling it. They most likely use sockpuppets to help promote the product. As with other fad products, support threads on diet boards are populated by people new to the board, that post on that thread only, that have “fantastic success” with the product, and encourage other board members to buy it.

Isn’t that what we all want?

The fad diet industry is banking on it. Lose 10 pounds in a week! Lose 100 pounds in 5 months! No faster diet, none! Better than gastric bypass!

Sounds good? Apparently, as we keep on paying for new diet fads all the time. Looking for the magic diet/pill/supplement that will take the weight off once and for all.

Why is “quick” weight loss so important? Because we know that we can not stay on the diet forever!

If I can lose my 100 pounds in 5 months, I might have a chance to stick to it. It’s such a short time; surely I can make it that long. Just be determined and suffer through it. Then I can go back to eating, huh, normally? Whatever. I’ll deal with it when I get there.

So I start a starvation diet like Kimkins. Enthusiastically. The first couple of days are hard and I’m hungry, but the scale number drops so fast that it’s easy to fight through it. Sure, it’s water weight but who cares? It’s quick and I weigh less!

The diet is easier that I thought. I lose my appetite and it is not that difficult to just eat 500-600 calories per day. I gain self confidence. I can do this. Yes, I’m fat but I’m doing something about it. I’m in control.

Soon, “excessive” hunger and cravings appear. What do I do? Most people quit the diet at this time. Often with a binge. Berating themselves for being weak, a failure.

Too many return to the diet after the binge. It did work after all. I did lose weight on it. I just wasn’t strong enough last time. I’ll do better this time. Try to remember that it’s only for a short period of time. When I have reached goal, I can eat normally again.

Did it ever occur to you that there is a reason for the binge? The irresistible cravings? That is not psychological? That it’s not your “fault”? That you are not “weak”? Could your body be trying to tell you something?

The lack of food and especially the lack of fat cause a “starvation” response. The body does not get the required nutrition and this results in cravings. Normally cravings for sweets, but high fat sweets. It’s a natural reaction and has nothing to do with being “weak”. It has to do with survival.

A very obvious example of how the body objects to Kimkins diet abuse is when dieters that follow K/E start craving salads and vegetables. K/E (Kimmer’s Experiment) consists of lean meat and eggs only. Who would have thought that they ever would crave a salad? But many K/E dieters report just that. Isn’t it obvious that the diet lacks some essential nutrition? That the body is trying to tell you so?

And no, a daily multi-vitamin will not help.

If you can not stick to a diet, there is nothing wrong with YOU. Don’t blame yourself, blame the diet. And find a diet/woe (way of eating) that you can live with for life. Healthy food. I recommend Atkins. According to the book, not at induction levels as a quick fix.

The “quick weight loss to reach goal and then I can go back to eating whatever” is an unrealistic dream. Think about it. Does it even make sense?

BMR = Basal Metabolic Rate. This is how many calories the body consumes in a “comatose state”. Calories just needed for bodily functions and to stay alive.

To avoid starvation mode, it is recommended to not go below your BMR level.

AMR = Activity Metabolic Rate. These are the additional calories we burn by moving around during the day. Some calculator just provide choices between sedentary, active, and heavy lifestyle. In others, you can plug in the minutes you perform of each activity.

Your daily calorie requirement is BMR + AMR. Theoretically, eating anything less than this should result in weighloss.

Using myself as an example, my BMR is 1252 cals, and if only adding 10 hours of “sitting”, my total calorie requirement goes up to 2092. Exercise days add up to 2400.

Weight loss experts (and I’m not counting Heidi Diaz, the 500 cals starvation guru, among them) generally recommend that you eat 500 cals less than the total calorie requirement so I would eat around 1500 calories to lose weight, 2000 to maintain.

The BMR/AMR counter I used is here: Body for Life

I doubt it but it wouldn’t hurt to try. Kimkins Review has a call-out for how you can help. Only by getting some low carb proponents on the panel can we influence how the new food pyramid will look. At least we can hope for some improvement.

And quoting Dr. Michael Eades who got the question why it matters as nobody follows the USDA recommendations anyway:

I explained that although he may not pay attention to them, plenty of other people do. The law that established the guidelines mandates that every bit of food or money for food that the government doles out has to follow the Nutritional Guidelines. Approximately 54 million people are fed daily by the government, and they all have to be fed according to the guidelines. Who does the government feed? The military, people in the prison system, school lunch programs, numerous people who receive commodities from Uncle Sam, Federally funded daycare centers, the list goes on and on. So the Nutritional Guidelines are not a meaningless, harmless little bit of government doodling – they are of great importance. It would be nice to see them move away from a diet that composed primarily of carbohydrate. The only way this will happen is to get some low-carb advocates on the panel.

I never paid much attention to the food pyramid but looked at it on Dr. Eades blog. It looks a lot more scary when you see it that way than just looking at the numbers above (not that 65% carbs don’t look scary in themselves). No wonder people get fatter and fatter.

