hCG is a pregnancy hormone. When a woman is pregnant, she usually has about 1000-2000 times more hCG in her body than the standard dose for weight loss (125 IU/day). What does hCG do in a pregnant woman? One of the most important functions of hCG is probably to guarantee steady energy supply to the fetus. How does that work?

In today’s America, we don’t think much about the importance of food. Food is everywhere and it is mostly cheap. If there is anything that we need to worry about food, it is that we have too much of it. But in the history of mankind, food shortage has been always a problem. Even today, billions of people face food shortage. So our body is well built to cope with food shortage. Our body is quite efficient in using energy. Our body is able to store as much food as possible. Whenever our body detects a slow in food intake (such as if you were eating less than 800 calories a day), the body will go into a slow metabolism mode to save energy. But for some reason, our creator did not build in a mechanism to deal with too much food intake. Ideally, when we become overweight or obese, a mechanism should kick in to slow down or stop our desire for food. But overweight or obese people not only will not slow down eating, they may even have bigger appetite than others.

Normal Fat

Normal fat is the subcutaneous (under the skin) fat (SC fat) that our uses to store fat (energy). SC fat cells are able to respond to energy regulatory hormones (such as insulin, adrenalin etc) because these cells have receptors that can bind to these hormone molecules. After eating a meal, the food is absorbed into the blood causing a rise in energy (fat and sugar etc). This rise in energy in turn causes changes in hormones. The hormones changes then push the extra energy that you just ate into the SC fat to be stored. Between meals, the lowering of your blood energy levels due to continuous energy consumption such as heart beating triggers your SC fat to release energy into the blood. This flow of energy back and forth between blood and SC fat is regulated by your hormones and reaches a balance under normal circumstances.

Many of citizens of developed nations, esp. Americans, consume a lot more energy than their body needs. They fill up their SC fat area at a very young age, teens or even below teens. Their SC fat area is full and there is no more space to store any more energy. But these people didn’t stop eating. The extra energy starts accumulating in their blood, causing a rise in their sugar and fat levels. The high level fat then starts diffusing out of blood vessel walls into other areas where the fat level is lower. This is a physical diffusion process (just like water will flow high level to low level). These fats accumulate in the visceral fat areas (lipophilic, or fats attract fats).

Abnormal Fat

Belly fat represents the abnormal fat. These are the fatty tissues found around the internal organs, hence the name visceral fat. These fatty tissues are meant to protect the organs (they form a capsule around your stomach, or liver or muscle). These fatty tissues are not designed to store energy. These fatty tissues don’t have (or very few) receptors to respond to the energy regulatory hormones. The usual diets such as Weight Watchers, South Beach diets or regular medical diets including an appetite suppressant, do not lose your belly fat. This is because these diets make you eat less which in turn triggers hormones to release energy from the SC fat, not the abnormal visceral fat.

Office hours are subject to change.  Please visit our website news release for more accurate information.

We are open from Monday to Friday and every other Saturday, see below:

Monday:            9.00 am – 5.00 pm
Tuesday:            9.00 am – 5.00 pm
Wednesday:      9.00 am – 5.00 pm
Thursday:       9.00 am – 3.30 pm
Friday:                9.00 am – 5.00 pm
Every other Saturday :  9:00 am – 12:00 pm

Clinic Hours: 11 am – 2 pm, Monday and Thursday. Every second Saturday from 10:00 – 12:00.  Appointments recommended. Walk-ins welcome.

Tel: (803)233.3420

Fax: (803)454.9339

Office Address: 6149 St. Andrews Rd., Suite C, Columbia, SC 29212.

From I-26W (from downtown Columbia towards Spartanburg): take Exit 104 (Piney Grove). Turn left onto Piney Grove –> Turn right onto St. Andrews Rd. Pass Bush River Rd. Our office is on your left side. Pass Wachovia and Autozone.  We are in the same building of Daily Massage. Park in the parking lot.  Our entrance is next to mailboxes.

