HCG Weight Loss Cure Guide by Linda Prinster Review
Have you wished for an HCG guide that expands, explains, and organizes the HCG protocol? Linda Prinster’s book, HCG Weight Loss Cure Guide, has been very helpful to me during my HCG journey. After learning about it in this review, you may decide it can be helpful to you as well. I was referred to this book by my functional medicine doctor. I eventually found and joined the HDI forums because they are recommended by Prinster in this book.
The book is set up with information on everything you need to know to correctly navigate through the sometimes confusing protocol instructions. It is set up in a logical way that makes it easy to find information. There are various summaries, sample menus, info on the different delivery methods, mixing and injecting and dosing instructions, and details on each phase. It also includes the entire reprinting of the original protocol. That and the extensive food list charts make it an invaluable resource.
Support ( and encouragement!) during Phase 2
Everytime I do a round, I like to re-read the original protocol section to keep it in my head. So much of it is non-intuitive and sometimes even counter-intuitive–but we know it works! So I’ve spent a lot of time in this section . We have a link on the HDI forums that takes you to the complete manuscript to read at anytime. Somehow, I seem to retain information better when I read it from a printed page rather than online, so I appreciate having both options.
Valuable guidance during Phase 3
I’ve probably gotten the most use out of the food lists section. Foods are sorted by category, but it also has columns for the low-calorie phase, phase 3 and phase 4 (which is notated in the chart as 2nd 3 weeks). There is then a last column titled “life” which removes the remaining cautions of the 2nd 3 weeks of P3. For each column, the food is marked YES, NO, or CAUTION. I like this delineation, because once you finish the 3 weeks of Phase 3 and start P4, you really aren’t well served by piling on the starches in great quantities immediately. The idea is to work up to your personal starch tolerance level. The warnings in the “2nd 3 weeks” column help you do that. The chart also includes normal serving sizes, calories, and nutritional breakdown. Pretty much everything you would need to know in maintenance planning.
The protocol instructions for Phase 3 are contained in only a few sentences of the manuscript. So of course, any kind of food list for P3 is going have some controversial inclusions. You will have to make some judgments about whether something on the list is really a good idea to use. However, overall, the reasoning for some of those are given logical explanations, often based on the nutritional macros with properties that might put it in a different group as opposed to just the category of food it may be in normally. I’ll give an example:
People have argued for years whether peanuts are allowed in Phase 3 or not, but this book does list them as a caution food in that category because the nutritional macros is more in alignment with nuts than legumes. That made sense to me. The nutritional makeup of a bean in very different than of a peanut. If you are wondering if you can eat cooked beets in P3, you can easily check the chart and it will show you that cooked beets are either a NO or a CAUTION food until you’ve completed the 6 weeks after phase 2 has ended.
Even being an HCG veteran in my later round, I still referred to this book often. It always helped me stay clear on how to cooperate with the science of the protocol. The latest edition can be purchased on Amazon, and used books are available for under $5.
