With so many people trying to lose extra pounds in the world today there is no shortage of weight loss programs, fad diets, and outright scams. One truly promising diet type that was started nearly sixty years ago and continues in full force today is the HCG diet.

The diet itself is an intense program, but it is also simple and one of the few guaranteed forms to lose weight. Human Choriogonadotropin (HCG) is a hormone generated by pregnant women to help make certain that the growing fetus gains the incredible amount of calories required to continue to grow swiftly and with strength and health.

This diet requires a series of injections, once a day for roughly a month, combined with a very low calorie diet. The HCG breaks up long standing fat deposits in the body and makes it possibly to rapidly lose weight, generally one or two pounds a day. Even at the low end of the spectrum that's a safe weight loss of around thirty pounds in one month.

The body grows less sensitive to the hormone after around forty days of treatment, and this is the maximum stopping point for a single treatment cycle. Six months later the treatment can begin again with similar results.

All of this is a proven medical fact. However, there are many individuals that have been working feverishly to scam the weight loss interested populace with fad's that borrow the HCG name to sell products that are poor quality, inefficient, or outright scams.

Typically these HCG product scams will run the gamut from "All you want to eat" style diets that break the calorie limit rule, or they claim to be products that work just as well as HCG without having to starve yourself. The thing about the HCG diet is that there is no starvation involved. The released fat from those ancient deposits within the body is converted into useable energy for daily activities. The body is not starving during this process. It is in fact gaining a great deal of calories to live off of by using what is already there more efficiently.

Any company with a product that claims to be better than HCG because the user of the product won't have to starve themselves either does not know what they are talking about, are playing on your emotions and fears, or have a blatantly fraudulent product that might do anything from be completely useless to actually damaging your body.

A true HCG diet will focus primarily on eating necessary protein to almost the exclusion of everything else. Sugar, starch, and fatty foods are all highly restricted. Alcohol, for instance, is a definite blacklist item during this time period. Any HCG diet that will work will stay to a heavily restricted dietary calorie intake because the body rapidly gains resistance to the hormone. A caloric intake higher than this will only retard the weight loss process and in effect waste the time and money of everyone involved in attempting to help that person lose weight.

An individual on a true HCG diet can already lose anywhere from a hundred to three hundred pounds in half a year. Any product that claims to have a better solution than that is most likely a complete scam that wants to defraud the public and blacken the good name of this procedure.