Due to our very busy office schedules, we may not be able to answer your phone calls. However, we answer all web inquiries promptly. We welcome your inquiries, comments, suggestions or complaints to help us to be able to better serve you.

Please use our Help Desk to submit a support request. You may also email your support questions to us.

Email address:

info@DrWLC.com    Medical questions
sherry@DrWLC.com    Admin. questions
TechSupport@DrWLC.com    Web technical questions

Tel: (888)688-2451/ (803)233-3420
Fax: (888)688-1934
Txt: (803)386-8012

Mailing Address :
6149 St. Andrews Rd., Suite C, Columbia, SC 29212

Doctor’s Weight Loss Center, LLC (DrWLC) operates several medical clinics, specializing in medical weight loss, anti-aging and sexual health services. DrWLC’s weight loss services feature Dr. Cheng’s Diet, a holistic weight management system that integrates behavioral, dietary, medical therapies with web database supported wireless weight monitoring technology for weight loss and weight maintenance.  Thousands of paitents and many years of clinical experience proves this system to be easy, effective and safe.  Average weight loss is around 30-50 pounds in 2 months.  The wireless weight monitoring system prevents patients from doing yo-yo diet.  So far, we believe our system is the only one of its kind in the world.  DrWLC attracts patients from all corners of US (including NY, Boston, Seattle, LA, TX and Florida) as well as international patients (e.g., UK).

DrWLC treats overweight/obese patients, patients with hypertension, or diabetes, or high blood cholesterol/lipds. DrWLC also helps patients who may not be obese or overweight but still desire to lose some weight. DrWLC accepts all major health insurances. If you are overweight/obese or have high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol, your office visits are usually covered by your health insurance.

We belive the root cause of hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, and heart disease is overweight/obesity. The current medical treatment modalities do not effectively treat the cause of these diseases. We believe whie it is important to treat the symptoms of these disease (elevated blood pressure, sugar or cholesterol), it is more important to treat the cause. By helping you to lose the extra weight, we can successfully and effectively help you to treat or prevent these obesity-associated diseases. It is our goal to offer quality safe, effective, easy and affordableweight loss services to our patients.

With DrWLC’s easy-to-follow weight loss program, all you need to do to lose weight is a few simple steps:

• Eat three meals a day. Don’t skip breakfast. Breakfast jumpstarts your metabolism of the day.
• Eat small portions. While on our program, you won’t feel much hungry, which allows you to eat smaller portions. But please eat! Don’t skip meals. We recommend between 800-1200 calories each day. Few than 800 calories can slow down your metabolism.
• Drink plenty of water. You may become dehydrated, if you don’t drink enough water while taking the water pill (Maxzide).
• We recommend that you buy a calorie counting book from bookstores. Calorie counting is a useful educational exercise. But if you find it difficult and can’t do it, don’t worry. Just eat smaller portions.
• Try not to snack between meals. If you have to, snack on fruits or vegetables.
• Exercise is highly recommended, but calorie restriction is critical in weight loss! Exercise alone won’t help much in weight loss. Exercise increases appetite that may even cause weight gain. For instance, one can drink a beer in 5 minutes easily. But it takes ~20 minutes to burn off the calorie in that beer. How many times after drinking a beer you went out to run 20 minutes?
• If you experience less than one per day bowel movements, talk to our doctor. Regular bowel movements are very important in elimination of metabolic waste and weight loss.

At DrWLC, we help you to change your current unhealthy lifestyle to a new and healthier lifestyle, a process called Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC). Regular office visits and following medical advices are critical in achieving TLC goals. It is critically important NOT to miss an appointment, esp. during the first few months, while your new healthier lifestyle is being established. Otherwise, it is very likely that you will regain the weight you lost. This will hurt your motivation, your efforts as well as our reputation. If you want to take a break from the program, you may do so after 3-4 monthly visits after discussing with us.