The HCG Diet Scam – Don’t Be Fooled
I felt compelled to write this after my girlfriend sent me some information at work the other day. After spending some time digging around I wasn’t able to find a comprehensive article about this diet scam so I thought I should step up and write one.
You may not have heard of this, I certainly hadn’t until the other day, it’s called the HCG diet. Here is the general gist of the diet. You buy two different bottle of diet supplements. One are drops called “iForce Maxx” and the other are pills called “Purify ColonCleanse.” Taken together they supposedly increases your energy levels, are rich in antioxidants and remove “bad toxins” and “sludge from your colon.”
The article I read claimed to be written by Channel 4 reporter Julia Miller. Written in the first person it starts off sounding almost genuine, with skepticism in all the right places. But as the article went on the claims got bigger and bigger.
The webpage itself also started to ring alarm bells as I was reading it. At the top of the page it appears that it has been endorsed by the Guardian, Channel 4 and This Morning but when you click on the logos it takes to you the diet pill company, not the broadcaster. It was full of bold writing, not something you expect from a professional website, and the offer of a free trial just so happened to be ending the very same day I was reading it!
Now I have to admit, there was a part of me that thought, “What if it does work and the website has been written by someone who doesn’t really know what they are doing? After all, they have over 28 thousand likes on Facebook.” So I jumped on to Google to see what I could find.
The first thing I did was Google the author Julia Miller. The very first result was a website telling of another diet scam that this name has been attached to! Moving on, I had a look at another few sites. It turned out that the biggest problem people had with this particular company selling HCG was that they were taking money from accounts without permission and were not stopping even after they had been asked. Every post I read was from someone saying the only way they could stop the payments was by cancelling the card!
Ok, I thought to myself, maybe it’s just this one company so I headed over to Wikipedia to see what that had to say about the diet itself. Perhaps not surprisingly Wikipedia was as equally damning. At the end of the opening paragraph it says, “As of December 6, 2011, the FDA has prohibited the sale of “homeopathic” and OTC HCG diet products and declared them fraudulent and illegal.”
It goes on to repeat warnings from the Journal of American Medical Association and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that “HCG is neither safe nor effective as a weight-loss aid,” and that “there is no scientific evidence that HCG is effective in the treatment of obesity; it does not bring about weight-loss or fat-redistribution, nor does it reduce hunger or induce a feeling of well-being.”
In fact, any weight loss while on this diet is solely down to the instructions that you are only able to eat less than 500 calories a day.
I hope this has been helpful and answered any questions that people have regarding this diet. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true….it probably is.