How I Dropped 60 70 Pounds in 140 175 Days and Have Never Been Healthier!

January 2008:
It is not easy to publish a photo like this one here for all the world to see, but I am hoping that the "before and after" transformation will inspire at least one more person to take control of their health, not be brainwashed by the FDA and mediocrity, and know that there is a way to remove stubborn fat that won't vanish no matter what you try.

I was not always as fat as the first photo above. While there was only one time, in my mid 20s, that I would have been called "thin," it was only in the last five years or so that I became that fat blob you see pictured. The funny thing, I wasn't exactly sure how it happened. Between age, incorrect eating, various prescriptions that were taken at different times in my life, and plain old apathy I managed to become fat, not just plump or chubby, but FAT. And I hated it. I tried to "make friends" with being fat, to accept myself as a fat girl, but the shame of how I looked and felt overshadowed all the other wonderful aspects of my life. It just wasn't "me" and I didn't feel like I deserved it. I didn't sit around eating candy all day, I didn't gorge on cakes and pies and milkshakes or eat fast food everyday, but nonetheless I became terribly fat.

I did try to diet but mostly I tried to up my exercise. Over the years my job went from standing up and moving for 12 hours a night to sitting in front of a computer for the same length of time, so I know that was one of the culprits. I had started participating in 5Ks around town; I couldn't run in them due to my asthma, but I could walk all day long! In 2004 I walked my first half-marathon, 13.1 miles, and was very proud of the accomplishment but wanted to do more, so the next winter I decided to train for the 2005 half-marathon more seriously. I started working out to walking DVDs, up to four hours a day. Yes, FOUR hours a day. After working out daily for about 6 weeks, guess how much weight I lost? NONE! And it wasn't that it was turning into muscle because my clothes fit exactly the same way. So I thought "screw this," why kill myself working out if it's not going to change anything?

In the next year or so I tried other methods, both alternative and conventional, to get my body to respond and at one point I did lose forty pounds by doing an intense herbal detox. Unfortunately, it did not "keep" and I slowly gained it all back and more. By this time I had almost given up. I remember my parents saying when I was a child, when we would visit a shopping mall, to look at all the fat people because inevitably, they were walking around eating something. And you know what, more often than not, they were. So that's the stereotype I had stuck in my head, and that's what I assumed people thought about me as well.

No matter how I got there, I was stuck with weight I could not seem to drop. Then somehow, all I know is I must have been divinely inspired, because in the summer of 2007, while surfing the internet, I learned about the HCG protocol developed in the 1950s and perfected through the 1970s by Dr. ATW Simeons. I don't even know what lead me to it, but once I learned about it, I joined a Yahoo Group dedicated to the protocol and read for weeks, learning all I could. A file of the doctor's original protocol was on the site, as are some of the most helpful people on the internet. I learned that a variation on this protocol was written about in a best-selling book called The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About by Kevin Trudeau. The book has been panned by people too closed-minded to think that something outside of their mainstream thinking could possibly work, or that it is too hard for the average person to accomplish. I have not read the book so I cannot give you my opinion on it, but the opinion of the Yahoo Group was that, while introducing some variants to the diet, just alerting them to the existence of the HCG diet protocol was a life-changing experience, and for that, I will give him credit.

So armed with everything I read from the Yahoo Group, I began the protocol on August 6, 2007. The only deviation I made from the protocol was not to stop after a 43-day cycle, but rather I continued the HCG phase of the protocol for 140 days straight. By Christmas I was done, less than five months later. Otherwise, I followed the protocol and Very Low Calorie Diet as prescribed by Dr. Simeons as closely as I could, and I averaged a .4# drop a day throughout the diet. I believe that I did not attain the 1# a day loss that many people do because I am on two prescriptions that inhibit weight loss so I was working against them. Still, I am thrilled with the results. I dropped a total of over 47" all over my body, including 12" from my waist and 10" from my hips. I was a size 18 and am now a size 4. I have also dropped two prescriptions for allergies/asthma that I do not need anymore since my body has had time to detox itself during the diet.

Of course dropping the weight is only half the story; I now have to keep it off. Again, I went researching and have come to believe that a Paleolithic style of eating is best suited for me. Basically the idea is that most degenerative diseases began in mankind after he moved away from a hunter/gatherer existence and started agriculture, eating foods that we were not designed to live on, and that means starches, the basis of the USDA Food Pyramid. If you would like to research this further, please visit my Health Links page for some books and web articles on the subject.

UPDATE - APRIL 2008: I just finished another short round of HCG to get down to my goal weight of 116 and I made it! In a little over a month, I dropped another 10+ pounds to get me to my goal of 70 Pounds GONE. I also dropped another 8 inches, bringing that total at 55 inches. In pants I am now between a 0 and a 2 depending on the brand/designer. At right is a photo of me taken April 2008 at 117 lbs.