I too gained about 100 lbs in my ten + years of hell on antidepressants. I’ve tried almost all of them and none of them really do more than slap a bandaid on the problem. I have lost my motivation, my creativity has suffered and I have a whole slew of health problems now that no one in my family has ever had – and for what? To keep an already filthy rich industry rolling in the money? My overall health and quality of life has taken a serious nose dive since being on this crap. I could write about the negative effects for days. Please reconsider before taking these kinds of medications and seek alternative therapies.

That would NOT work for me. I am on Methadone, because of building a high tolerance to a pain medication I was taking for painful uterine fibroids. This drug has made me gain 80 pounds in a year due to craving and eating nothing but carbs and sugar. Oatmeal us primarily the main staple I eat.

Oh that’s interesting – is it an iodine supplement?

I have to take anti-depressant or I can’t function or sleep. You’re right about everything not working. I’m killing myself with the added weight. I’m going to try again to lose weight again but with a difference. My metabolism is shot so I’m going to spread nutritious foods over 9-12 hrs. It’s not going to be fun, I’ll be hungry & calories will count. The idea is to kick-start my metabolism. This pretty well the end of the line. If I keep up what I’m doing now, I’ll be dead in 2 yrs.

I have maintained the same unhealthy diet and since quitting my medications i have more energy and weight loss and my body is starting to take its natural form again

Superb kind of work by the team as on this particular topic people needs more precise information and special attention to it.Thanks a lot.

Gynecologist mountain view, ca

SSRI’s completely screw up your hormones. Of course it has nothing to do with appetite.

I am on Cymbalta and have lost weight. I eat a lot of Greek yogurt, hard cooked eggs, very little meat, but I eat Alaskan salmon (canned) and fresh fruit. When I was on Effexor, I gained 40 pounds and craved sweets much more. I think you have to bug your doctor to try a different medication. That is what I did and I know I was annoying, but you have to push for your own health because only you know what works for you.

Thank you so much for this article! I have looked for a reason for my weight gain for years! I suffer from major depression, and have been on various medications. I have also gained weight steadily, even though I don’t eat much. I joined Weight Watchers after all the media about over-eating, convinced that I was eating more than I thought. I found myself eating more food than normal, and after gaining two pounds, quit. I have been so frustrated about this, and worst of all, no-one believes me, even my friends. It helps a lot knowing someone else is going through the same thing.

I got one when I was 12 I was very track basketball baseball and football athlete I was diagnosed with bi polar and deppersion abd was put on depeakote and abilify then next 8 years I gained about 180 pounds It got hard to be active and messed w some nerves these lats 2-3 years I been trying to lose weight and have been active working out eating somewat healthy and noting eating as much and I can’t seem to lose more than 10-15 pounds

I am auditioning for the Biggest Loser this weekend. Maybe they will pick me and we can finally get national attention on the problem. I have bipolar disorder and I have gained 120 pounds in the past 10 years.

Good share! This may be a problem to most antidepressant especially the SSRI’s.  While it doesn’t happen to everyone, but when it does occur, it can be a snag that should not be ignored.

SSRIS have caused me to put on 33 lbs. From a thin 229 to a chunky 262. I have been on 4 ssris in trying to find one that didn’t cause me weight gain. No luck. I have stopped 3 times and have almost lost all of the weight before trying a new med and gaining again. This time Prozac 40 mg was the culprit. I have been off the drug now for 4 months and have lost 5 pounds. Each time I take an AD it takes longer and longer for the weight to come off. I eat way less than I burn off and it just doesn’t come off. There’s no explanation.

I had no idea about antidepressants doing this. Thanks for the heads up

I am also very thankful for this article! I have always been a little “chubby” but never over 200 lbs, at 5″10. When I started taking my antidepressants I weighed 165 lbs. Within the first year I gained 60 lbs!!!! It has now been over 5 years and I weigh 305!!! I have always ate a little more than I should, but it was never a big problem untill I started the meds. I know that’s what it is, because you don’t just gain 60 lbs in one year, without any changes in diet or exercise. This absolutly needs to be a big discussion in the media, because I know there are other people out there thinking “Why am I gaining so much weight?” without being told by there doctors or anyone else that there meds are the possible cause.

I’ve been off and on bi-polar and anti-depressant meds for 5 years now. I finally stopped taking them a year ago because of the weight gain, and also the horrid nightmares that the anti-depressants gave me. I was so fed up with being told that I weighed 150 lbs too much and had too high cholesterol. I did research online and took my findings to my new doctor who is very cooperative. Since then, through my own hard work and study and the doctors silly little tests, I’ve found out that I have Sleep Apnea, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, and Fibromyalgia. Of course, these things all contribute to my fatigue far more than my mood disorders.

