Dr. Richard Cheng, Cheng Integrative Health Center

Maximize your CALout

There are 3 ways that our body burns calories.

1. Metabolism: ~85% of the calories that we burn everyday are through our metabolism.
2. Physical activity (not including exercise): this contribute to ~10% to our daily calorie expenditure.
3. Exercise: those who exercise regularly (as recommended) probably burns ~5% extra calories.

CALin – CALout ~ Body Weight

Not burning enough calories is a major problem in America’s obesity epidemic.  We all know that we need to eat less and exercise more in order to lose weight.  There are a lot of people out there exercising on the streets or in the gyms.  About look around you, how many of them have lost much weight?  Do you ever wonder why?  In my clinic, I hear often from my patients complaining that no matter how much they exercise, they just can’t seem to lose the weight.

CALout:  Metabolism (~85%) + (Non-exercise) Physical Activity (~10%) + Exercise (~5%)

As shown above, roughly ~85% of the calories we burn everyday are through metabolism. If we exercise as we are recommended to, we may burn ~5% more calories.  But most people, including physicians, don’t realize this.  Research and clinical experience both at our clinics and others suggest that by increasing metabolism, one can achieve a lot more weight loss.  We use a combination of nutritional and hormonal balance, including natural thyroids to help boost your metabolism without causing side effects.

hCG appears to have 2 major advantages over other diets:

• More weight loss around the waist line
• Reduced difficulties or side effects

Although the mechanism is unknown, these above effects may have to do with hCG’s biological nature.  hCG is naturally only found in pregnant women.  I believe one of the mechanisms that hCG protects pregnancy is to protect energy delivery to the fetus.  Energy is the most important factor in fetal development.  But pregnant women do not always have adequate food supply.  Throughout millions years of human history, human beings have been constantly struggling to feed themselves.  Even today, when we are able to put men on the moon and when we can control a fighter jet from thousands of miles away with a remote control to fight a war, many people still starve on a regular basis.  So what happens when a pregnant woman is starving?  Energy supply to a fetus is far more important that that to an adult.  Inadequate energy supply to a fetus may result in fetal developmental problems.  Yet, clinical experience, lab research and anecdotes seem to suggest that fetus somehow is protected from lack of nutrition, to certain degree.  In other words, more of the energy in the food that a malnourished pregnant woman eats goes to support the fetus than to support the mother.  Often times we hear pregnant women saying “my baby is sucking my energy”.  Dr. Simeons research and our own clinical observation suggest that patients on hCG diet tend not to have hypoglycemia and their blood glucose levels tend to be more stable.  In contrast, one of the major problems dieters encounter is the hypoglycemic symptoms (headaches, fatigue, mood swing etc, even metabolism slowdown).

hCG appears to be able to release energy from the mother’s stored energy to the blood circulation to protect the fetus from starvation.  The result is a more stable blood energy level even when the pregnant mother is starving.  This feature designed by mother nature (or God) is meant to protect the fetus, without causing unnecessary harm to the mother.  So the energy released from the mother starts from the least important body part first (belly fat), followed by normal subcutaneous fat, muscle, guts etc.  This explains why dieters on hCG loses belly fat mostly.

Minimize your CALin

CALin: calorie intake (the calories that you eat every day).

To minimize CALin means to cut down the calories in your food as much as possible while maintaining your nutritional balance.

First of all, what is nutritional balance?  Nutritional balance means sufficient nutrients to maintain our normal and healthy life.  This balance includes water, minerals, vitamins, dietary fibers, carbohydrates, fats,  and proteins.  Out of all the nutrients listed above, only the last three (carb, fat and protein) contain calories.  Our body stores extra fat and carb (mostly in the muscles and the liver in the form of glycogen) which is what we need to get rid of.  Our body doesn’t store extra proteins.

So our dietary goals are clear:

1. To maintain water, minerals, vitamins and dietary fibers.
2. To reduce carb and fat to a minimum (in theory, we don’t need any carb or fat in our diet while trying to lose weight).
3. To eat enough protein to prevent muscle weakening or loss.  Research suggests 5o gm of protein daily is enough for most of us to maintain this balance.