Today marks day 32 of the HCG Diet Program I am on.

Things have been progressing quite nicely.

Since my last update on August 4th, when I weighed in at 218.8lbs I have lost an additional 4.6 lbs of fat.

I am now at 214.2lbs, with a total weight loss of 13.0 lbs since I started the HCG diet 32 days ago.

My HCG Diet Plan Weight Loss Chart

As you can see from my graph, I had a spectacular drop in weight from August 4th – when I was 218.8lbs to August 11th – when I was 212.4 lbs.

During that one week period I dropped by 6.4 lbs in 7 days.

There are a couple of reasons for this.  Firstly, during this period of time I was very strict with my diet while at the same time adding in daily exercise into the equation.

I either walked, or jogged for at least 3-5km every day in addition to my dietary changes and on August 11th I did a 15km walk prior to weighing in.

All of that exercise, combined with the HCG diet I’m on, definitely helped to produce such amazing results so quickly.

Cheating on the HCG Diet

I have to admit that with summer here and the BBQ and birthday party I attended during the last week I did cheat on my diet and consumed a lot more than the 900 calories I should be eating.

On the days that I cheated, I actually still ate much less than the 2,000 calories per day my body needs to maintain weight, but I’m pretty sure I gained weight in the days following that because of the white flour and processed sugar content of the foods that I was eating.

I previously wrote about the way that the body stores glycogen in the liver and how glycogen is basically one part sugar and four parts water, so when a person starts eating refined sugars after not eating them for an extended period of time, the liver stores that sugar but also stores about 4 times the weight of that glycogen in water weight.

So for example if you look at my weight on August 11th – which was 212.4lbs and compare it to my weight on Aug 13th – which was 216.2lbs, that is a difference of almost 4lbs of weight in 2 days.

There’s NO WAY that I gained that much weight in FAT during two days.  When I say I “cheated”, I’m talking about having ONE hotdog and ONE can of Coke during a BBQ instead of having a salad for example.

The reason my weight jumped so much in 2 days is because the glycogen levels and water weight in my liver must have gone up after consuming the white bread and refined sugars in the meals I ate.

I learned about this glycogen storage concept from a doctor while I was on the Bernstein Diet last year, and it really helped me to understand how the human body works.

This is also one of the ways that most fad diets can produce very quick results in the first few days of depriving the body of sugar.

If you deprive the body of sugar for just a few days, the glycogen levels in the liver go down, and the body not only sheds the weight of that glycogen quickly, but it also sheds four times it’s weight in water!

Of course, on the flip side, when you resume eating sugar again, your glycogen levels in the liver go up, and you gain the water weight back.

This is why it is important to have a long term outlook on weight loss and not to freak out if you gain a few pounds of weight the day after eating some sugar.  It’s not FAT you gained, it’s mostly just water weight.

Of course that doesn’t mean you can keep eating sugar non-stop, as once the glycogen levels in the liver are replenished any excess sugars you eat WILL turn to fat and you don’t want that.

The HCG Diet Itself

One other thing I will add is that I am NOT following Dr. Dale’s dietary recommendations verbatim.  Her diet is based on 900 calories.  Most HCG diets are based on a 500 calorie diet.  I have been eating probably around 1,200 – 1,500 calories per day, but I’ve been supplementing my diet with regular exercise in the form of walking or jogging.

I find this to be more manageable and more long-term friendly than trying to only eat 900 calories on a VERY restricted diet of VERY specific foods.

I eat a lot of salads, and veggies, but I don’t follow the dietary recommendations verbatim.  For example, I might have a chicken breast and a salad with various vegetables, with a little bit of salad dressing whereas Dr. Dale’s diet doesn’t recommend eating chicken or having more than one vegetable with each meal, and no salad dressing.

I’ve modified the diet to make it easier for me to stick to it long term and I’m happy with the results.

In 32 days I have lost 13lbs, and I have NOT been feeling starved or hungry or unable to do exercise due to being tired.

In fact I actually feel like I have WAY more energy right now while dieting and taking my HCG drops than I did when I was consuming 2-3x as much calories of junk food.

Today is Day 18 of the HCG diet program that I am on, and Day 50 in my Weight Loss Challenge with Tyler Cruz.