Just to amuse myself, I decided to redo the food pyramid for a low carb woe (way of eating). I didn’t add any food items so the “fats” segment ended up pretty empty – just a jar of mayo that is on the top in the USDA version.

It didn’t surprise me that the pyramid is pretty much flipped upside down. But notice that the “oh so important veggie” segment is in the same place and no smaller in the lowcarb variant.

And to further amuse myself, I created a Kimkins food pyramid. This one was simple. Just erase most of the food items. The pyramid ended up a lot smaller too as the typical Kimkins menu is 500 – 600 calories as compared to the 2,000 in the USDA pyramid.

Laxatives are not useful for weight loss. They cause loss of water weight. Not fat loss. The drop on the scale is not permanent. As soon as you replace the lost water, your scale will be back where you started. 

You would think that a diet “guru” like Heidi Diaz would know this. And I think she does. Is she also aware that her advice to take laxatives to produce a temporary scale loss might end up killing someone?

Extensive laxative abuse can cause:

• Dehydration.  Dehydration can cause weakness, blurry vision, fainting, kidney damage, and (in cases of severe dehydration) death.
• Electrolyte imbalance.  Electrolytes are minerals (sodium, potassium, calcium, etc.) that are in body fluids in very precise amounts and ratios.  Electrolytes are responsible for proper functioning of nerves and muscles. Laxative abuse can upset a person’s electrolyte balance and cause improper functioning of vital organs, like the heart!
• Laxative dependence.  This is when the colon requires larger and larger doses of laxatives to produce bowel movements.  People often become so dependent on laxatives that their body loses the ability to produce bowel movements on it’s own without the aid of laxatives.

Or listen to the advice of someone that tried it:

Okay, I had a really long reply typed but here’s what I was going to say in a nutshell. I’m only 23 years old, and I have been dealing with this problem for 10 years already. And, don’t do it, seriously, please read this and seriously consider the truth, and hopefully you will realize that it doesn’t help you at all in the long run.

Okay, yes taking laxatives or I should say abusing them will actually help you lose weight. But, the ways that they do it are as follows:

• You realize hey I weigh less today!
• Then, you convince yourself that you don’t want to eat because you don’t want to gain the weight back.
• You find yourself drinking less.
• You get nauseated when you attempt to eat.
• And, you constantly have diarrhea, you can’t control when where or who is in the public restroom at work/school when you have it.

Look, it’s not pretty, but it gets worse. If you still think it’s worth it, listen to the rest. Picture yourself thinner, and then picture yourself smiling, and when you look at that smile, broken and thin brittle teeth. Pretty huh? True though, because laxatives can remove the calcium from your body because it won’t let your body absorb the calcium Hardly no one seems to realize that this is a horrible side effect. Your teeth can practically crumble. And your bones…easily broken.

Also, you can end up in the hospital for any of many many reasons, where they will pump you full of potassium (oh, and that reallllllly hurts!! It causes your arms to swell, and every vein they put the iv in with that crap, collapsed).

And, you can get jaundice (where your skin turns yellow) from your liver enzymes being high because of organs failing, and end up with a not so pretty scar on your stomach.

And, think about your colon, no seriously think about it for a second, think about the alternatives to keeping it healthy.

Okay, so those are the physical problems.

I’ve tried to sum it up for ya, but it’s not a short list. I hope that you realize that this is a baddddddd decision, and not one easily kicked.

The TRUTH recently posted a series of PM’s from Kimmer (aka Heidi Diaz) where laxative abuse is recommended.

I know many overweight people that do not have what I would call an unhealthy relationship with food. They eat what they want and just don’t care about being heavier than what society deems “acceptable”. They don’t obsess over food and rarely, if ever, step on a scale. Nothing disordered about their eating, in my opinion.

I think that eating disorders are mainly caused by restrictive dieting, Kimkins being the worst restrictive diet out there.

Is there anybody that did Kimkins for any significant amount of time that did not develop an eating disorder? I have yet to see one. The ones that have left the Kimpound typically react by:

1. Binge eating. The excessive food restriction on the Kimkins causes both physical and mental cravings. The body is crying for nutrition and the mind is rebelling. This results in weight regain and in possibly even in full blown bulimia with binge/purge cycles.

2. Fear of food. Following the extreme restriction on Kimkins, any increase of food tends to cause a weight gain, threatening to undo the weight loss success from Kimkins. It’s tempting to cut down calories again to get the scale to move downwards. But how long can you keep on doing it? You have to start eating more at some point in time.

It is sad to watch the victims of Kimkins struggling with finding a WOE (way of eating) that will not reverse the weight loss and that provides a sensible eating plan that can be followed for life. A WOE that can lead to a maintenance plan.  A WOE that stops yo-yo dieting and attempts at crash diets like Kimkins.

Weighing The Facts has a lot of information about Eating Disorders and Eating Disorder help resources.

I recently returned home from a long flight with US Air. Not that the experience was unique for this airline. I have had exactly the same thing happen on United and Alaska Airlines. No doubt is the “no-food” practice common on other airlines as well.

