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"\\\"Oh, my God! When are you due?\\\" the thin, gorgeous yoga model practically screamed, planting her hands on my bulging belly.\\n\\n\\\"I'm not pregnant,\\\" I said. She stopped smiling with those stupid perfect teeth, dropped her hands and apologized, looking horrified. I forced myself to laugh it off. But I was humiliated. And that feeling sent me down a road I still can't believe I took.\\n\\nFlash forward a year to me, jabbing a syringe full of a \\\"fat-melting\\\" hormone into my thigh\u2014despite some serious health risks and zero proof it even worked\u2014and starving myself silly. It went against everything I believed in. Cheating at anything, including weight loss, was something only shameful people did. I have a strong work ethic. I always do things the \\\"right\\\" way. So how the hell did I get *here*?\\n\\nYou'd think the model's horrid comment would push me to lose weight, but oddly I lived in denial and totally ignored my food baby. Instead, I kept eating cheese, bread, whatever. It's my lifelong way to cope with stress, and I had plenty of it in my job as a photo producer. Six months later, I moved from Denver to Los Angeles to pursue movie writing and producing, still doing photo shoots on the side.\\n\\nIf anything will drive you to get skinny, it's living in L.A. It's like a film set filled with annoyingly perfect models 24/7. At 5 feet 6 and 165 pounds, I wasn't obese, but I wasn't healthy. I felt fat, lonely and desperate to fit in. I started avoiding the on-set buffet and doing P90X DVDs every day, even if I had to get up at 4 a.m. After six months of practically killing myself, I lost 5 pounds. *Five pounds*?! I felt ... defeated.\\n\\nI needed to see a friendly face, so I decided to fly to Montana to visit my mom. She'd always struggled with her weight, too. Mom taught me that quick fixes like the cabbage-soup diet or diet pills are a sign of laziness. Together, we had striven to slim down the respectable way\u2014with hard work and discipline. We hiked, ate healthy and bitched about our slow metabolisms. Whenever we failed to lose, we would commiserate over a clandestine pizza. I wanted her empathy.\\n\\nWhen she answered the door, I almost didn't recognize her. Two months before, my mom had been a size 12. Now, her short tee revealed flat abs. She was a 6, easily. I was shocked.\\n\\n\\\"You look great! What did you do?\\\" I would start it immediately.\\n\\n\\\"I lost 40 pounds by injecting myself with a hormone!\\\" she said, beaming.\\n\\n\\\"Fraud!\\\" I wanted to shout. But this was my mother, who never took shortcuts. I hated to admit it: She looked *good*. Maybe it wasn't that bad.\\n\\n\\\"Where do you get it?\\\" I asked.\\n\\nShe explained: A doctor prescribed her daily injections of a synthetic hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which is released naturally during pregnancy to help sustain the embryo. The theory goes that, when a nonpregnant person takes it, the hormone signals there's a hungry embryo on board and primes the body to release stored fat. But the shots alone won't prompt weight loss\u2014hCG dieters also have to cut down to 500 calories a day to avoid storing new fat. They say the hormone helps suppress hunger, though, so the super low-cal diet isn't that painful. The payoff? A major loss\u2014up to 40 pounds\u2014in 40 days.\\n\\nBack in L.A., I Googled the plan, fantasizing about my new, shrunken body. Every search yielded scary pages about its dangers\u2014heart trouble, brain damage, potentially fatal blood clots. I learned you can't have sugar, oil, dairy, alcohol, processed foods, eggs, gluten, beans or grains on the hCG diet. I began to worry: What *would* I eat? Could I really survive on only 500 calories a day, the equivalent of a cup of granola\u2014that is, if granola were allowed? And what if I developed a blood clot and had a stroke?\\n\\nBut the image of my mom's tiny waist was burned into my memory. I wanted that. I could put on moral blinders for 40 days. No one else would know. They *couldn't*\u2014I hated to imagine what they'd think of me. I found a shady holistic doctor who prescribed me hCG with no warning about the dangers\u2014I simply signed a form agreeing that I wouldn't get back my money if I didn't lose weight\u2014and ponied up the $800.\\n\\nThe diet starts with a 48-hour \\\"fatload\\\" period, which involves eating tons of fatty food to fuel your body so you don't shock it with the starvation. I inhaled pad thai, cheese fries and dessert after every meal, even breakfast. By the end, I felt so fat and bloated, I'd do anything not to feel so gross. Meanwhile, I also started shooting the hCG into my thigh, bracing against the pain.