Pregnancy hormone leads to weight loss?

Initially when I first heard about the hcg diet it made no sense to me. I do NOT lose weight while pregnant, even in the earliest stages. The baseball moms were whispering about this diet that someone was trying...you spray hcg under your tongue 2 or 3 times a day, ingest 500 calories of food (very defined food list and schedule) and experience significant weight loss fairly quickly. The argument about using the hcg in addition to the low calorie diet was that the hcg made your body act like it's pregnant and forces it to go to the fat to get calories you are deficient in rather than getting it from the muscle. Supposedly it helps get rid of that deep seated fat and continues to amp you up like you have ingested 1500 calories.

Now several moms have tried it and have had pretty good success. I think several have used an appetite suppressant which helps them deal with the only 500 CALORIES a day. Ultimately I think they've been pleased by the results.

Last week one of my running friends mentioned that she was considering this diet. Of course this isn't something you can do and actually run or do much exercise while doing it. It just got to me that apparently this diet (which has actually been around for years) is burning like a wildfire around the women I know here.

But here is my problem with it...beside the fact that it's only 500 calories! For me at least my food issues aren't just the overeating or the eating of the sweets. For me it's the place food occupies in my life. It's a main focus. I love food. I like the taste. I like the texture. I like the colors. I love how I feel sitting on my sofa with an cupful of soup or chili and a piece of fresh sourdough bread. It is just so pleasing to me. I watch the Food Network for crying out loud! And enjoying food isn't a really a problem. It's one of those things that separates us from the other animals. It's art that you can eat.

The danger is when you aren't actually savoring the food, but just mindlessly putting in your mouth, chewing, and swallowing without real recognition of the flavors. It's having my hand in a bowl of m&ms, grabbing about 10, popping them in my mouth, while I'm reading, and not really tasting the chocolate and crunchy candy shell, then grabbing another 10, repeat until the bowl is empty.

Sometimes diets since they are restrictive and you don't just sit there and eat and eat and eat, do allow you to regain that appreciation of foods' flavors. And that's great because appreciating the flavor of the orange is what it's all about.

The problem with diets, though, is they can feed the food obsession. I can become even more obsessed with food while on a diet because it's the charting, the planning, the weighing , the counting, .... Again it's all about food. Food, food, food. I've seen the pattern in myself several times. I've lost lots of weight on Weight Watchers many times. I've gained it back too.

What I'm trying now is to just let it happen. I'm certainly more motivated to lose some weight because with all of the work I'm doing physically I don't want it to be for naught. I've just naturally been doing better with grabbing a handful of grapes rather than a couple of cookies. I do think about it of course, as I make my choices. I'm trying to avoid the whole total immersion into a food plan thing, though. I don't think it solves my food problems even though it makes me look better for a year or two.

This winter will be a test of my resolve, though. Watch me tout the beauty of hcg under the tongue come January!