Revolution Health & Wellness

Episode 68 – Weight Loss – The HCG Diet

Episode 68 - Weight Loss - The HCG Diet

Weight loss and the HCG Diet

 

Speaker 1: 00:00 This is Dr Chad Edwards and you’re listening to podcast number 68 against the grain.

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Speaker 1: 01:02 Today with Dr Chad Edwards, who believes that 80 percent of medical recommendations are crap, technically speaking, here he is the author of revolutionize your health with customized supplements. He served in the U, s army. He is a board certified family physician and he’s the founder of Revolution Health Dot Org. Dr Edwards. Hey, how you doing today? Well, I’m doing actually pretty spectacularly. It’s uh, it’s, you know, we’re starting to get into fall and that just has me excited. It is absolutely bar none without question. My favorite time of the year. And that’s exciting and it’s exciting because it Kinda the seasonal change. It brings a about a lot of different moods from people. Yeah. So, so, so usually that’s a pretty good thing, you know, and then there’s Pumpkins and you get. I mean it’s just leaves falling. It’s pretty outside. It’s nice, you know, and we got the, you know, in, in Tulsa we have the fair, which is, I grew up right by the fairgrounds.

Speaker 1: 02:02 So it was like the fair was like a big deal because it was sure it was just cool. So my family and I are going to the fair. Do you ever do any of the people watching at the fair? Oh my goodness. You know, the funny thing is, this is a, I may have said this before in the past, I don’t quite remember, but you know, you walk up and down the midway and you’re like, my gosh, where are these people? The rest of the year? Yeah. And then I, you know, I work in the emergency room and sometimes I’ll go stand out in the waiting room and I was like, ah, you know, they are very, they are. They are. So, so tell me, you know, I like to eat a lot of uh, uh, of the kind of the unique fair foods to fair foods. Um, but I probably don’t like to eat it as much as some of the people there do, you know, I’ll try and try and work it off during the week. Well, but the other piece is you probably do it as an annual experience. You’re going to do it, you know, you go to the fair and you like pig out and get food. This really crappy you and

Speaker 3: 03:00 that’s just how it is, but the rest of the time you eat fairly sensitive. Sure. I don’t know that that’s the case for most people is. Sure, sure. So how would you say this fair food diet maybe throughout the year would contribute to overall health? Well, just look at the people at the fair. Okay. That’s what I mean, that’s, I’m going to go to the fair. I don’t want to stereotype it, but it’s not just confined to the fair. Let’s be honest. I mean there’s a, a, you know, I like going to Branson and I love going to silver dollar city and I’ve, I’ve walked into silver dollar city and I’ve just looked around and I thought, my Gosh, is that a requirement that you’re obese in order to get it? I mean it’s, it’s ridiculous. Sure. It’s, and I don’t mean to fault anyone. I’m sure that’s going to step on toes, but I mean it’s just, there is something about it, you know, my, I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve been able to do some, some teaching things in, in Europe and when you walk around Italy and France and Belgium and, and you just, people watch there, you don’t see obesity.

Speaker 3: 04:01 Like we see it here, you just don’t see it. Why, what in the world is going on and you know, a lot of people will come in and they’ll ask that question and I don’t, I’ll be honest, I don’t have a good answer. I think the quality of our food has a lot to do with it. I think our, our lifestyle or stress or 24 slash seven, all those things have a lot to do with it. Uh, the culture can play a role in it in some ways. Certainly toxins I think play a role and it may be cumulation of all of those things, but you know, the, the French, if you go to on pair, you know, in Paris there’s a pastry shop on every corner. I mean, they’re just all over the place and we were, you know, my friends and I joked that if we wanted to look Parisian, all we had to do was walk around with a bouquet of flowers in one arm and some baguettes and the other because that’s just, that’s just, that’s what you do and you, you go and pick up your groceries and they’re basically fresh right there.

