Medication and Weight Gain Presents Serious Problems

On Monday, the Today Show had an interesting story: medication and weight gain. Many medications such as anti-depressants, anti-inflammatories and steroids cause people to experience a variety of unpleasant symptoms, and weight gain is often one of them. The medicine might slow down your metabolism or increase your appetite. Many times the medications don’t even have labels warning of the possible side effect.

As the weight appears, many people especially women, stop taking the medication to avoid gaining more weight. Obviously, this isn’t a good idea! General health comes first and then you worry about the weight.

Dietitian Madelyn Fernstrom even advised viewers to start drinking diet soda and using other low-calorie products to help cut calories and diminish the weight gain from the medication. She noted that low-calorie products such as diet soda will help consumers cut calories while allowing them to still enjoy their favorite foods and beverages.

Other tips she provided:

· Call your doctor and see if there’s a different medicine you can switch to.
· Be more active.
· Make small changes in your eating – cutting 100 calories a day can lead to a ten-pound weight loss over the course of a year.
· Keep healthy snacks on hand such as carrots, pretzels, rice cakes, low-calorie yogurt, and fruit.

I’ve never been on medicine that made me gain weight but I can understand it would really frustrate me to have no control over what was happening to my body. We all like to think we are in control of what happens to our bodies but many times such a thing is really out of our control. Has anybody ever taken medication that caused them to gain weight?