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The Power of your Metabolism

ANTIDEPRESSANTS AND MEDICATIONS THAT MAKE YOU GAIN WEIGHT

Antidepressant medications, all of them, make you gain weight. Generally the manufacturer assumes its responsibility and says it on the “warning” page that comes with these medications.  My experience has been that very few things lower the metabolism more than antidepressant medications (Zoloft®, Paxil®, Prozac® and others).  All of them make you gain weight!

I’ve seen hundreds of people, mostly women, who start using an antidepressant and they start to gain weight much faster.  Also, the efforts that they make to help increase their metabolism produce very little results.  I know that this is true because, in the cases where someone got to the point where they could stop using anti-depressant medication, they automatically started to lose weight.

Over the years I’ve learned about using natural supplements that have an antidepressant effect like the amino acid L-Tyrosine, vitamin B-1 (thiamine).  There is also a natural Russian herb called rhodiola rosea that some American psychiatrists have begun using in their private practices for their patients with depression.

When we are interested in fighting a “slow metabolism” we have to learn to distinguish which are the medications that lower our metabolism, and antidepressants definitely make you gain weight.  Your psychiatrist can insist that these are just “stories” but if you look at your waist line you will see that what I am telling you is true. Your clothes don’t lie!

Another group of medications that lower the metabolism and make you gain weight are diuretic medications that are used to lower your blood pressure.  It turns out that everything that increases water in your body tends to increase the metabolism and everything that lowers the water level of your body decreases it.  Diuretics work by lowering water levels in the body to lower the pressure.  Numerous times I’ve seen how a person starts having a much slower metabolism after starting to take diuretic medications.

The best way to lower your blood pressure is to lose weight.  There is a direct relation between being overweight and having high blood pressure.  Losing weight almost always gets your blood pressure to go back down to normal.  Your body fat produces a substance called “angiotensinogen”, which is associated to high blood pressure. The more fat there is in your body, the more tendencies there will be for you to have high blood pressure.  If you lower your body fat, your blood pressure lowers and normalizes, unless you have one of those very rare cases of high blood pressure caused by stress or emotions.  Losing weight and lowering your body fat are the real solutions.

If you currently use a diuretic medicine to lower your blood pressure, don’t make the mistake of stopping its use until you have lost weight and your blood pressure has gone back to normal.  These medications can’t be stopped or reduced without the help of your doctor.

Other medications that make you gain weight are those that are used for inflammations in your body.  For example, the inhalers that asthmatics use, cortisone injections for back inflammations or cortisone tablets (Prednisone® an others) for other inflammatory conditions like arthritis.  These are medications chemically related to cortisone.  Cortisone is a hormone that is identical to the cortisol that our body produces in the adrenal glands.  It is called “cortisone” when it is produced by the pharmaceutical industry and “cortisol” when our body produces it, but they are basically the same hormone.

All in all, what you need to know is that there are medications that decrease your metabolism.  Naturally, medications can be necessary depending on the condition.  But it is also true that when a person increases their metabolism and loses weight, a majority of their health problems improve or disappear completely.  I’ve seen hundreds of cases of people that have lost weight and get to the point where their doctor discontinued the medications they took for their condition.  The human body has an apparently infinite ability to recuperate from any condition when we give it the help it needs to do so.