Speaker 3: 04:53 And, and, uh, you know, they’re within the stores within a block of where you live. If it’s not at the, you know, the farmers markets, they don’t call it farmer’s market, but it’s a, if it’s not at the market, you know, a once a week, you know, they bring in these trucks. It almost looks like midway at the fair they bring in these trucks and they’ve got just the most amazing selection of food across the board. You talked about foodies. Oh my goodness. Number one, there was a uh, uh, it was in, it was in Antwerp, Belgium and I went down and was looking around and of course they had the butcher thing, but they had a, like a carcass, you know, the, the animal carcass hanging there and when you got your stake he just cut it off of the thing and then you know, cut it and there you go.

Speaker 3: 05:36 I mean it was like fresh from the farm. There was no processing and sitting in and coloration or. And there was none of that. You got it right there. Seafood was the same way, but they had this one that was a Mediterranean truck and they had more olives than I have ever seen. There was probably 20 different kinds of olives and it just looked beautiful. You look at this and the colors and flavors and man, I mean the quality of the foods, so much different. Nothing, nothing that, that you buy, you know, in that farmer’s markets in a box, none of it has preservatives. None of it has any of that crap that we get routinely. I mean, all of it is just the quality of that stuff is just different on a different level, but it really is and I really have to think that that plays a big role in, uh, in, uh, in our obesity across the board, you know, across the country.

Speaker 3: 06:27 I think the food we eat is just pure crap. And so let me ask you this, um, we’re getting into our topic for today, for today’s episode. How does the obesity and the Diet and the nutrition of our food, um, contribute to today’s topic? Well, it, it basically is the foundation of this because we’re going to be talking about how to lose weight or one way to lose weight. So I had a patient that came to me. I didn’t take that. I mean I get it all the time and patients will come in and they’re obese. Even sometimes. Oh, just overweight. And it’s a scale of the body mass index, which I’m not a huge fan of, although it’s a, it’s a tool that can be helpful, can be, uh, is the, is the key word there. But a little side note on the body Mass Index, Dr Robert [inaudible] as a I’ve worked, had the opportunity to work with him.

Speaker 3: 07:15 He’s the medical director of the TV show, the biggest loser and he, and basically how the biggest loser got it. Start a, it’s one of two TV shows that I wanted to talk about to kind of lay the groundwork. Um, but the way the biggest loser got it start was he was the team physician for the La Raiders back in the eighties and his coaches came in and they, his, his linemen, of course they’re, they’re working out, they’re doing two a days and just working out all the time and they weren’t gaining weight like the coaches wanted. And he wanted, they wanted the line to be much heavier than they were. So they were like, doc, make it happen. They literally just brought in buffets and then we’re like, you know, Britain bringing pigs to the trough and we’re like, eat up. So they had to engorge them basically with food in order to maintain their weights so that they weren’t burning it all off by the amount of exercise that they did.

Speaker 3: 08:08 So when NBC came to Dr Huizenga and said, we want to do this show based on that, basically that’s where he got the foundation for the show. Uh, so on the show, of course, they’ve got a great track record that he’s published over 18 studies from, from, you know, all the data that is accumulated from the contestants on the show. And it’s like everything you see on there as legit real. It’s almost like a televised study. Exactly, exactly. That’s exactly right. And you know, we’ve talked about some of that on the podcast as we’ve gone through. I know we have, but uh, there’s, there’s just a, a lot of data that’s come out of there and they are successful. They, I mean, all of those contestants lose weight. Now what most people don’t see is that they’re getting up first thing in the morning and they might be on the treadmill for an hour or two before even start their day.

Speaker 3: 08:56 They’re going to work out four hours during the day. The amount of exercise that they are doing is so much more than people often know or expect. I think they had the last chance workout and that’s it. They are literally working their butts off. I mean, they are burning it. And so that is without question a. and of course they balance it with, with, uh, with optimal nutrition and, or I should say with, with good nutrition, I don’t agree with everything that they do, but they clearly get results and they get success, but they’re a, they’ve got a nutritionist and they help them with their meal selections and things like that. But part of, part of the show is they’ve got to learn how to cook. They got to learn how to eat, they got to learn how to prepare food, all of those kinds of things.