I am learning a lot about diet and exercise and how it affects body weight on this challenge.

I have also noticed some interesting patterns between days when I take my HCG drops and days when I do not take my drops.

First, lets cover my results so far…

HCG Diet Results for Day 18

As of this morning I have lost 8.4lbs since starting the HCG diet and 9.0lbs since starting the Weight Loss Challenge.

However, after my weigh-in yesterday I had lost 10.0lbs on the HCG diet, which basically means my weight went up by 1.6lbs from yesterday’s weigh-in to today’s weigh-in.

Let me show you my graph for this morning and you’ll see what I mean.

As you can see in the graph, my weight loss is represented by the blue line.  Tyler’s is in red.  I don’t have the official numbers for Tyler’s weight for the last few days so that is why his graph is so flat.

But when you look at my graph, you will see that my weight has been really fluctuating up and down the last week or so, compared to the first week or so on the HCG diet.

I have discovered there are multiple reasons for this.  Let me share a few things I’ve discovered.

HCG Diet and Weight Training

In the past week or so I have had two days where I did quite a bit of physically intensive work outside on my property.

One of those days I did about 8-10 hours of physical labor outside, cutting down branches, pulling down an old fence, and digging out an old tree stump in my yard.

Another day I spent about 2-3 hours working on a new fire pit area in my yard, where we have our bon fires.

Both of those days were very physically taxing on the body in terms of the amount of labor that I had to do, while on this diet.  Also, for both days it was mostly exercise that would be equivalent to going to the gym and lifting weights, versus a cardio workout.

Now the tough part of having to do this kind of work, while on the HCG diet is that after the work you get hungry for calorie dense foods.  The last thing I wanted to eat after working on the yard all day is a salad.

So it’s not very easy to maintain the perfect HCG diet while physically exerting the body that way.

However, I will say that I was somewhat surprised at how much energy I did have to do the actual work for the first 3-4 hours.  On some other diets I’ve been on in the past, there’s no way I would have had the physical endurance to do that kind of labor while on the diet.  I would have tanked after the first hour.  On the HCG diet I had energy without eating for at least 3-4 hours.  Only then I started to tank a bit and had to eat some calorie dense foods that weren’t exactly on the diet.

The other downside is that the following morning after days like that you don’t lose a lot of weight – according to the scale – and in some cases you actually gain weight.

I am comparing this to a day where you follow the diet strictly, take the HCG drops, but don’t do any exercise.  On such days I pretty much always lose weight.

Maybe it’s because on days where you do heavy physical labor, the body focuses on re-building and repairing muscle tissue.

It could also just be a temporary issue where you don’t lose the weight the day immediately after the physical exercise, but you do lose more weight all the days after that due to the small increase in more muscle tissue that has been rebuilt.

HCG Diet and Drinking Water

One huge difference I’ve noticed while on this diet is that on days when I drink the most water, I lose the most weight.

While on this diet, the body is burning fat for fuel and so it is also releasing all the toxins stored in the fat cells, so it needs a lot of water to flush out the toxins.

I’ve been working on increasing the amount of water I drink on this diet and overall I have been drinking a tonne more water in the last 18 days than ever before.

However, there have been some days where I have been out at meetings and driving around and I definitely have not been consuming enough water.  I noticed that on such days I don’t lose any weight or even gain weight.

So if you’re on the HCG diet, make sure you are definitely drinking a lot of water.

HCG Diet and Eating Out

Another reason why my weight has been fluctuating a lot more, going up and down is that I have had a lot of meetings in the last few weeks where I had to leave the house and meet people at restaurants or coffee shops etc.

In such situations I have found it somewhat difficult to order food that fits with the HCG diet program.

The reason for this is because most restaurant food is loaded with calories, sugar, salt and fat.

In most cases, restaurants focus primarily on selling simple carbs as their primary calorie filler.  For example, yesterday I had a stir-fry for lunch from a Thai food place, which was basically a giant plate of rice noodles (carbs), smoothered in sauce (more carbs) with a little bit of veggies on top and a little bit of chicken.

