After you have successfully completed 21 days of Maintenance 1 and have stabilized, you are welcome to begin to slowly add sugars and starches back in to your diet per the M2 guide found in the ThinNow HCG Diet Guide.

When you see little to no fluctuation in the scale for about a week, you can assume your weight has stabilized. Congratulations! Continue to monitor your weight daily and perform a steak day if necessary. 

Steak days are only effective on the very day your weight goes more than 2.0 pounds over your LDW. If you fail to do a steak day on that day, then you will need to commit to eating just lean proteins and vegetables for a few days. This usually causes the scale to come back within the safe range within a few days.  If you find that you are performing multiple steak days, please give us a call so we can help get you back on track.

A steak day is a tool used to correct weight gain during the maintenance and life phases of the HCG diet. Any time your weight goes more than 2.0 pounds over your Last Drop Weight (LDW); you will need a steak day on that day.

During Maintenance and the Life stage a Steak Day is used to correct a weight gain of more than 2.0 pounds over your weight on the last day you took HCG (LDW). The steak day MUST be done on the very same day that your weight goes more than 2.0 pounds over LDW or it will not be effective and could be counter-productive. This is why weighing every single morning during maintenance is non-negotiable.

No. The Atkins diet is a low carbohydrate diet. While on Maintenance 1, you need to avoid sugars and starches, but carbohydrates in the form of low glycemic fruit and vegetables are perfectly fine. You can find the guidelines and allowed foods for M1 in the ThinNow HCG Diet Guide.

Both Melba toast and grissini are considered starches and are not allowed during Maintenance 1.

During Maintenance 1 you need to refrain from eating any foods with sugar or starch, except what occurs naturally in the allowed foods. There are many different names for sugar, so be sure to check the ingredient lists of your favorite foods to determine if they contain sugars or starches. Be warned that there are some vegetables that fall in to this category including: potatoes, peas, and corn.  A list of sugars and starches in all the various forms can be found inside the ThinNow HCG Diet Guide.

During Maintenance 1, cheating could result in difficulty stabilizing as well as hindering the reset of the hypothalamus, which controls metabolism. While losing weight on the HCG diet is a fantastic result, the real magic happens when your body achieves a new set-point weight. Cheating is NEVER worth it while on any phase of the HCG diet.

Maintenance 1 is just as critical as the VLCD. It is during the 21 days of M1 that your new weight set point is established and your hypothalamus is reset. The entire six weeks of maintenance is part of the treatment – don’t stop until you’re finished! You don’t want all your hard work in VLCD to go to waste…and it will if you don’t follow the Maintenance plan.