Speaker 3: 09:37 And it’s just part of it. Um, but it’s, it’s their job to be there and workout and eat right and lose weight. That is their job. That’s their existence. It’s what they do. You can certainly, they a little bit of downtime, but uh, and they get some cool things because we’re on the show and every now and then they’ll go to vegas or they’ll go to napa or they’ll just do different things, you know, on each season, but that is their job. It’s not reality for most people. You can’t, you can’t spend four or five, six hours a day working out, walking, you know, just doing different things. So I think some people will see that and they think that, well, I can just do that and you know, I’ll just walk two miles a day and that’ll be sufficient and it’s just not for most people.

Speaker 3: 10:17 Uh, when you consider how many calories you walk per mile, do you burn per mile? You know, you’re looking at 100 to 150 based on the size of the person. A calories per mile. Well that’s a can of coke. So if you were to cut out one can of coke, that would be equivalent to walking a mile or more or less. So a lot of people think that, you know, they’ll, they’ll make some changes and so I quit drinking cokes or if they were, you might, might have been drinking three or four of those a day and that’s gonna take 500 calories right there, but you can dunk 500 calories pretty darn quick, uh, at dinnertime and you really have to tweak it in multiple ways. And then when you consider how much you have to exercise in order to like, calorie expenditure, I mean it’s, it’s more work than I think most people recognize or realize.

Speaker 3: 11:09 Now, there are certainly other things that you can do. You know, the, there’s a post exercise postworkout thermogenic effect where your metabolism is higher. Of course you’re, the amount you burn is dependent on how much muscle you have. So increasingly muscle mass is very important. It’s one of the topics or one of the key components of what we’re going to be talking about, but there’s just a lot to it. And some people get very frustrated, they’ll try really hard and they don’t get good success right upfront. And you know, if you’re not eating cake, you quit out, you know, you cut out all the junk and you’re seeing friends and they’re eating a bunch of junk and you’ve been doing this for two weeks and you’re not really making any difference. And then you see the cake go by and you’re like, well crap, I’m doing all this stuff and I’m not getting anywhere.

Speaker 3: 11:52 I’m going to eat cake too. So it can be really frustrating for patients. But so the biggest loser is, is definitely one. Um, you know, one way that their concept eat sensibly and work your butt off. That’s definitely a way that you can lose weight. I’m an, it works, but it takes more work than most people realize. Another way that you can do is I like to draw these parallels with a lot of the patients that come into clinic. And another way that you can do this is with, um, you know, just massive starvation. And the other TV show that I like to compare to is survivor. At the end of the show on survivor, none of those people have gained weight. None of them that in fact they all lose weight, they don’t lose as much as on the biggest loser, but that’s. They don’t get contestants generally that are as big, but they, many of them lose a tremendous amount of weight, but they are an on an extreme calorie restriction.

Speaker 3: 12:45 Their energy is low. They can’t, you know, many of them in different circumstances. Some of the competitions they just can’t move. They don’t. They can’t perform their really sluggish and tired and all of those kinds of things. So you can, you can dramatically cut calories, go on a starvation diet. You know, and I would argue that like concentration camp survivors, I mean you’ve seen pictures, they’re emaciated, they are bony structures and they just didn’t get to eat anything completely. Not Healthy, but none of them were obese. So for the patients that come in and they say, it doesn’t matter what I do, I can’t lose weight. I have to say, bull crap. It’s not true. It. And I don’t mean to frustrate anyone because I understand their frustration. I understand that you know, it’s much more difficult or they’ve tried all kinds of things, but if you get really extreme you can lose weight.

