Solutions to drugs that keep you fat 6—Corticosteroids....

Today's Post: Friday, 4-13-2012

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.

Friday, 3-16, we covered anti-depressants since some of those can keep you fat. Some don’t including Zyban aka Wellbutrin that helps some people quit smoking.

Friday, 3-23, we covered blood pressure lowering drugs.

Friday, 3-30, we covered drugs for type 2 diabetes.

Friday, 4-6, we covered statin drugs. (There are far better ways to protect your heart. And statins cause the exercise that is essential for beneficial and permanent fat loss harm you instead.!)

Today, we cover Corticosteroids.

Corticosteroids are essential tools to improve some health problems.

But the longer you take them, the more fat you tend to gain. You can also gain water weight which can add to the drop in mobility this can cause.

The strategy is to use them temporarily, use lower doses, or take planned breaks such as taking them every other week or 10 day period, use a lower dose – or use alternative ways to combat the condition. But that depends mostly on what you have and only partly on which doctor you work with.

(If it’s possible to do these things without harm and your doctor won’t, that’s different. In that case, you need a different doctor who is experienced in doing them effectively and safely instead.)

If you have to deal with such a condition, your doctor will likely endorse the very health oriented lifestyle upgrades in eating that produce fat loss and help you keep it off.

Doing those eating right upgrades will keep you healthier and minimize the damage. So you will gain 20 pounds with the corticosteroids instead of 80. With luck, you may even not gain instead of gaining 50 pounds.

But for exercise, your doctor may well know reasonable limits and guidelines as to what you can do safely and not do.

1. For asthma, particularly allergic asthma, such drugs as prednisone and methylprednisolone can be used as a very powerful and effective off switch.

This is great for emergency use because when needed it can make you a lot more comfortable and even save your life in some cases.

I took them once for this reason and was astonished at how effective the prednisone was.

The good news for most people is that finding ways to remove things you are allergic to from where you work and live or change things to move you away from them, can help you not need steroids to manage your asthma long term.

Then once those steps are in place, you can usually stop the corticosteroids. IMPORTANT note, with this class of drugs, dropping immediately to zero dose, can be very hazardous. You have to very gradually step down the dose over several days or a week.

Sometimes de-sensitization shots can turn off enough of the allergy to help.

And, I’ve known that taking quercetin as a supplement and eating foods like red apple peels and onions high in quercetin can turn down allergies. Some people find it makes them more energetic. (I eat the foods but have not tried the supplement for energy.)

I found out yesterday that a study found that taking 2,000 mg of vitamin C a day can cut back allergic reactions by 38 % or more AND it begins to do so within a week of starting to take that much. Note that it’s more effective to take the 2,000 mg a day in divided doses.

(I take that much vitamin C for heart protection, 1600 mg early in the day and 500 mg after dinner. I had noticed I very rarely had any allergic asthma or hay fever symptoms in recent years but didn’t realize the vitamin C may have helped bring that about.)

Better yet, fat loss reliably improves asthma because your lungs quite literally have more room to work!

And, best of all, there are several drugs that can help prevent asthma. So once you have gotten allergens out of your life to the best of your ability and started on those, you can usually stop taking corticosteroids all the time.

There are also drugs that turn down your allergic reactions without making you sleepy. Just be extremely careful to never double the dose with some of them. With those, it’s better to skip one than take two by accident.

So, for most people, taking corticosteroids for asthma can & should be a temporary step.

Using corticosteroids to treat rheumatoid arthritis and some types of cancer, is completely out of my area of knowledge. Unlike asthma, I’ve never had them myself.

1. But, with the rheumatoid arthritis, eating right for fat loss can help in two ways.

To the extent you are successful in minimizing the weight you gain or even increasing what you still take off, your joints will be under less stress and hurt less.

NOT eating the foods such as corn oil and soy oil and hydrogenated oils made from them and refined grains and the junky desserts and snacks made from them, helps lose fat. But it also lowers chronic inflammation.

Eating smaller amounts of the most fat trimmed meat and poultry that are fed grains like corn and soy that are high in omega 6 also does that. So does eating wild caught fish or meat from animals only pasture fed or 100 % grass fed instead of fatty grain fed meat. So does eating beans, lentils, and black-eyed peas and nuts and low fat dairy for protein on some days.

Taking omega 3 supplements and eating wild caught fish high in omega 3 also helps.

With far less extra inflammation from eating badly, you might be able to take a lower dose of steroids or periodic breaks from them. That’s an experimental question and between you and your doctor.

Rheumatoid arthritis can be severe enough it might not be possible to do this in your case. But if it is possible for you, this kind of eating right will decrease your pain and inflammation and may open the door to you to do these things and have the corticosteroids add less weight and fat.

(I’ve no idea if you would find them helpful. But there are two supplements that might help turn down rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases.

Taking 4,000 to 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 at least until your blood level tests above 60 might help. There is some research showing that D3 tends to prevent autoimmune disease. I’ve not heard of any showing it helps after the fact. But the evidence I’ve seen is that taking that much D3 is safe and has many other health benefits. So, if I ever got an autoimmune disease, I’d continue taking that much as I do now for the other health benefits.

And, although I’ve not seen the research, if it remains available, I have heard that taking the supplement DHEA has helps turn down autoimmune diseases for some people.)

3. Cancer treatments are still in their infancy at this time. However, to the extent you have a cancer where corticosteroids help and there are other treatments that work, in some cases, it may be possible to use corticosteroids at first and then gradually stop as is possible with asthma.

So with asthma, long term use of corticosteroids is very likely not needed. For rheumatoid arthritis and cancers where they help, it may be possible to take less or not take them every single day.

By using those strategies, eating right for fat loss, working with your doctor, and getting what exercise is safe, you can at least minimize the fat gain from taking corticosteroids or escape it altogether.