Don't Waste Your Money

GHC is a hormone found in the urine of pregnant women. More than 50 years ago Dr. Albert Simeons, a British physician, claimed that GHC injections would allow overweight people to tolerate a 500 calories a day diets without any of the discomfort and overwhelming hunger usually associated with a severe calorie-restricted diet. Dr. Simeons claim was that small daily doses "rendered" fat deposits readily available for making up the deficit of a calorically inadequate diet and the process is accomplished by a rapid breakdown of adipose tissue.

Current knowledge of the regulation of appetite and hunger [ notice that they are not the same. Hunger is physical while appetite is emotional. ] is extremely complex and involves the emotions, hypothalamus, gastrointestinal physiology, energy requirements and possibly genetically determined metabolic pathways. Sorry! Still no magic bullets.

Noted physician Dr. Andrew Weil says about GHC injections or sub-lingual applications," They don't work. Don't waste your money." The Mayo Clinic stance is that, " Taking GHC doesn't appear to be particularly unsafe, but there is no scientific proof that it does any good." This is the view also upheld in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In 2007, the infamous snake oil salesman Kevin Trudeau wrote a book entitled, The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About. The following year FTC cited Trudeau for misrepresenting the contents of his book in infomercials and he was fined $37 million dollars. He was extolling the virtue of the GHC method and accused the pharmaceutical companies and government of trying to eliminate the competition for weight loss therapies.

The FTC stance was that," There is no substantial evidence that GHC increases weight loss beyond that resulting from caloric restriction [ italics are mine ] or that it decreases the hunger and discomfort associated with calorie restricted diets." Think about it for a minute. If you are consuming 1500 calories each day and you cut down to 500 each day, you are consuming 1000 calories less each day, which I feel is dangerous [ unless you are morbidly obese and under the supervision of a doctor ]. That's 1000 X 7 = 7000 calories less in a week. That's 7000 divided by 3500 [calories in a pound of energy ] = 2 pounds per week lost.



Here is how we are engineered. If you are consuming 1500 calories each day and your weight doesn't fluctuate much, your cost of living [metabolism] and exercise energy requirements are about right. If you maintain your level of physical activity, the only adjustment will be the speed of your metabolism which drops as you age. If you have and are gaining weight, some form of calorie restriction should work depending on the quality of food you consume. Dr. Barbara Rolls in her best selling book The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan, teaches how to feel full on fewer calories. But, theoretically, if you consume 250 calories less each day [ equivalent to a pound lost every two weeks], the calories needed to keep your 1500 a day level will come from your energy storage depot i.e. your fat deposits.