Speaker 3: 13:40 Again, I don’t think that’s the healthiest way. So you know, one came in the other day, a patient came in the other day and they said, hey, I really, I really need help losing weight. I’ve tried all kinds of things and of course one of the things that we do in the clinic is we’re looking at their underlying physiology. We to check the thyroid hormones and testosterone can help increase in insulin sensitivity. A thyroid is a big driver of your baseline metabolism, so there’s a lot of things that we will look at at their physiology and try to identify why can’t they lose weight. So we focus a lot on that. Now when you’ve gone through everything in this particular patient, her labs look pretty darn good hormone, seemed to be optimized. Thyroid function looked really good sleeping, okay, blah, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3: 14:24 What in the world’s going on? And I get patients like that from time to time. A lot of times we’ll find something and it makes a big difference, but I’ll tell you that my experience is that some things are so nuanced, there’s just these little bitty things that might make all the difference in the world and you know, it’s difficult to find all of those things and of course we don’t have an unlimited time with every patient that comes in. So I’ve, I’ve readdressed I used to do this, I used to provide a service for this diet and I, I’ve recently thought, you know, I’m going to dig a little bit more into it. I’m going to look at this and I’m going to see is there any utility for this in my practice? And at the end of the day, I think yes, there is. I think there are many patients that would benefit from it.

Speaker 3: 15:07 I don’t, I’m not going to tell you that this approach is the absolute best. I highly recommend it for every single patient that walks in the door. But when you get a patient, in fact, this particular patient that came in, she said, what do you think about a weight loss surgery? And my thought is, heavens no, I mean absolutely not, you know, you’ve got a couple of options and some of them are, are less of a no than others, and the one that I’m speaking about, the most, uh, is uh, ruined. Why gastric bypass and that’s what it’s called you. And basically they cut off part of the stomach and they reattach the esophagus and the small 15 or 20 to 30 cc pouch of stomach and they attach it down the small intestine and they had, the reason they do that is because it bypasses a lot of your absorptive ability and they’ll re a nasty memos or attach those two structures.

Speaker 3: 16:02 So you’ve bypassed the stomach and a lot of the small intestine, a good chunk of it. But the problem is, is that you induce a malabsorptive syndrome. You cannot absorb food. You cannot ignore, absorb nutrients in the same way as before. So these patients have to be on a very modified diet. They can’t ever eat a Thanksgiving dinner again. You know, they’re, they, they have to eat a certain way all the time. My issue with it is that it doesn’t address the underlying problems to be, but you know, to begin with. Secondly, I’ve seen people die from it. I mean, clearly the mortality rates are fairly low, but I have seen it. I have seen patients die from bariatric surgery. Of course I’ve seen patients die from obesity to so you can make that argument, but at the end of the day, we want patients to lose weight. We want them to be optimally healthy and we want to do it in the least lowest risk mode. And so when I consider all of those options, I think this dietary approach makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1: 17:05 So we’ve talked about a couple of different approaches that are most, um, I don’t, I don’t want to say most understood or widely maybe widely understood by most of the society. Uh, you have the, the, the biggest loser approach. A lot of calories going in and an extreme amount of energy being expended, calories burned. That’s okay. Then you have more of a starvation type approach where I’m just not going to eat a lot and I’m not going to do a lot, I’m just not going to exercise very much, but with that being said, I’m going to even less. Right. Okay. And then you even have people that have gone to the approach where it, hey, I’m going to get a, I’m going to get surgery so that my

Speaker 3: 17:50 body, my body physiologically cannot, uh, cannot process all of these nutrients and calories just physically can’t processes. Right. Okay. And you’re saying that there is a even maybe more appropriate approach for a patients where maybe none of these really kind of you fit into one of these categories. There’s the more appropriate, better approach. Yeah, and this is not to say this is the only one, there may be others, but when I look at what can I do in my practice to help my patients? Um, and this again is not for every one of them, but what I’m incorporating again is the HCG diet. And htg stands for the human chorionic Gonadotropin Diet. It’s been around since the 19 fifties. And this physician, Simeon’s I think was his name, he was a British born physician and he started doing this hc d, g diet. Basically the concept is it’s a very low calorie diet, like 500 calories a day, low calorie diet that’s really low.

Speaker 3: 18:53 There’s, I mean, you’re talking a couple of breasts of chicken a, you know, an apple or two and some Greens or something. It’s just, there’s not a lot there. And, uh, so really low calorie diet. Now the problem is, is that, you know, if you go on a really low calorie diet, then you start burning everything you can and you’re going to burn fat, but you’re also going to burn muscle. Now that we have a real problem, because muscle is part of your basal metabolic rate. And we’ve mentioned that earlier, the basal metabolic rate is determined by a number of things, but your lean muscle mass is definitely part of that. If you have 10 pounds of lean muscle mass versus 50 pounds of lean muscle mass, you can burn a whole lot more energy when you run, when you sleep, when you do everything.

