Trusted Reviews, News,and Diet Advice.
Trusted Reviews, News,
Diet Drops are the latest phenomenon in weight loss and they are attracting a lot of attention from the media, consumers and the diet industry alike. There are numerous companies marketing all kinds of “secret” Diet Drops that you use to support a Very Low Calorie Diet plan.
These plans all come with strange dietary rules but essentially feature eating only 500 calories per day, accompanied by a few droplet servings of diet drops. Lets make it clear not all diet drops require you to follow the strict regimes of a very low calorie diet, but most do.
Unsurprisingly eating only 500 calories a day does result in weight loss.
What is surprising is that all the companies behind these Diet Drops claim that weight loss results are down to the effects of the drops and not the low calorie diet. What is even more remarkable, thousands of customers seem to believe them.
It begs the question that if you are going to exist on 500 calories per day long term, then why on earth you should need Diet Drops at all?
Starvation makes you lose weight. If you don’t eat, you lose weight. It isn’t magic. The question is how long do you keep the weight off and is this approach to dieting healthy?
Pretty grim to be honest. The Diet Drop marketers dress their various diets up with some rules to “help” you. Secret Diet Drops for example offers you tea for breakfast (remember not to have more than 1 tablespoon of milk over a 24 hour period) but you can drink as much black coffee as you like.
Lunch follows. It is an egg or one full tub of cottage cheese. Alternatively 10 clams or 140g white meat or fish.
You take this with one serving of vegetables chosen from a list including bell peppers, tomatoes spinach and sprouts. Only one serving mind, – you are not allowed to mix vegetables on this particular plan– why, is never explained. (Some Diet Drop plans do allow you to eat more than one type of vegetable at any given time.)
Dinner is the same and snacks (two a day are allowed) can be fruit such as an apple or an orange, five strawberries or similar.
With the Secret Diet Drops Plan, you start this VLCD on day 3 and stay on it for 46 days. That’s right 46 days!
Most, if not all of the Diet Drops plans follow the same format with some differences between the plans, duration and small variations to rules but essentially, they are all the same.
In a bizarre twist, most Diet Drop plans require you to “load” your system in day one and day two of the diet where you are encouraged to binge eat anything and everything you want including alcohol, cakes and pastries and takeaways.
There really is no sense to it.
According to the manufacturers behind the various Diet Drops, it is not just about losing weight by fasting. Most of the Diet Drops on the market come with some fake science around the role of the metabolism and a timetable and eating plan to help you along the way.
There are lots of these on the market and the Diet Pill Watchdog has already covered some of these products.
Here is a list of some of the most common Diet Drops on the market in the USA and the UK. This is really only scratching the surface of a very extensive list.
The idea of Diet Drops stems from British endocrinologist (hormone specialist) Albert T Simeons. He began investigating a link between Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) a hormone derived from the urine of pregnant women, during his research work in the 1950s in India.
He believed that if you combined a very low calorie diet (VLCD) with this hormone it would bring about drastic weight loss and reduce fatty tissue rather than muscle. He first found this while working with pregnant women in India and used his findings to successfully treat men suffering from Frolich’s disorder, a condition that results in extreme fatness because of problems with the piturity gland.
Seeing HCG as the answer to obesity, he published a book in 1954 called “Pounds and Inches” where he advocated the use of the hormone in combination with an ultra low calorie diet. People who followed this took Diet Drops containing HCG to support this weight loss.
Albert T Simeons was later discredited by the medical profession who rubbished his findings. Using more technologically advanced equipment than was available in the 1950s, scientific research proved once and for all that there was no link with HCG and weight loss. More disturbingly, physicians warned against anyone following such a low calorie diet because of the serious risks to health.
This idea of HCG and Diet Drops for weight loss would have passed into obscurity if it hadn’t been for well-known TV presenter and infomercial “king” Kevin Trudeau.
He resurrected the whole concept of HCG for weight loss in a blatant attempt to market his own version of the diet and associated HCG products.
Kevin Trudeau is a charismatic and likeable TV personality with no medical training. He wrote “The Weight Loss Cure ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About” in 2007. It was based on the idea of Simeon’s book “Pounds and Inches” and all about changing the activity in the hypothalamus and the pituitary glands to control hunger and regulation of fat cells. This was helped along with the low dose HCG hormone and herbal diet drops which Trudeau marketed himself.
HCG diet drops are still marketed and the book is still a best seller despite Trudeau being charged with fraud for making false claims in the book.
Kevin Trudeau is currently in prison for hiding assets to avoid paying a $37 million fine for fraudulently advertising his diet book.
The Diet Drop Plans all come with a variety of rules and regulations which are essentially based on Trudeau’s book although without any real connection with the likeable infomercial king.
