It’s been a month now since I started my latest Weight Loss Challenge with my friend Tyler Cruz.

Although we both started the challenge on the same day – June 16th – I didn’t actually make any dietary changes, or start exercising at that time.

Tyler started right away, making his dietary changes and implementing the starting point of his exercise regime, but I focused most of my attention on researching the right weight-loss program for me during this first month.

Because I’ve done many of these weight loss challenges in the past, and I’ve lost the weight only to gain it back I wanted to make sure I had a more solid plan this time around.

For quite some time now, even before starting this challenge, I have been researching what people have called the “HCG Diet” or the “Dr. Simeons Diet”.

The “HCG Diet”, also known as the “Dr. Simeons Diet” was first revealed to the public in Kevin Trudeu’s book “The Weight Loss Cure They Don’t Want You to Know About”.

In this book Kevin reveals how he discovered this diet, quite by accident, after many failed attempts at losing weight and keeping it off.  As Kevin describes in the book, he discovered that the Dr. Simeon’s diet has been kept a secret from the public for over 50 years, and has been used by over 10,000 people of the ultra wealthy class, celebrities and members of royal families to lose weight quickly and permanently.

I read this book several years ago and was very intrigued by it.  However, the one challenge I had with the program was that it required the administration of daily HCG injections to be effective, and the idea of taking daily injections just didn’t resonate with me at the time.

What is HCG?

HCG is an acronym for Human Chorionic Gonadotropin.  HCG works by stimulating the body to burn fat naturally, and is supposed to be the body’s natural reaction to an excess of abnormal fat on the body.

However, in the case of people who are overweight, the natural response of burning fat (rather than storing it) has gotten impeded somehow.

We live in a world where processed foods, with chemical additives, preservatives and hormones are consumed on a regular basis and these types of things wreak havoc on the body taking it out of balance and alignment.

What HCG basically does is that it turns the body’s natural fat-burning mode on to help eliminate those excess stores of abnormal fat.

HCG Injections or Drops?

After reading Kevin’s book as well as Dr. Simeon’s original manuscript “Pounds & Inches – A New Approach to Obesity” I was very intrigued and definitely wanted to try HCG as a weight loss method.

However, as I mentioned above, I’m not very fond of injections – especially self-administered injections so I started looking for alternatives.

What I found out is that there are basically three forms of HCG out there:

1. HCG Injections
2. HCG Drops or Pills
3. HCG Homeopathic Drops

Let’s start with HCG injections first.  HCG injections are normally available by prescription or under the supervision of a doctor.  They can be administered at a doctor’s office, or self-administered at home.

The HCG is injected directly into the muscle (your thigh, or buttocks for example) and it enters the bloodstream from there.

Dr. Simeon’s original manuscript, as well as Kevin Trudeau’s book both reference HCG injections as the best method to use.

Another way that HCG is being sold is through HCG Drops or Pills.  From my understanding, this method basically involves taking a HCG Pill or Drops and placing them below the tongue and letting the HCG absorb into the bloodstream through the mucous membrane below the tongue.

This is a rather new method of delivery that I don’t believe was available during Dr. Simeon’s era, and from the small amount of research I read about this method – it seems it is similarly effective to regular HCG injections.

The third option for HCG “delivery” into the body is through the use of Homeopathic HCG Drops.

Homeopathic HCG drops, however, are totally different form the first two types of HCG in that they don’t actually contain any amount of HCG in them – chemically speaking.

Let me explain.

Homeopathic HCG Drops

Homeopathic HCG drops don’t actually contain any HCG in them – from a chemical point of view – but instead they contain the “vibration” or “energy signature” of HCG instead.

To understand how Homeopathic HCG drops work, you would have to essentially first understand how Homeopathic medicine works.

Explaining Homeopathic Medicine is beyond the scope of this blog post, but I will say that Homeopathy is the second most widely used system of medicine in the world and has been around for 200+ years.

When I learned that it is possible to do the HCG diet through the use of Homeopathic HCG drops I got really excited as that sounded way more fun to me than using HCG injections.

