Saturday, November 17, 2018

Those of you on (psychiatric) medication finding it hard to stick to a deficit/not binge eat, please ask your dr to change or adjust meds [GENERAL ADVICE]

tl;dr psych meds made me binge and over eat, despite following all the weight loss tips and tricks and rules, until I changed meds. Takes trial and error but its worth it and this issue of binging is not always in our control.

I've been on psychiatric meds since 2015 and before that weight loss was a breeze. My first medication, latuda, made me so hungry I would eat 5000 calories a day and gained 15lbs on less than 2 months. I've been on a few other meds since that I don't think had much impact on my eating (lamotrigine, lithium, Wellbutrin, saphris - might have been able to lose on it but it killed my sex drive) But I still over ate and couldn't lose any appreciable weight. The last one I was on, abilify, was great for my mental health but I was compulsively eating at night. I got back up to a heavier weight than I've been in 3 years, 160+, despite tracking.

I made sure to avoid triggers such as intermittent fasting, I tried more or fewer meals, more or less fat, always high protein, but night time always came back to haunt me. The longest I'd gone without over eating in the last year is probably half a week if that.

Now I'm starting a new medication, geodon, and for 7 of the 9 days I've been on it I've had no desire or urge to binge or over eat. The first 2 nights I'm guessing I did because I still had abilify in my system (was on the lowest dose so just immediately switched meds). I've had a few days under my goal as well, a few just slightly over, and even one night I was going to bed and felt a bit hungry and thirsty and decided to just go to bed. Another night I brought food up with me that I had logged and it was within my deficit, and i forgot to eat part of it and didn't notice until the morning. Normally my routine has been to just eat until stuffed and now I'm able to put food away after having grabbed some.

So if you're on medication and finding things to be really hard, don't think that's its all because you "lack willpower" or some shit like that. Don't let others make you feel like it's something wrong you are doing if you're literally trying to do everything right - tracking, weighing food, etc. And don't be afraid to stand up for yourself with your doctors, if your doctors don't help you find a medication solution that enables you to be healthy fully then find a new doctor (this is coming from someone who had to find a new psychiatrist because the old one refused to prescribe anything that I wanted to try and didn't listen to me).

I'm pretty sure that changing my meds now with encouragement from my psychiatrist is what's going to help me get to my mini goal of 150 by my birthday in January, back down to 133 by the summer, and ready to slowly bulk later 2019. No amount of willpower or accurate tracking was going to change the physiological effects medication had on my eating.

submitted by /u/ana30671
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