Solutions to drugs that keep you fat--Insomnia drugs….

Today's Post:  Friday, 5-18-2012

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.!)

Friday, 4-13, we covered Corticosteroids.  (Some problems those help are hard to treat without them but your doctor may be able to help you use them in a way that minimizes the fat gain.  The better news is that for asthma, using corticosteroids can almost always be temporary.)

Friday, 4-20, we covered Birth Control pills. 

Friday, 5-11, we covered migraine drugs.

Today, we cover drugs for insomnia.

Some of the over the counter insomnia remedies slow your metabolism.  The active ingredient in them, diphen-hydramine slows down your metabolism.  Sominex and Nytol are two examples. 

Nytol at least is designed for temporary use to help you sleep better when you have a bad cold.

So the effect from Nytol is temporary plus as with any over the counter multiple drug product, if you can do OK without it, it’s safer and cheaper to do so.  

Sominex and the other insomnia drugs are different.

One the best reasons for fat loss is to protect your health.

If you value your health, you will use other ways to sleep better and take zero insomnia drugs.

Here’s why.

Eating lots of fatty meats from grain fed animals will increase your risk of death from heart disease.

Processed meats are fatty meats from grain fed animals that have also had extra salt and preservatives added.  Eating those meats often will increase your risk of death from heart disease a bit more.

Smoking is worse.  Even smoking 3 cigarettes a day will increase your risk of death from heart disease even more than eating preserved meats often.

Guess what? 

The champion is taking insomnia drugs.  The chances of death from all causes goes up MORE than if you did all those three at the same time!

I was so astounded when I learned this I already did a post on it which I will include below.

That post has some of why this may be the case.  And of course it includes ways to turn off insomnia without drugs. (It includes a drug that causes insomnia that our post in this series on statins suggests you can do better to replace.  At the least you can use less or take a different one or both.)

But before I add that post, there are some fat loss specific things to say.

1.  One of the most effective and essential ways to sleep well is to do regular exercise, ideally at least some vigorous exercise for a few minutes on most days of every week.

But doing that with progressive strength training and interval cardio plus some more moderate exercise as you can fit it in, is also essential for fat loss!

That means if you have yet to get into that kind of exercise, gradually and slowly adding it will turn off many if not most cases of insomnia. 

People who do this kind of exercise go to sleep more reliably, with less effort, in fewer minutes each night, and sleep better after they fall asleep.

This is a win-win deal.  You will lose more fat whether it shows on the scale or not.  Your health will improve.  And you will find it easier to keep off the fat you lose from eating better.

And you’ll have less of a problem with insomnia and sleep better too!

2.  One of the causes of insomnia is sleeping too much during the day due to sleep apnea disrupting your sleep at night.  This often causes people with this problem to take microsleeps and even periods of narcolepsy, a kind of microsleep that isn’t micro.

Besides effective snoring treatments such as the Pillar procedure and airway obstruction removal in some people and/or the CPAP all night treatment where the machine force feeds you air, the most effective cure for sleep apnea is significant fat loss.

So if you have a lot to lose and do it, your sleep apnea may well disappear.  At worst it will be far less severe.

This makes a fat loss a win-win too.  You’ll be less likely to be in a micro-sleep caused accident, you’ll be more productive during the day.  And since, during the day, you’ll get less sleep, you’ll go to sleep easier at night.

Here’s the post from a few posts back:

Sleeping pills have an extremely death rate….Thursday, 3-15-2012

Last Monday, 3-12, Jenny Thompson of HSI sent out an email about a new study published in the British Medical Journal.

Researchers studied 10,500 people who took sleeping pills, from hypnotics like Ambien to sedatives, during two and a half years and compared them with 23,600 carefully matched people who took no sleeping pills at all.

The higher death rate in that time period of the people who took the sleeping pills was so much higher it was truly scary!

The people who took sleeping pills 11 times a month or more were FIVE times as likely to die during that time.

The people who took less than 11 a month but at least 18 a year were four times more likely to die.

People who took 18 or less each year were more than 3 and a half times more likely to die.

A.  Why is this happening?

1.  The study found one reason for this.  The people who took the hypnotic drugs got more of many kinds of cancer during the time period.  That was particularly true of the people who took them every week.

2.  Another reason is that one of the main reasons people have really serious trouble sleeping is when they are extremely stressed.  And, that level of stress tends to be almost that harmful.  The list of demographic characteristics the researchers matched for didn’t appear to have included that difference.  The death rate for severely stressed people is elevated too.