I think by now that most people are aware that no food is being served on shorter flights and plan accordingly. But what about the longer ones? When you are stuck on the airplane for 5 hours, plus an hour or so for boarding and getting off the plane?

It depends. Continental serves food at “meal times” and a 5 hour flight generally means that you hit a meal time in some time zone. Not that the food is low carb but at least you get something.

Other airlines, like the three mentioned above, have implemented “food for purchase.” To me, this would mean that there is food for purchase on the plane. Not so.

On my last trip, I was sitting in the last row. I knew that meant that there wouldn’t be any food for purchase when the flight attendants reached my row. Not a problem for me. I can bring something with me, even if just a bag of nuts. And if I don’t, not eating for a full day is not a problem for me. I don’t have blood sugar issues.

But I felt sorry for the young couple next to me. It was their first trip with their new baby. They had prepared well, packing diapers and baby food, but no food for themselves. Why would they? The airline had said it would be food for purchase available on the plane. How would these unexperienced travelers know that 1) they would be assigned seats in the back of the plane and 2) there was not enough food brought on board for all passengers?

I find the “food for purchase” practice rude. Who decides which passengers will be allowed to pay for food and which passengers will have to make do with a tiny bag of pretzels for the entire flight? If you announce food for purchase, why not bring aboard enough food boxes to make sure that everyone that wants/needs one get it? Perhaps not the first choice, but at least something? It’s not like you can step off and buy food somewhere else when you find out that there is none available.

I understand that airlines are trying to cut corners to save money. I just wish they could prioritize which corners they cut. I can’t see that the cost per passenger would be much affected by them bringing on board at least the non-perishable snack box in enough quantity. Any unused boxes can just go to the next flight.

If I could, I would boycott airlines that have this practice. Unfortunately, as my choice of airline is based on destination, price and schedule, I am not at liberty to do so. However, I have submitted a comment/complaint on US Air’s website and I hope other passengers will do the same. Perhaps it will make a difference, in time.

In the meantime, passengers just have to continue to bring food with them, creating a Catch 22. Fewer passengers will use the food for purchase “service” and the airlines will plan for even less food boxes on board.

The formula given is:

BMR = 655.09055 + 9.5634w + 1.8498s – 4.6756a

where

w = weight in kg (divide pounds by 2.2)

s = height in cm (multiply inches by 2.54)

a = age

Using my stats, I end up with a BMR = 1,258.4597 (Love the 4 decimals! It makes it look very precise.)

How accurate is this number? Developed by modern science? Based on a large number of subjects?

Hardly. The Harris Benedict formula was published in 1918. It was based on 103 women (plus 136 men and a number of infants, but I disregard these in my discussion). Basal metabolic rate was measured for these individuals and the results are presented in the graph below.

The horizontal axis shows the weight (in kg) and the vertical axis shows the BMR. Notice how the dots (individual results) are all over the place? I am impressed that they managed to develop a formula out of this huge individual variation. The first two terms of the formula are represented by the line in the graph.

I took my weight as an example to see what the variations were in their subjects. Reading off the graph at 56 kg, I find a low BMR of 1085 and a high BMR of 1635! The high BMR is 50% higher than the lower! The theoretical value (on the line) is around 1300. The individual variation was -20% and +25%.

[The line in the diagram doesn’t include the two last terms that adjust for height and age, but even assuming that the “high” woman is 6’6”, 20 years old and the “low” woman is 4', 100 years old doesn’t account for the difference.]

So what does this tell me about my calculated BMR of 1,258? That it could be 25% higher (1,573) or 20% lower (1,006)? Perhaps it can deviate even more from the “norm”? Using an activity factor of 1.5 gives me a range of 1,509 – 2,360 as daily calories that my body will use. Not very useful, in my opinion. The only way to find out MY critical calorie level for weight loss is by trial and error.

While the BMR is a good starting point (what else do we have?) be prepared to adjust the target number.

Why doesn’t the medical community spend some money to study these types of questions? To provide tools to people that want to lose weight? The answer is pretty obvious. There is no money in it. Who would fund a study that didn’t lead to needing a medical procedure, pills or products?

“There must have been an intent to deceive. But, it could be well argued that she used the creative photos and testimonials… not to deceive, but to convey the truth.

If her “intent” (a very important distinction) was instead of misrepresenting the benefits of her program, but instead to provide prospective dieters with a true picture of the results that such a program can accomplish then there was no “intent to deceive.”.

Here we are really talking about what was in Heidi’s mind… did she believe that what she was offering was honestly a way that enabled a good weight loss program?

Her historical postings show that she really was a “believer” in what she was describing and because of that ingenuousness, then the legal concept of “scienter” comes in to play.

It’s a legal distinction called “guilty knowledge,” which often has to be proven convincingly before a judgement (or conviction) can be obtained. I think this is where Diaz is on very strong footing legally.”

Sam Redman might be surprised. Anipomini provided a link today to a very similar case where criminal charges for fraud were filed:

Deputies raid Lakeland home

This case involved the sales of products rather than “lifetime memberships” but otherwise they are eerily similar.