(Kim speaking)

What’s happening in the brain

Many of us spend our lives losing and gaining weight. We blame ourselves for our failures because we imagine it’s all up to us, all we need is some discipline and will-power and we’ll get to the right weight. Wrong. Weight gain and loss is a highly complex mechanism that involves hormones, heredity, the messages being sent to and from the hypothalamus–a very primitive part of the brain that regulates temperature and appetite and the way we extract calories from food. Recent brain studies have made it possible to isolate the control centers in the brain that influence weight. Researchers also understand a great deal now about the ways these centers maintain their control. Fat cells release hormones that let the brain know when fat is gained or lost. Neurotransmitters can influence whether we get hungrier or less hungry, our metabolism can be increased or decreased in response to these messages. When we start a diet we are also starting a rush of information racing back and forth across the permeable membranes of cells, into the blood stream, up to the brain and back again. We are not to blame for our failures unless we consider it a failure not to learn how our bodies work.

Why people gain weight
It’s easy to talk about why people gain weight. If we take in more calories (energy from food) than the energy we expend, fat will be stored and weight will be gained. That part is easy. Another easy concept is the set-point, the weight that is ideal for our bodies. Set point simply means that the body tends to return to this weight no matter how much weight has been lost through dieting. It is this mechanism that dooms the various kinds of diet, whether Weight-watchers or Atkins or the Zone or the Alkaline diet or the Breatharian diet (based on the idea that food is not necessary so on this diet no food is consumed). There’s also the Cabbage Soup diet, the well-known Crash Diet the Cookie Diet, the Detox diet, the Food-combining Diet. I don’t know about you, but I myself have tried an incredible number of these diets and have found, as have 90-95% of dieting folk, that over time the weight just comes back on.

Thrifty genes
There are reasons for this. There are, for instance, strange creatures called “thrifty genes.” They get activated by dieting and actually encourage us to gain weight after a diet by making us more hungry and lowering our metabolism. We have to face the fact that we are governed by the autonomic nervous system that is not under our control. It works behind our backs, so to speak, controlling heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, salivation, perspiration, even the diameter of our pupils. This system is intended to achieve homeostasis, a state of steady balance throughout the body. Lose weight, lose fat, the system is alarmed and attempts to return to normal by gaining back the weight that has been lost. This is not surprising, given that the body experiences a diet as if it were starvation or a famine. Worse (or better ) yet, the body has its own ideas about how much fat we should carry. It will do everything it can to keep those fat layers at the precise amount it deems necessary to have us do our best over-all functioning.

The ABC of hCG
Here’s where hCG comes in. It is a hormone produced in massive quantities in pregnant women, making it possible for them to transfer fat from themselves to the developing fetus in conditions of scarcity. It may also be responsible for the rather euphoric feeling many women experience during pregnancy, and which some people experience while on the hCG protocol (I did.) If you wish to understand more about the way hCG works you can look it up on the website in the Coaching House: “The ABC of hCG.” Briefly here: the hCG protocol burns only the fat that is stored on the body and is not available to be used as energy. Oh that stored fat! How well we know it, happily living out its days on hips and thighs and stomach. One crucial result of burning this fat is that it becomes available to nourish the individual on the hCG protocol. We are being fed by the fat we are losing. That is why the 500 calorie diet does not make us experience ourselves as starving or living through a famine. And why the autonomic mechanisms are not set into play to restore homeostasis by taking back the fat we have lost. The autonomic system is not “worried” about the depletion of stored fat that can’t be used for energy. It is concerned with the necessary fat around organs and the fat held in reserve for us to use in times of scarcity. Even better news: hCG has the capacity to readjust the set-point so that the metablism is increased and the energy from food can be used more effectively. Dr. Simeons, who developed this protocol during the 50’s, was able to show that after the protocol people could eat in a normal, healthy way without gaining back the weight they had lost, precisely because of this re-adjustment of the hypothalamus.

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