So after my posts yesterday a few people were quite concerned about the caloric intake of only 500 calories per day. I wanted to go into this a little further.
The premise behind the HCG is that it is releasing that stored fat to be used as energy. So for every pound of fat that is ‘released’ you have roughly 3500 calories of energy being released into your system. Therefore your body does not enter the ‘starvation’ mode causing you to gain everything back plus some at the end.
The 500 calories sounds like Such a small amount of food – but all in all, it is not. Mostly it’s a change of ingredients:
For example – yesterday for lunch:
I had crunchy sweet apple chicken salad. This consisted of 1 1/2 cups of celery, 1 whole apple, and 1 chicken breast (Weighing 3 1/2 oz) along with lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg, and any other seasonings I’d like to throw in there. 
It’s a little hard to tell – but that’s my medium mixing bowl.. It was so much food I couldn’t even eat it all at one sitting. I was also allowed up to 1 1/2 cups more of celery, which I used later as a snack when my mouth was bored.
And for Dinner – we had Chicken Asparagus Bake:
This tasted really good – We each got a chicken breast, and a ton of asparagus – along with our home made chicken broth and seasonings. It was more than enough for dinner – but just minus all the oils and fats that we would normally put in a meal like this.
To finish off we had a strawberry ‘smoothie’ with ice, strawberrys, vanilla sweet leaf stevia, and a TBSP of Milk all blended together – that was yummy too!
So overall – its essentially just making my own foods and not using oils and butters – or things with sugar in them.
I’m not focusing on calories either. I’m just simply making recipes from the book and following the guidelines included.
It has been a bit tough – yesterday I had a real sweet tooth and was craving sugar – but today has been so much better so far! The evening is the hardest part where normally we munch on snacks and goodies all night.
Good luck! I can never go through with diets and they never worked for me.
One thing that did work was making sure I stayed active, hydrated and eating only fist sized amounts of food every 2 hours – any food I wanted but of course I don’t eat just crap. I’m 134lbs now (5’5″ tall), haven’t weighed this in God only knows how long.