B12 Injections and the HCG Diet: A Smart Combination for Better Results
In your quest to lose weight and develop a healthier body, you may feel drawn to pursue the HCG diet. This diet, which makes use of natural hormones and severe calorie restriction to boost metabolism, can pose some challenges by limiting your access to the critical vitamin known as B12. That’s why you should also know about your B12 supplementation options and how this practice can actually help your diet achieve greater results.
Benefits and Challenges of the HCG Diet
The HCG diet relies on a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin. This hormone aids in fat metabolism for both males and females. Most notably, levels of naturally-occurring HCG rise during pregnancy to make more energy available for the developing fetus. However, the same fat-to-energy conversion can prove just as useful for helping people of both sexes lose weight more quickly and easily. HCG injections therefore figure prominently in the HCG diet.
The downside of the HCG diet involves the calorie restriction that it also imposes. Followers of the HCG diet must limit themselves to 500 calories per day. This tiny allowance greatly speeds the weight loss process, but it also makes proper nutrition extremely difficult. As a result, you may experience facial swelling, breathing problems, headaches, and even vomiting from deficient intake of Vitamin B12. The fact that the body tends to run through its B12 stores quickly just complicates this problem.
How B12 Supplementation Helps You Stay Well and Lose Weight
Getting extra B12 is a smart way to keep your body on an even keel as you follow the HCG diet. You can get B12 from meats, dairy products, fish and poultry; you also have the option of taking B12 supplements, either orally or in injectable form. Supplementation can not only help you avoid the symptoms associated with deficiency; it can also help your body produce red blood cells.
B12 offers another key advantage for anyone trying to lose weight on the HCG diet: providing the body with extra energy. This means that your body is free to burn even more of its fat reserves, helping you drop even more pounds more easily.
Making This Strategy Work for You
As noted, getting your full B12 intake through food is all but impossible when you’re restricting yourself to 500 calories a day. Ingestible supplements can help, but you may only absorb about one-third of the nutrient when it’s consumed in this manner. B12 injections sidestep this limitation, allowing for dosages of just .5cc instead of the 1.5 cc you’d have to ingest orally. (These dosage levels represent minimums, you can take as much B12 as your body will tolerate, since you can’t really overdose on this water-soluble vitamin.) B12 injections need only reach into the muscle tissue, making them relatively easy for anyone to self-administer.
Want to learn more combining B12 and the HCG diet? Contact us today!
