Solutions to drugs that keep you fat 2....

Today's Post: Friday, 3-16-2012

Last Friday, 3-9-2012, our post “Some drugs can keep you fat” listed several kinds of general strategies to drugs that tend to fatten you or keep you fat. For most of them, there is a better drug or a way to improve your condition that avoids using that drug.

Antidepressants can make you fat. The worst ones include Paxil (paroxetine), Zoloft (sertraline), amitriptyline (Elavil). and Remeron (mirtazapine).

“Wellbutrin (bupropion) and Prozac (fluoxetine) are considered weight-neutral or weight-loss drugs. "Generally, older antidepressants are typically more prone to cause weight gain than the newer SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors]," Dr. Lawrence Cheskin said.

1. Wellbutrin is also sold as Zyban to help people quit smoking. If you are taking Zyban to quit smoking, it is on the mostly OK list for avoiding this problem. It does have side effects for many people. But if you do enough other things to quit including finding out how unbelievably harmful tobacco and its smoke really are, once the tobacco smoke effects wear off in your body, you can soon after that take less and then none.

It’s worth it if you need it to quit smoking. And it won’t add extra weight while you take it.
Very carefully done vigorous exercise that you start really slow and increase really slow both helps people quit and improves depression for most people better than the drug. So start doing just a bit of exercise right when you quit. Then by continuing to do it, when you need to cut down or stop the Zyban, you won’t need it as much anyway. The exercise will also help avoid the weight gain from quitting. If you also upgrade your food to health supporting food only and go really easy on sugar and avoid overeating, you can avoid the rest of the weight gain from quitting.

2. Two, it’s beginning to look as if the entire group of studies on antidepressants shows that they are less effective for most people than exercise. The drugs have little effect for most people and exercise works for most people!

Some people need more than exercise of course. But people who do vigorous exercise regularly do become much less depressed over time. The best news is that while you focus on doing the vigorous exercises and recovering right afterwards, it shuts off the negative thoughts and you get almost immediate if temporary relief from depression!

Since antidepressants cost money and have side effects and are even somewhat addictive, another solution is to try all the nondrug methods for fighting depression instead.

Some people will need skilled talk therapy to teach them the skills described by Dr Martin Seligman in his book, Learned Optimism in addition.

Depressed people have thinking patterns that cause them to be depressed. So if you do the other things in this post that improve the physical side, learning to stop these patterns and replace them with more effective and happier ones, and if you learn this skill well, you can often stop being depressed.

In some cases, actual brain damage can cause depression.

A doctor who treats both of these is Dr Daniel Amen.

He describes the talk therapy part as learning to kill the ANTS, automatic negative thoughts. He has a new book called, The Amen Solution: The Brain Healthy Way to Get Thinner, Smarter, Happier by Daniel G. Amen M.D. that does a good job of describing getting rid of the ANTS. He calls the most damaging ones, red ANTS. Some of his patients were able to use that information to learn to kill off these thoughts on their own. And all of them who learned to do so were able to feel much better AND be far more effective at losing fat. Many rated it the most useful part of his program. (And, the rest of it is quite good!)

In that book, he also describes the different parts of your brain that can be damaged or not working well and the things he has found effective to help those people.

Then too Dr Ilardi has a book called, The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs by Stephen S. Ilardi.

He found that 85% of people who did all 6 of those steps stopped being depressed. That’s not 100 %. But it’s dramatically better than the almost no effect for most people of the drugs.

a) Adding omega 3 from wild caught fish or supplements helps. He found that most depressed people were deficient in omega 3.

When that happens, people feel physical pain more and are more irritable -- which can drive people away and can trigger feeling depressed. Other studies show that your brain literally works better and lasts longer with enough omega 3.

We did a recent post on Better than glucosamine on Tuesday, 3-6 that describes how to limit excess omega 6 and how adding omega 3 AND sharply limiting omega 6 lowers inflammation and very likely helps you be less depressed. The way of eating described also lowers high blood pressure and makes it dramatically easier to lose fat and keep it off.

b) Another thing he does to have people take enough vitamin D3. If you are deficient in this vitamin which most people are, it does tend to cause you to be depressed. In mid-winter, many people get SAD, a kind of depression caused by too little sun exposure and vitamin D you get from that. Many people do need more than just enough vitamin D3 to stop being depressed. But turning off this cause does help make sure the other methods will succeed.

Opinion is mixed for higher doses and levels. But it’s now clear to the people who research vitamin D3 that about 3,000 iu is the minimum you should take each day. And, if you test for your vitamin D level in your blood, you should be at 50 or above.

If your level tests in the 30 to 49 range many doctors who don’t know this new information will say that’s OK. (Below 30 is severely deficient.)

Opinion on taking more than 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 and blood levels above 60 is mixed. One study found that taking 4,000 to 8,000 a day was more effective in preventing cancer for example than taking less.

c) He is a very strong advocate for exercise. He found it helps.

d) He calls automatic negative thinking, ANTS, ruminative thinking. Instead of enjoying life or getting things done, he found that not only to depressed people have these self damaging thoughts they spend time running them over and over again.

He teaches people to STOP and replace these thought with more positive ones and to immediately take action on something to stop the endless loop effect.

e) He teaches people how to interact well with other people and has them begin to do it far more often. Isolation and loneliness cause depression. He found learning ways to stop that and doing them often helps turn off the depression.

f) He teaches people to be sure to get enough sleep as his step 6. People who sleep too little often have too little mental energy to think clearly. They can be too tired to do it well!

People who get less than 6 hours of sleep a night except for a tiny minority of people with a special heredity have all sorts of extra health problems. (More than 7 is a challenge for most busy people. And more than 8 suggests health problems and is not good on a daily basis.) 7 hours a night is ideal if you can manage it. 6 and a half to 7 and a half is good. But the key thing is not to sleep less than 6 hours a day.

And, it also helps to sleep well.

In addition the ways to sleep better without drugs that we listed in our post yesterday, going to bed at about the same time each night and getting up at the same exact time each morning.

Research found that people who hit the snooze button or reset the alarm clock to a later time on weekdays. Got no more rest than if they got up and then were behind schedule besides. Plus your body acclimates to getting up every weekday at the same exact time.

g) Dr Julian Whitaker says that for people who do need the serotonin boost that the drugs try to deliver can get it more safely by eating the spice saffron or taking it as a supplement.

He points out that people low on serotonin tend to crave sweets. So this is a good alternative to shut down that craving without the sugar and its effects he has found with his patients.