Sometimes it takes the tiniest of decisions to spur us into action. Dr Donna Matthew’s decision to go on her weight loss journey started last November grew out of a quest for greater knowledge, and in many ways her desire to heal herself.
Oh sure, you might think a doctor is in the business of healing others. But for Donna, it started with the realization that something was wrong and with a determination to fix it.
“I was skinny before I opened my office in 2008 and then I started to put on the weight. Then I was about 163 pounds. But then one day I was getting out of my car and I looked down, and my feet were swollen. I’d never had swollen feet in my life because I was always skinny. I couldn’t believe it. When I got in the office and stepped on the scale I almost fainted. That was it for me; that was when I knew I had to do something.”
While Donna admitted that she regularly attended the gym it was what she did afterwards that was getting her into trouble.
“It didn’t matter that I would go and work out, but afterwards I would hit Kentucky one day, then get pizza the next,” she said. “I would go to Flindt for a piece of chocolate cake, go and work out and tell the trainer too. I like to eat and I didn’t hold back. I guess because I was working out I felt it didn’t matter what I ate. But the working out wasn’t the problem – it was the eating,” she said.
What she did was take the advice of a former client, who had told her about a weight loss programme called HCG.
“Back in 2008 I had an eyelash customer who was doing the programme in Miami. She came to me because she knows I like to think outside the box. She told me, ‘There’s this thing, HCG, it’s the latest craze in Miami; you need to go and do it’. She brought back the information for me but at the time I wasn’t into doing it.
But when Donna’s health came into question, she knew she had to take action.
“From then I went on and investigated it online and I went to do the course in Arizona,” she said. “HCG is a hormone that is normally released in pregnancy, (human chorionic gonadatrophin). But it’s been around for weight loss since 1954, when Kevin Tudor, a doctor, introduced it.
“What happens is you go on a 500-calorie diet. My trainer was saying any person who goes on a 500-calorie diet will lose weight, which is true. But the hormone helps you to stay on the diet. You can only get energy in the body through carbohydrates and fats.
“The 500 calories you are eating are essentially proteins and vegetables, no carbs no fat. The hormone would then use your storage fat to break down and produce energy. So it works very well once you stick to what is on the list.”
Donna said you are allowed certain vegetables, but you can’t use broccoli, because it has a stem and it has starch, so it opens that carbohydrate path.
“What happens once you follow the list of foods is that your body will pull from storage fat, tummy fat, back fat but you have to take the hormone,” she said.
“Women lose slower than men, so they will lose .5 to .75 pounds a day and men drop about .65 to .9 pounds a day because of the testosterone,” she said. “Because they drop more they tend to get a better result on the programme.”
According to Donna, the hormone is in two forms, either injectable or sublingual, which is under the tongue. For the first six weeks of the programme, you just walk to get you in the habit. Then when you’re going through the maintenance phase is when you exercise.
“Why a lot of diets don’t work is that they help you to lose but they don’t help you to maintain,” she said. “There’s a gland in the brain called the hypothalamus, so we know if the brain registers your new weight at whatever it is. So even when you’re off the diet you don’t gain.
“Just the other day my mother was telling me you have to keep eating healthy, otherwise that weight would go back on – and I smiled,” she said. “I said to her that will never happen because not only is the weight set, but you’re in the process of weighing in every day. I know if I eat X how the weight goes, so I can pull back and add to suit. I lost 25 pounds. Just the other day I was telling a lady at the salon I was 163 and I am 138 now.
“I had a double chin and stuff. I started in November and the diet finished in January. Once you do the weight loss, then it’s six weeks of maintenance. My aim was to get to Carnival slim. Honestly speaking, I didn’t think it was going to work this good but I had to do it.”
