How to make the most of your HCG journey

There are several key tips to making the most of the HCG plan, which I have learned in the process of keeping my food journal. The first is keep a food journal! ;) If you need a template, let me know. Really, a good old-fashioned Word or Notepad document will do. Just be sure to include the date, weight, details of foods you ate and how they were prepared, as well as exercise/activity notes. This will be helpful when trying to determine what caused a stall/plateau or accelerated loss.

Secondly, I've found several factors (some quite surprising) that cause a stall in my progress: sunburn, aerobic exercise, lotions with oils in them, and too much salt. This is my experience, but yours might be different. If you have stalled for a day with no weight loss at all, look back on the day's activities (which you have noted in your journal) to see if any of my progress stalls apply to you. Take note of your actions to find the clues.

Another crucial part is drinking enough water to flush out the fat! Be sure to halve your weight, then count that as ounces of water you need. For example: If you weigh 200 pounds, you'll need 100 ounces of water a day. That's 12 and a half  eight-ounce cups or 5 twenty-ounce bottles of water like those commonly found at Sam's Club or WalMart. I use glass bottles and fill my own in order to avoid that nasty plastic leaching issue. ;) Distilled water seems to be best. Maybe you haven't thought about it, but a cup of water is literally the size of a normal coffee cup--simple to gulp down. And if you can gulp one an hour throughout your waking hours, those 100 ounces a day are do-able. I've found that many people really don't like drinking water, so that may be helpful; just gulp and go.

One last tip for today: LOAD UP appropriately on the two load days prior to dosing. I'm a healthy eater, used to all organics and no white sugar, flour, etc., but the advice I got was to pig out on those days, so I took it. I ate pizza, creme horns, cheeseburgers and fries on those two days and gained two pounds! The good news is that I have never been hungry on the HCG protocol and I lost those two pounds PLUS on my first day of dosing. Can't beat that! ;)

More tips next week!