\\n\\nThen I cut down to 500 calories. That whole thing about hCG nixing hunger? Bull. I was constantly famished and dizzy. Sometimes, if I bent over, I passed out. I obsessed over what little food I was allowed: Once, I dropped a shrimp on the floor and ate it anyway. By day 14, I was painfully constipated from the lack of fiber. My body was going through hell. But I'd spent the money\u2014and I'm no quitter. So I talked myself through each day of pain to the next one, when I'd wake up another pound or two lighter. The success (and possibly starvation) was intoxicating. My friends' support helped me keep going. They assumed the P90X was paying off; I felt guilt-free about lying to them\u2014technically, it was only by omission.\\n\\nThen, on day 40, I worked with some colleagues who hadn't seen me in months. My weight: 133. Their response? Shock. Disbelief. Then, *manic* curiosity and envy. I was thrilled with the attention\u2014until they started asking how I'd done it. My heart beat out of my chest. For the first time in 40 days, I wasn't hungry. I felt sick with shame.\\n\\nAnd then it came out: \\\"I'm doing a cleanse.\\\" I'd just lied to their faces. Disgusting, but there it was.\\n\\n\\\"How did it happen so fast?\\\" someone asked. Busted, I thought.\\n\\nBut the lies kept coming. I told them about P90X. Eat less, exercise more. Simple. To my surprise, they bought it.\\n\\nI didn't tell them about the needles. Or the ridiculous diet. Or that, really, I was lucky to be alive. Because, while I worried about being fat, I worried more about what they thought of me. I desperately needed not just to feel responsible and hardworking but to be seen that way, too. I despised lying, but what choice did I have if I didn't want to come off as a kook, an extremist, as obsessed with being as thin as every L.A. model? I finally had the body I'd dreamed of, and I felt like a fraud and a failure.\\n\\nOver the next several weeks, I felt so guilty, so embarrassed, that I turned back to late-night nachos and cupcakes and regained 10 of the pounds I'd lost. I started to stress: What if my emotional eating brought back *all* the weight? I considered another hCG round, but that triggered a fresh wave of shame. Plus, I couldn't afford another $800 for the doc. But the lying and self-loathing were pushing me to eat the other pounds back. I was stuck.\\n\\nI knew I'd let myself down. I judged others as cheaters and fakes, but I'm no better, I thought: flawed, insecure, susceptible to the allure of an easy fix. Maybe all the pressure I'd put on myself to do things the \\\"right\\\" way was just as extreme as the diet I'd chosen.\\n\\nSo, two months after taking my last hCG shot, I realized I'd basically hit rock bottom: Trying to do everything 100 percent perfectly\u2014and feeling like a bad person when I didn't\u2014was ruining my life. It was time to give myself a break. I devised an 80/20 rule: I'd get a healthy amount of exercise and eat 1,500 calories a day 80 percent of the time; for the other 20 percent, I'd have whatever I wanted and be a couch potato, guilt-free. Maybe letting myself off the hook a bit could keep perfectionism from destroying me. It worked: In the year since I started my 80/20 rule, I've stayed in the 130- to 140-pound range without a single guilt-riddled midnight food frenzy.\\n\\nLook, I know the hCG diet was stupid. I still can't believe I put myself in danger like that. But, to be honest, I don't regret it. If it hadn't been for hCG, I'd never have gotten here\u2014to a happier weight and mindset. Am I a bad person for what I did? No, but I understand I'm not perfect, either, even though others may see me as more so now. The truth is, image *isn't* everything. Health is.\\n\\n#### A big fat scam?\\n\\nHCG is FDA-approved as a fertility treatment but *not* for weight loss\u2014in fact, there's no solid research proving it helps melt pounds. What we do know: Taking hCG for fertility may in fact be linked with an increased risk for breast and ovarian cancer, and taking it during pregnancy can cause birth defects! Who knows what other dangers will surface as people continue to inject the stuff. So why does the hCG diet work? \\\"Because you're on a very low-calorie diet,\\\" says Deborah Bade Horn, D.O., vice president of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians. And such extreme diets are *firmly* linked with a host of health problems, including nutrient deficiencies, gallstones, electrolyte imbalances and cardiac issues\u2014which can kill you. Skinny isn't sexy if you're dead. *\u2014Marjorie Korn*  \\n  \\nPhoto Credit: Meredith Jenks. Overlay: Maria Toutoudake/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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