If someone who’s on a low calorie diet tells you that they’re also exercising, you might find this a little alarming. But since the HCG diet is a little different from other low calorie diets, is the same true of the HCG diet and exercise?
Is Exercise Safe?
Actually, yes. If you’re on the HCG diet, for the most part you’ll want to forego exercise for the duration of the plan. Moderate exercise is okay, if you can’t do without it. A 20-minute walk and gentle stretching are permissible. You don’t want to do more than this, though, because HCG helps your body to establish a delicate balance between calorie consumption and what is burned. Putting a strain on that balance could upset it completely.
Without too much physical activity, while you’re taking HCG your body can live on the limited calories without going into starvation mode. This is because it’s burning its excess fat for energy. If you go overboard on the exercise, though, your body might start to freak out, and starvation mode (also known as self-preservation mode) will set in. At this point, rather than burning excess fat, you might start to burn muscle, which is the opposite, usually, of what exercise means to accomplish.
Exercise After HCG
If you thrive on exercise, though, don’t worry: this limitation is temporary. As soon as you’re done with the diet, you can go back to the gym. It’s likely that you’ll have a lot more energy than before, too. If you weren’t an exerciser previously, you might even want to start due to that increase in energy. Whatever muscle you had before will be more toned, and you just might want to show it off.
So don’t think of the HCG diet as anti-exercise. The HCG diet is about health and well-being, about getting you into a condition of maximum wellness so that you and your body can realize your full potential. Once you’ve completed the HCG diet, the extent to which you’ll want to practice healthful habits such as exercise will be so increased that you might not even recognize yourself.