Speaker 3: 19:40 So you want more lean muscle mass at least to a point. So I think that’s very important. Get, keep or increase or at least maintain or lose the least amount of lean muscle mass that you possibly can. You go on one of these severe calorie restriction diets like on survivor, that survivor ask, you know, a concentration camp type approach that ultra low calorie, a starvation type deal, you are going to burn muscle and it’s almost inevitable the this or the concentration camp survivors, they were, they were amazed they didn’t have any body fat, but they didn’t have any muscle either. They were completely wasting away. So that is obviously clearly not healthy. So when you go on these low calorie ultra low calorie diets, you are burning fat and you’re, but you’re also burning muscle and that is where there’s a real problem. So you get on these Jojo diets where you’ll, you’ll diet and you’ll lose a lot of weight.

Speaker 3: 20:40 A lot of that’s a fat, maybe a lot of it’s muscle too. So then you go back to the way you were and you gain more fat. Now you still have those same amount of lean muscle mass that you had at the end of that diet where you don’t have as much. Then you know, you gain more fat, so your body, the proportion is just is off and you don’t have the same, uh, the same capacity to, to burn calories. And so that’s where you get this obesity and suddenly you can have a creasing creeping obesity where you just gained weight over years and you can have from Yoyo dieting where you lose muscle mass in the process, regardless, you need to make, keep and maintain your muscle mass, period. So the concept with the Hcg Diet as you go on this ultra low calorie diet, 500 calorie diet and um, or some other kind of a ultra restrictive diet.

Speaker 3: 21:28 But the HCG HCG, which is a hormone helps prevent hunger and this is not proven to do that, but it’s recorded by patients on the Hcg Diet that they just don’t get hungry. And I would argue that the. Wouldn’t just argue, it’s what I’ve seen that the vast majority of patients on the Hcg Diet just don’t have the same level of hunger that they would’ve had had. They just severely restricted their calories. So the hunger piece is a big part. The second part of that is when it’s done correctly, you preserve your lean muscle mass and you basically burn bad fat, the unhealthy excess body fat. You utilize that and burn it for energy so you’re almost getting this starvation kind of thing. But we’re tricking the body by giving it this hormone that you are preserving lean muscle mass. So I would argue it’s a much better way to go.

Speaker 3: 22:23 Much safer than just severe calorie restriction and it’s definitely safer than a very adequate surgery. And we get good results. And I’ve, I’ve seen good results in a number of patients. You know, it’s not a, no one’s obese because they have an HCD g deficiency. So, you know, in my, in my clinic, I’m always looking for what’s the underlying cause and while we’re trying to figure out that underlying cause many patients may need to be on an hcg diet to help them lose weight and sometimes they just need a jumpstart where they can lose 20, 30, 40 pounds, get them started and then we’re still working on the lifestyle stuff that I think is the ultimate solution. And, but maybe that gets them enough, everybody starts looking at them and said, hey, you know, you’re, you’re looking great, you know, what are you doing? Just giving them some motivation to do those other things while we’re working on their sleep while we’re working on their exercise, all of those other things. And then we pull them off the HCG diet and now they’ve got a plan that they can, they can work with, have already had some success. So what I want to do is I want to take a quick break here and when we come back I want to see, uh, how we actually administer this hormone and the different application of this diet and action. Okay. That sounds great. Are you tired and fatigued? Are you frustrated with doctors

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Speaker 3: 24:15 Okay. We are back with Dr Chad Edwards and we’re talking about the HCI Gi die. Dr Edwards again for all of us, all of the physicians out there listening what is hcg or human chorionic Gonadotropin. It’s actually the hormone of pregnancy coming from the placenta. All those kinds of things. What we measure to determine are you pregnant or not? Okay, but I also use it for men in trying to stimulate the testicles to produce testosterone and if they have testicular stricken shrinkage or atrophy, we can use it to help increase the volume of the testicles. So there’s some, there’s some other benefits to hcg boom, and we are using this, uh, specifically in this episode is the Hcg Diet as a, uh, a way for some patients to lose weight, but it has to be done correctly. Absolutely. And so why don’t you walk us through the application. How do patients get started on this and what does that really even entail?

