What happens if I take Novarel and eat normally?
People can become enamored of Novarel CG’s almost magical ability to eliminate hunger while eating extremely low calorie. It’s not a far jump in logic to presume that it could work similarly while ignoring the 500 calorie limit (or whatever calorie limit your physician’s protocol has you on) and the sparse selection of allowed foods. Why not give it a try, one might think? I can eat what I like, my hunger will be controlled so I’ll eat less and I’ll lose, right? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.
Such an experiment will likely lead to disaster. The reason the diet is so limited and so low fat is because only certain foods enhance the action of the Novarel , which is mobilizing your metabolism to burn its fat stores. Adding extra dietary fat short circuits this process. Additionally, and we really don’t know why this is, but only a few foods work with the Novarel to produce the amazing quick loss result. Other foods that would seem logical substitutes (like pears or turkey for instance) not only don’t help the process, but hinder it and can cause gains.
So the most likely scenario of using Novarel without the accompanying menu plan is that you’ll likely gain weight. It’s best to just suck it up, do the Phase 2 very low calorie 500 calorie diet and reap the almost guaranteed benefits.
Certain clinics have experimented with expanding the protocol food lists, allowing the mixing of vegetables. These plans have shown some success, at least in the weight loss portion of the diet. They do it by keeping the carb numbers to about 30gram per day, and adding an extra protein portion. They may allow 100-300 extra calories. While this is not “normal” eating as fat is still restricted (some plans allow a T of MCT oil per day), it is a more relaxed approach to the protocol.
The best way to see if using Novarel this way would work for you would be to do a strict protocol round, and then try the expanded version so that you can compare your results. The unknown in this has to do with stabilization. There is no evidence that shows that the weight loss can be maintained by this format. We know that following the original diet and following 3 week stabilization plan will produce a metabolism reset that establishes a new lower weight setpoint. There will always be ways to lose an amount of weight, but the Novarel protocol is the only one that gives you the metabolic changes that make it easily possible to maintain those losses.
