How to lose the fat you can't shake

This one's for any woman who has gone on an antidepressant to cope and weaned herself off it, but still can't shed the pounds. Doctors have a term for it: Metabolic Syndrome. Unlike men, women who take certain antidepressants/antipsychotics have an observed weight gain that dieting and exercise cannot shake. It happened to me.

I gained thirteen pounds on Paxil. When I weaned myself off it after about a year, the weight gain stayed. I went back to my old diet. The weight didn't budge. I increased my exercise. The weight didn't budge. I ordered special supplements from a getting off psychiatric drugs website. Still no change. I threw out all my one size smaller clothes. After four years I just gave up, figuring that chubby me was forever. Then I got lucky.

As a last ditch attempt I asked a diet doctor what to do. He said that in the past he wasn't a very successful diet doctor because his patients didn't really lose the weight for good. "All that's changed," he added. "A year ago I found out about the Simeon Protocol."

Dr. A.T.W. Simeon was a doctor in Rome in the 1970s when he published his book Pounds and Inches. According to Dr. Simeon, the best time for a woman to lose weight is when she's pregnant. Eating for two is a myth. If you are overweight you've got more than enough non-essential fat to see you all through. There are three kinds of fat, structural, normal reserve fat and abnormal fat, which Dr. Simeons likens to fat locked away in a bank vault, not available to the current (normal fat) account user. When people diet, he noticed, they tend to look gray and haggard, their skin loses its glow. This is because most diets go after the reserve fat, and then the structural fat, but never get to the deposit of abnormal fat.

The solution is to make the dieter (man or woman) a little bit pregnant using Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin (HCG), a naturally-produced hormone found in the urine of pregnant women and the great apes. HCG allows the banked abnormal fat to be available as fuel, rather than remain locked away.

In order to summon the abnormal fat to the reception desk, so to speak, a 500 calorie a day diet is called for. Before anyone faints at the thought, keep in mind that the diet includes taking HCG under the tongue twice a day, which suppresses the appetitite. My husband and I went skiing when we were on the diet, hunger was not a problem.

HCG is not approved by the FDA in the United States as a diet supplement. HCG has been used safely in Europe for decades as a dietary aid.

Dr. Simeon died shortly after his book was published and before he could be considered for a Nobel Prize. The man's a genius. He deserves one.