Speaker 3: 25:16 Yeah, there’s actually a whole protocol that was actually written by Dr. simeons again published this paper in 1954. He was very strict, had to be done a certain way. 500 calories a. So for example, you got a so nuance that you could eat white meat, chicken, you can’t eat dark meat chicken, the scan has to be removed, can’t cook it in oils, it’s, you know, it’s got to be cooked a certain way. You can only eat certain vegetables. And so there’s a lot of nuances to it. And probably beyond the scope of this podcast, but now there’s a very specific diet that goes along with that. Now there’s a physician whom I respect, Dr Emma. She’s been on the Dr Oz show. She has done a lot of studies about the HCG Diet and she has found that it is very effective. It does work and she’s had a lot of great success with it.

Speaker 3: 26:05 So, um, she, she, I don’t know the difference between her protocol and Dr Simeons, but she does use some differences. It doesn’t have to be the 500 calorie diet with her. Um, so there can be some differences with differences with that. Again, we’re trying to mobilize fat and I would argue that when I was an exercise phase major, and I look at the exercise physiology and the underlying physiology and you know, you look at insulin and things so you can’t be on, you cannot have sugars and things, you know, there’s a lot of calories and sugar, so there’s more in fat, but that we can get into the nuances that some other time. But you got to avoid all of those things. Eat very clean, there can’t be a cream in your coffee and the needs to be black coffee, you only get a small amount of certain things, so the Diet’s a fairly strict and you take daily injections of Hcg.

Speaker 3: 26:57 Now when you start the protocol, you basically pick out for a couple of days and you’re doing that. There’s a physiologic reason for that, but you, you increase your intake for a couple of days, make sure those abnormal fatty deposits are filled with this fat so you’re trying to cram it in as much as you can for two days. It sounds like a great diet so far. Yeah, exactly. But let me start. You start the injections on, on day one, and then you pick out for a couple of days. On Day three, you began this ultra strict diet. And you, you do that for a, depending on how much weight you’re wanting to lose. Twenty one days, 23, somewhere in there. And then, uh, you know, if you need to prolong it, you can, but you do it in phases. If you needed to lose 100 pounds, you don’t lose 100 pounds and you just maintain on the same course, you do one round and then you’ll stop, take a break and there’s a prescribed way that you take that break and then you go back onto round two.

Speaker 3: 27:52 Um, there are some patients that will get a, they call it immune to the HCG and I think we probably just flood the receptors and you know, too high level for too long and you’re the body which responding. So you need a break or we often call them holidays from the therapy and then you go back on the therapy as needed until you get to your goal. And again, I’ve seen many, many people have profound benefit from that. Now the, there’s been a lot of controversy about the HCG Diet and it works. It doesn’t work. Those kinds of things. And I’ll tell you when you, when you can get hcg and multiple forms, you’re going to get multiple results. The what has been studied and what I recommend are the HCG injections. You want to make sure that you get a high quality hcg injection and you and you inject every day.

Speaker 3: 28:41 This can be done at home. Um, you inject them every day and you maintain that as prescribed and you don’t cheat. This may be a list, maybe a third grader question from, from Marshall Morris Order, but, um, but where are these injections going in the subcutaneous tissues in the, in the fatty tissues under Dr Simeon said they needed to be intramuscular. Uh, so I, I typically give them a subcutaneously. Some others out there maybe disagree with me, but, uh, yeah, just under the skin fatty tissue or intra muscular tissue. Okay. Pretty cool. Uh, so you get these injections every day. That’s what’s preserving the muscle. Uh, the HCG is not how you lose weight. The Diet is how you lose weight. The HCG is how you protect your lean muscle mass and also lower the hunger. So that’s the benefit and the effect. And again, Dr Emma has, has shown that to be true in her studies.

