Increasingly people are taking hCG injections,which comes from the urine of pregnant women

To lose weight,women take pregnancy hormone.

Every morning,Kay Brown engages in a ritual similar to a heroin addicts,or a diabetics: she sticks herself with a syringe. Only hers contains hCG,a pregnancy hormone. Brown,35,is not taking hCG to help her bear a child. She believes that by combining the hormone injections with a 500-calorie-a-day diet,she will achieve a kind of weight-loss nirvana, without feeling tired or hungry. I had a friend who did it before her wedding, Brown said. She looks great.

Women like Brown are streaming into doctors offices,paying upward of $1,000 a month for a consultation,a supply of the hormone and syringes. More than 50 years after a doctor at a Roman clinic began promoting hCG as a dieting aid,it is as popular as ever.

The regimen combines daily injections with a near-starvation diet,and patients,mostly women,are often enticed by promises that they can lose about a pound a day. Even more seductively,they are frequently told that the hCG will prompt their bodies to carry away and metabolise fat that has been stored where they least want it in their upper arms,bellies and thighs.

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The Food and Drug Administration warned in January that homeopathic forms of hCG,like lozenges and sprays,are fraudulent and illegal if they claim weight-loss powers.

The injectable,prescription form of hCG,human chorionic gonadotropin,is approved as a treatment for infertility,and it is legal for doctors to prescribe it off-label for weight loss. The FDA recently received a report of a patient on the hCG diet who had a pulmonary embolism,said a spokesman for the agency. He said the hormone carried risks of blood clots,depression,headaches and breast tenderness or enlargement.

But unlike other diet supplements,hCG,which is derived from the urine of pregnant women,has acquired an aura of respectability because the injections are available only by prescription.

Browns physician,Lionel Bissoon,charges $1,150 for his hCG programme. From an anecdotal point of view, Dr Bissoon said,physicians all around the country have seen people losing a tremendous amount of weight with this stuff,and you cannot afford to ignore that. Another New York doctor,Scott M Blyer,offers the hCG diet as an adjunct to his cosmetic surgery practice. The hCG,Dr Blyer said,tricks your body into a state of pregnancy; it burns off fat so the fetus can get enough calories,but it protects muscle.