Many of the plans include a “loading phase” where you are encouraged to eat as much as possible for a couple of days. This is followed by the weight loss phase where you are restricted to just 500 calories over a lengthy period of time. Following this, you are encouraged to keep to a diet containing between 1500 and 1800 calories during what is known as the maintenance phase.
Throughout the diet, the Diet Drops are there to offer you support – in general, you take around 15 drops three times a day. We cannot see how taking these drops will compensate for such a low calorie diet.
It is important to note that not all diet plans follow this exact “protocol” as Trudeau called it. However, it seems certain that without his book and his notorious infomercial advertising the whole idea of Diet Drops may never have seen the light of day.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Trudeau
No most diet drops do not really contain HCG and human urine even if some of them are advertised as containing “genuine” HGC.
Instead this hormone is synthesised chemically to reproduce the effects. Remember – the link between HGC and weight loss has never been proved so it doesn’t really matter anyway.
Although many Diet Drops on the market use the plan that Trudeau devised for weight loss, real HCG is not an ingredient of diet drops, even if this is the vital point of this method of losing weight.
Some Diet Drop manufacturers base their magic ingredient idea on other ingredients such as Raspberry Ketone for example.
Along with the “magic ingredient”, expect the Diet Drops to contain a blend of amino acids and compounds such as
All Diet Drops contain the same sort of ingredients you would expect to find in any weight loss and body building supplements.
The FDA has warned that HCG is illegal and fraudulent when sold for weight loss purposes.
Losing weight like this is not safe and it is nothing to do with the contents of the Diet Drops. The drops could contain nothing but water and this diet would still work and not be safe.
According to Pieter Cohen, assistant professor of the Harvard Medical School speaking in an interview with US Health News;
It’s reckless, irresponsible, and completely irrational. Can you lose weight on it? Of course, but that’s mainly because you’re hardly consuming any calories. And any benefit is not going to last.
Source: US Health News article
The NHS warn against VLC diets and bearing in mind that these are usually estimated at being around 800 calories a day, these Diet Drop diets fall short even of that low figure.
Cutting calories significantly can lead to medical problems and cause gallstones, heart problems, tiredness and anaemia. When taking a VLCD is important to do so under medical supervision and these diets are only suitable in some cases of extreme obesity.
The 5:2 diet which is respectable by comparison has received criticism because it requires you to fast on 500 calories twice a week. This is too hard for many people so just imagine how a long term eating programme of 500 calories a day will make you feel!
Source: http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/loseweight/Pages/very-low-calorie-diets.aspx
Pick up some Diet Drops from the internet and follow one of these plans yourself and you will lose weight short term.
You cannot really fail to lose weight if you are starving yourself and not receiving adequate food to sustain you.
Expect your Diet Drops diet to impact on your life and make even normal day-to-day functioning difficult. Concentration and energy levels are all affected by hunger so expect impaired work performance and even your ability to drive to suffer.
Long term, taking Diet Drops in combination with a VLCD will not really help you lose weight. This is a fad or crash diet like any other and the result is always to pile the weight back on once the diet is over.
The only way you can be sure to lose weight and keep it off is to make permanent lifestyle changes that you can live with.
Diet Drops with a very low calories diet do not work. Save your money and do not believe this so called miracle cure for weight loss.
There is nothing miraculous about it. If you starve yourself, you cannot fail to lose weight short term and that is the real secret of all these Diet Drops on the market.
Disclaimer: Our reviews and investigations are based on extensive research from the information publicly available to us and consumers at the time of first publishing the post. Information is based on our personal opinion and whilst we endeavour to ensure information is up-to-date, manufacturers do from time to time change their products and future research may disagree with our findings. If you feel any of the information is inaccurate, please contact us and we will review the information provided.
I tried Secret Diet Drops for 1 week & experienced dizziness, tiredness, shaking and felt awful.One of my friends thought I was diabetic and having a seizure Another friend has used them for quite a while, and although she lost a lot of weight, she appears to be putting it back on very quickly. Definitely not for me.
Introducing hCG into the body when consuming a VLCD triggers the hypothalmus into releasing fat stores to be used as energy instead of going first to lean muscle, which is what would happen without hCG. There’s more to the protocol, but if you can’t get past that first sentence, there’s no point in going further. Thanks!
I have purchased the secret diet drops,and the drop away drops,felt absolutely lifeless whilst on them,I lasted a week and half,I’m sad to see on Fb so many people singing the drops praises after loosing lots of weight,why would intelligent people believe its all down to the drops,its the lack of food as you say its a starvation diet.wish people would wise up and save their hard earned cash
Anyone who doesn’t know that a 500 calorie diet regardless of the magical pills or drops will help you lose weight needs professional help or at the very least a math course! If calories in is less than the calories needed to survive, you surely wont! Not rocket science just a common math formula!