Speaker 3: 29:41 So I, I think this diet is a, is a great adjunct and can provide a great resource for many patients. It’s not a panacea, it’s not for everyone. I think it’s, I think it’s a really good solution for a lot of people and I’m recommending it for that patient that asks me about bariatric surgery because I can stop this at any point. I can adjust this at any point. Uh, you know, she can lose and, and going through back to 1954, the data is fairly consistent on you lose just under a pound to a pound a day fairly consistently. So pretty interesting. You know. So if you needed to lose 40 pounds, you’re talking about, you know, 40, 50, 60 days somewhere in there. So if you started this now or at the first part of Wagner and the end of September, first of October, and you started it now, you could be done.

Speaker 3: 30:33 And that goal by thanksgiving, that means you could have a thanksgiving meal and eat what you wanted. If you had bariatric surgery today, you could not have a Thanksgiving meal now on with the Hcg that you can’t have a Thanksgiving meal every day. Otherwise you’re right back where you started. You know, we’ve got to make changes and that’s why I, that’s why we have to look at those underlying issues as well. Look at the physiology, look at inflammation, look at Leptin levels, look at thyroid hormones, all of those things optimize the health of that patient as much as possible while we’re doing this at the same time so that when they come off of this and there’s a way to come off of it, when they come off of this, they are set up for a new lifestyle that they can maintain their optimal health, which means inappropriate body weight over time.

Speaker 3: 31:21 So we’re building a sustainable lifestyle and an optimal lifestyle rather than making a huge change that may not stick. Exactly. And I can say that my, what I’ve seen for patients with very atrik surgery and it, it works, patients lose weight. Uh, I would argue that it’s almost more like the, you know, the concentration camp survivors not, not quite, but it’s more of that starvation thing because you’re not absorbing your foods, you have nutrient deficiencies. There’s all kinds of things and once you make that a, once you make that leap, you can’t go back. There’s, there are certain things that patients, when they have had gastric bypass and that ruined my gastric bypass and they come in and they have problem. There are certain things that are off the table. I like having options. There are other ways in my opinion, to do this without doing that, without altering the physiology, without inducing those starvation or the malabsorptive syndromes. And so would you say that while it might not be for every patient, the HCG diet, it might be worth at least looking into for anybody that’s considered that type of a gastric bypass surgery? Oh, absolutely. When done correctly, it can be done very safe, have good results. And again, as long as you are addressing the issues which we

Speaker 1: 32:40 do in our clinic, as long as you are addressing those underlying issues, we can have longterm success. And what I neglected to that last in my last comment was what I have seen his 10 year success rate for gastric bypass is deplorable. I’ve seen it multiple, multiple times. I’ve had family members that have had gastric bypass and they gained much of their weight back over years because they still continue to eat the way they did before. They still have those underlying problems and they haven’t been addressed. And so this comes back to the functional medicine mantra, if you will, is address the underlying causes of the weight gain, the correct the lifestyle that’s causing this, but the HCG is a way to lose the weight and build a sustainable lifestyle and do it in a very constructive way where it’s not an extreme and a non habit forming diet.

Speaker 1: 33:37 Yup, exactly. Okay. Well Dr Edwards, this is kind of like open my eyes into like the different ways of weight, weight loss. I know that there’s a lot of things that maybe go into it, uh, that being as a, as a guy that’s pretty in shape, I don’t have to deal with those types of, um, maybe decisions on a daily basis. Okay. But for a lot of people they do, do I eat this? Do I not eat that? And while my own personal nutrition can improve, um, I know that that’s, uh, something where if we are all focused on optimal health and not just good enough, I think that’s an area where we can all improve. Absolutely no question. Okay. Well thank you so much for joining us today talking about how to lose weight in a sustainable way, in a sustainable way. Right. Dr Edwards, until next time. Thanks man. It’s good to talk to you.

Speaker 2: 34:35 Thanks for listening to this week’s podcast with Dr Chad Edwards. Tune in next week where we’ll be going against the grain.