Now I realize that I didn’t have to make that choice for food, but my point is that at most restaurants they primarily focus their meals around carbs – because they’re cheap.  Rice noodles are cheap.  Rice is cheap.  So they try to fill people up on simple carbs.

Another reason I have trouble ordering anything decent at most restaurants is that I absolutely can’t stand the salads that restaurants make.  To me they are totally disgusting.

When I make a salad at home, I always use only the absolute most fresh ingredients.  I also include a large variety of different types of vegetables, like green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, broccoli, cucumbers, radishes, green onions, tomatoes etc. as well as some pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds etc.

When you put a large variety of those types of veggies, thinly sliced on a salad it actually tastes good!  Only about 25% of my salads are made up of lettuce or salad greens.

When you go to a typical restaurant and you order a salad, you’re basically ordering a bowl of lettuce!  Lettuce is cheap so they load up 90% of the plate with just lettuce and then maybe put half a tomato on top and a few sliced carrots.  That’s not a salad!  That’s lettuce!

Also, at most restaurants that I’ve been to for the last few weeks, the cost of the salads is ridiculous as compared to other meals.  I don’t understand why restaurants charge like $14 for a salad that is mostly just lettuce.  I can make the same salad at home for $2.  It wouldn’t be such a rip-off if the salads actually tasted good, but they don’t.

Anyway, so that has been tripping me up a bit.  Trying to find semi-healthy foods to eat at restaurants when salads are not something I enjoy eating out.

I’ve been trying to make some better choices while going out to eat on this diet, but so far pretty much every single time I go out to eat on a given day, I find myself gaining weight according to my scale the next morning.

When I eat at home, I almost always lose weight.  I’ll keep trying though.  I’m sure there has to be SOMETHING that a person can eat at restaurants that won’t cause weight gain every single time.

HCG Diet and Taking HCG Drops

Another thing I’ve noticed when it comes to my daily weight is that on any day that I don’t take my HCG drops, I gain weight.

I actually didn’t realize until last week that I am only supposed to take the drops for 6 days in a row and then skip the 7th day and then go back to taking the drops again.

I read that in Dr. Dale’s instructions for the program when I first started taking the drops but then I totally forgot about it.

When I found the sheet again, and I remembered that I was supposed to take one day off from the drops every week, I didn’t take the drops that day and the following day I gained weight again.

Also yesterday I was out for most of the day and I totally forgot to take my drops, and I ended up eating at restaurants both for lunch and for dinner.  I also didn’t drink enough water yesterday.

The net result of that was that I gained 1.6lbs from yesterday’s morning weight to today’s morning weight.

HCG Diet and Weighing Yourself Daily

I know most people say that you shouldn’t weigh yourself every day, but I like weighing myself every day as it gives me an almost instant feedback system as to how I’m doing on the diet and it lets me know if I’m slipping.

When you don’t drink enough water throughout the day, and the next morning you gain weight – it motivates you to drink more water.

When you go out to eat and you eat something that isn’t very healthy and the next morning you gain weight – it motivates you to make better choices at restaurants.

When you forget to take your HCG drops and the next morning you gain weight – it motivates you to remember to take your drops.

When people weigh themselves only once a week or so, it’s not very easy for the brain to link behaviors with negative consequences to results.

For example, if you only weigh yourself once a week every Friday morning, it is not very easy for the brain to link a weekend of partying with the weight gain the following Friday.

Meaning, if you party on the weekend and eat crap and then you eat healthy from Monday to Thursday and then weigh yourself in on Friday morning, and gain weight after 4 days of healthy eating, it feels like a punishment after four days of doing the right thing.

However if you eat crap one day and you notice the very next morning that you gained weight, the brain can make the link between eating crappy = weight gain.

Also if you eat healthy one day and the next day you lose weight, the brain can make the link between eating healthy = weight loss.

I never understood why people say not to weigh yourself daily.

I find daily weigh-ins to be one of the best feedback mechanisms for me.

If I weighed myself only once a week it would be way too easy for me to “cheat” on my program and still feel good about the weekly weight loss I had.

It would also make it almost impossible for me to figure out how my body reacts to so many different types of foods, different types of exercise, hydration levels etc.

If you’re on the HCG diet, I would definitely recommend daily weigh-ins to keep track of your progress.