However, after doing some research I found a lot of negative “press” specifically related to Homeopathic HCG drops in terms of their effectiveness.

Even Kevin Trudeau himself, on his radio show KTRadioNetwork.com, spoke out against the ineffectiveness of HCG drops in early 2011 and stated that according to his data the only form of HCG that works is HCG injections.

Are HCG Drops a Scam?

Digging into this further I realized very quickly that there is currently a full-on HCG diet craze on the Internet and everyone is trying to cash in.

There are a LOT of people out there selling what they claim to be “Homeopathic HCG Drops” but which are most likely nothing more than just water & alcohol in a bottle.

If you hear any negative press about the HCG diet, it is most likely due to someone buying “fake” HCG drops which are supposedly “Homeopathic” but which are really poorly made and are most likely nothing but water and alcohol.

The main reason why a lot of these Internet scammers are able to get away with selling this crap and getting away with it is because SOME people actually DO get some short-term results on the program due to the ultra low-calorie diet that is prescribed with the program.

You see the original HCG diet that was put together by Dr. Simeon’s included an ultra-low calorie diet that was just 500 calories/day.  The way that the diet worked is that due to the HCG injections, the body would release another 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000 calories or whatever it needed on TOP of the 500 calories of food that the patients would eat on the diet.

So essentially a person who required 2,500 calories in a given day to meet the body’s needs, would get 500 calories from their diet and the other 2,000 would be released by the body from fat stores.

Unfortunately if a person is getting scammed into using FAKE HCG drops which are nothing but water and alcohol in a bottle, then the body is not going to have the HCG fat releasing benefits at it’s disposal and essentially all it’s going to do is go into “starvation mode”.

So what happens with these fake drops is that people couple them with a 500 calorie diet and it is the actual diet that causes the weight loss, not the drops themselves.  These fake drops don’t do anything.

Finding Reputable HCG Drops

Once I discovered that the majority of the HCG drops being sold online are most likely a scam, I started looking for a reputable source of Homeopathic HCG drops.

After a lot of research I found that the best Homeopathic HCG Drops on the market right now are produced by Dr. Theresa Dale.

Although Kevin Trudeau hasn’t yet specifically commented on Dr. Dale’s HCG drops, he does endorse Dr. Dale’s other work quite publicly and I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback on Dr. Dale’s work and her Homeopathic products.

After doing my research I feel very comfortable trusting Dr. Dale’s Homeopathic HCG drops which are prepared at a FDA registered facility in strict accordance with the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States (HPUS).

If you’re going to be using Homeopathic HCG Drops for your diet, I highly recommend finding a reputable source like Dr. Dale.

Don’t just buy crap on the Internet from someone who just got into making (fake) Homeopathic HCG Drops 2 weeks ago and will most likely be out of business in a month.  Find someone reputable.

Getting Started with HCG

Today is my first day on the HCG diet provided by Dr. Theresa Dale with her Homeopathic HCG program.

Tomorrow I will reveal some more research I’ve discovered related to HCG drops and why the original Dr. Simeon’s diet plan will NOT work with Homeopathic HCG drops, and why anyone following the original manuscript with Homeopathic HCG drops is essentially just wasting their money and time.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I haven’t actually started implementing a diet and exercise plan until today, so my weight loss chart from the beginning of this Weight Loss Challenge is essentially flat, but I’ll include it in here anyways as a starting point.

As you can see in the chart, I’m still at the same 227lbs weight that I was at one month ago at the start of this challenge.

Now that I started the actual diet, we’ll see how quickly things change.

As you can see in the chart also, Tyler’s weight loss graph is the red line.  Although he’s lost a little bit more weight in this first month of the challenge, I didn’t actually start until today, so I really hope he’s got more up his sleeve during this challenge than what he’s been doing so far as it doesn’t look like he’s making enough progress.

Time will tell.

I’ll write more posts on all the details I’ve learned about the HCG diet over the next few days along with updates on my progress.

I’m really curious about how this program is going to compare to some of the other programs I’ve been on in the past.

Stay tuned.