3.  A third reason is that the most mentally healthy people, Dr Martin Seligman found, think of most bad things as temporary for various reasons that are usually true.  They do NOT over-generalize and see most things that severely stress them or trouble sleeping occasionally as continuing to happen forever or completely out of their control.

The people who think the opposite, that bad things will continue forever, are far more likely to self limit themselves and be depressed.  They also have MUCH poorer health most of the time.

So when the mentally healthy people see the things that stress them as temporary or fixable and see any trouble sleeping as fixable and temporary, they rarely will ask a doctor for sleep drugs.

4.  The hypnotic drugs by themselves have killed people also.  One man who had taken a hypnotic sleep drug went sleep walking in his light pajamas and went outside.  Unfortunately for him, it was mid-winter and below zero.  They found his frozen body in the morning.  People have also driven and died in accidents in their “sleep” while taking hypnotic sleep drugs or eaten poisonous things and died.

In real sleep, your brain induces a kind of paralysis.  That’s why people wake up from nightmares sometimes.  They try to escape or stop the scary thing in their dream and find they can’t move and wake up terrified.  It’s happened to me on occasion.

The sleep induced by the hypnotic drugs somehow fails to start up that effect.  So at any time people taking those drugs could die in exactly such a “sleep-walking” event.  Unfortunately some have been reported to have just that happen.

B.  Things that help you sleep that do not require you to take drugs to do it.

Jenny Thompson in her email listed several things that people can do to sleep better that do not require drugs.

1.  The best one is regular and vigorous exercise almost every day.  People who do that kind of exercise have much higher stress tolerance ability.  And, they fall asleep more quickly and sleep better once asleep.

She also notes that many years ago, when she was having trouble sleeping herself, she bought a new and better quality mattress and took the television out of her bedroom, and the quality of her sleep improved immediately.

2.  An uncomfortable mattress can make it harder to fall asleep and the extra discomfort can cause you to feel pain or more tired when you wake up.  So getting a new good quality mattress can help.

3.  But the really huge thing she did was to get the TV out of her bedroom!  Late night TV news is mostly about bad things you can’t do much about.  Even good TV shows you like can cause you to go to bed too late in the day. And, the extra light from the set tends to prevent your body from releasing the natural sleep hormone melatonin.  (Doing other things to make your bedroom dark also helps your body release melatonin.)  This is also better than a new mattress because it’s cost no money to do.

4.  And, there are some foods and supplements that can help too. 

a) If you have a raw vegetable and a healthy OK protein snack and maybe some fruit, the hunger that might have kept you up is gone and you will fall asleep and sleep better.  (Just keep the amount light and try to eat it an hour before bedtime.) 

A couple of broccoli florets and a single string cheese and two or three strawberries would work. 

I eat the broccoli florets first.  Then if I’m still hungry, I have a spoonful or two of nonfat cottage cheese and unsweetened apple sauce. Then if I’m still hungry, I’ll have a single spoonful of almond butter.  I’m trying to lose weight, so I don’t let myself have the almond butter often.  One man I know did well with lowfat yogurt and blueberries as a night time snack.

b) You can also take melatonin about an hour before bed.  A single one milligram or half of one will work.  So will taking 3 mg; but you may be groggy and too laid back the next morning if you do that.  That happened to me once. Try the lower amounts first!

c) There is also a safer way to calm yourself when you are super stressed.  Taking the herb valerian works.  People in Europe took it during World War II when their lives were in danger day after day.

But save that for really heavy duty stress and sleep problems.  Valerian quite literally stinks.  Worse it’s the calming compound in the valerian that smells bad.  I tried it once and decided to pass unless I was under incredibly high stress.  And, in that event I’d try to get sealable jar or box to keep the bottle of valerian in when I wasn’t taking it!

The good news though is that valerian does work and is safe otherwise.

d) If you take a drug every day, also check on Wikipedia or with a pharmacist to see if the drug you are taking causes insomnia. 

It turns out many people taking Lipitor get insomnia.  There is a genetic test you can get for about $150 to see if you are one of the minority of people statins help.  Most people are in the larger group that get better heart protection from niacin than from statins.

Or you may get the same heart protecting effect but no or less insomnia with another statin. 

For those two things of course, you’ll need to work with your doctor.

But for most people most of the time, it looks far safer to stick to these methods and NOT take sleeping pills at all.