HCG diet’s effectiveness debated in obesity battle
Katie Wilkinson, who started the diet after seeing a friend’s success, now tastes her cooking and spits it out.
Week after week, body-conscious Middle Tennesseans pack weight-loss clinic waiting rooms, listening for their names to be called.
They step on a scale, learn their weight and body mass index, and then collect a supply of pregnancy hormone that they’ll inject into their own fat deposits for the next month or so.
Word-of-mouth has been the HCG diet’s biggest advertising tool, with men and women booking appointments at a half-dozen clinics in Franklin, Nashville, Murfreesboro and Clarksville offering the hormone — and the 500-calorie-a-day food plan that goes with it.
Critics call HCG an unhealthy starvation diet at worst and a psychological boost at best. They expect the diet to join legions that have enjoyed booms and busts, including cabbage soup, Atkins and hoodia. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s position is the hormone does nothing for weight loss.
But don’t tell that to Katie Wilkinson, a Nashville chef who started the diet after seeing a friend’s success. She tastes her cooking and spits it out — willpower she says comes from the hormone produced by pregnant women.
Read the full article at http://yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/diet-nutrition/story/2011-12-05/HCG-diets-effectiveness-debated-in-obesity-battle/51654142/1
Source: by Tom Wilemon for The Tennessean, posted December 5, 2011 at http://yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/diet-nutrition/story/2011-12-05/HCG-diets-effectiveness-debated-in-obesity-battle/51654142/1
