Medical Weight Loss

We live in a unique time when almost any type of food is available to us 12 months out of every year and 24 hours out of every day. Our daily lives often revolve around food; we gather in groups to celebrate with food and drink; we use food to help heal wounds and hurts; we seek food to pass time and fill empty moments.

We often ask our patients to consider what and when they would choose to eat if there was a limit to the amount and type of food they had access to. Would they choose something that tasted wonderful but had very little nutritional value and offered their body only a few hours of energy, or would they pick a meal that was nutrient dense and nourished their body for many hours? The decisions we make multiple times every day play a significant role in how our body decides what to do the food we take in; whether we burn it as energy or store it as fat to use later. These decision patterns influence our metabolic rate and ultimately determine whether we lose or gain weight.

We once thought that losing weight was simple a mathematical equation – eat less calories than are burned and you will lose the difference between what was taken in and what was expended. We now know there are multiple hormonal factors that influence whether the body will burn fat or store it. This can leave many people who are doing their very best in terms of dietary intake and physical activity with the inability to lose weight. This frustrating situation is primarily due to fact that the metabolic set point has been altered due to hormonal imbalances and resistance to burning stored fat, which can only be changed by balancing and sensitizing those hormones. HCG is one tool that we use help re-establish the connection between the brain and the fat burning hormone leptin. We also feel it is important to ensure that all other hormonal systems are functioning optimally and are not a contributing factor to the inability to lose weight.

Although losing weight is what initially compels most people to commit to any diet program, it is only one of the many positive outcomes that occur during the HCG program. What we see at the end of the program is a far deeper transformation where there is a fundamental shift in the way the patient relates to food and to his or her own emotional impulses to eat. We believe this is the only way to make lasting changes to weight and metabolism. We often tell patients that HCG is not a magic pill or a quick fix, but rather an amazing tool that offers us access to change our deepest patterns surrounding food and how we utilize it, both physically and emotionally.