Thank you doctors, for not listening to me, and shoving pills down my throat that made me gain 100+ lbs and raise my cholesterol to scary heights.

Six months ago I switched to an entirely vegan diet. I’ve lost 35 lbs, and my weight is slowly slowly going down and down. My doctor still wants me to lose another 50 at least, but all I can tell him is to hold his horses. It’s not exactly easy to exercise when you injure yourself just by sleeping wrong. 😀

Extreme diets, extreme exercise, together or separately, have the effect of shutting down the body’s ability to lose weight. Your body adapts to the new diet & starts once again conserving as much energy as possible in the form of fat, stopping weight loss & in some cases even reversing it (depending on the level of caloric deprivation). I know how they say exercise “revs up” metabolism, but the fact is that it only does so to a limited extent. The body adapts to the energy expenditure & quits losing weight. If you think about it, it has to – otherwise star athletes would wither away to nothing despite high caloric intake in some cases.

Some people are born with bodies that want to hang on to every calorie that goes in the body, regardless. You can tell who they are – their ancestors survived famine, survived low food supplies (think serfs who had to give most of their food to the “nobility” as taxes; there were some who died of starvation while others survived-I think every one of them has GOT to be in my genetic lineage somewhere!). They survived because hunger couldn’t kill someone whose body had stored every calorie as potential energy in the form of fat!

Plus, a few years ago, someone came out with a finding of a certain retrovirus that was present in about 85-90% of all fat people they’d checked, but was rarely, if ever, in thin people. But just like the 1991 findings of an at that time unknown retrovirus being present in 85-90% of people with CFS/ME, the findings were ridiculed. “Fat contagious?” articles abounded with doctors calling the findings “unscientific” & blacklisting, systematically, the researchers (physicians, lab techs, etc) to the point where they could no longer practice their professions; they couldn’t even get jobs. Fat people were ridiculed if they insisted on more research. “Quit blaming anyone or anything else but yourselves for your fat. You’re all lazy, undisciplined, unwilling to do the hard work of diet & exercise,” they said. The same thing happened to the 1991 CFS researchers; in fact, the lab tech got such a horrible case of CFS that she can barely function. She may not be alive anymore. And for another decade or so, CFS patients continued to be told they weren’t really sick, that all they needed to do was adopt a healthier lifestyle, suck it up, & continue living, or see a shrink if they couldn’t figure out how to manage that task.

Meanwhile, people suffer.

Yeah, I suppose there are people out there who fake having CFS well enough to fool people into thinking they’re sick when they aren’t. And there are plenty of fat people who might lose most or all of their excess weight if they dieted & exercised, but they “poor me” people to the point where they’re disgusted. Most of us could benefit from a better lifestyle. But there are a lot of people out there who are obese who shouldn’t be – & not just people on medications that have caused weight gain. How about those people in 3rd world countries where getting ONE meal a day is a gift? Or those who live in garbage dumps & eat half-spoiled food? How in the world do THEY become obese? Yet it IS happening. Obesity has been called a “global pandemic.”

And diabetes is blamed on obesity when it could very well be that diabetes CAUSES obesity.

Where would I get such an idea? From my son & his pediatric endocrinologist. When my son was 6, he’d had a few bad viral infections in a row starting around Halloween, going through Thanksgiving & Christmas & his birthday (which is Christmas Eve, & which we have always celebrated as a distinct celebration different from Christmas). After that, he went from having slims be loose on him to having huskies be tight, in ONE YEAR. His eating habits & activity hadn’t changed at all, & because we were all fat in both families for generations, even during the Depression, I’d been careful with his diet. When, at age 12, he was diagnosed with type 1 (autoimmune, not obesity-caused) diabetes, the endocrinologist asked me if, at any time in the past he’d had a sudden weight gain despite no change in diet & activity, & if it had been preceded by viral infections. He said it was at the time of that weight gain that my son had gotten diabetes, it had just taken years to show up. Apparently, the body’s immune system had attacked a viral infection where the virus was the same general size & shape as the islet cells in the pancreas, the ones that produce insulin. The body’s immune system had started attacking those cells, & they’d responded by increasing insulin production, which had caused weight gain. Eventually, the antibodies the body created to attack the beta cells in the pancreatic islets were sufficient to overwhelm all his body’s attempts to produce enough insulin, & the symptoms showed up.

Increasingly, adults in their 40s, 50s, even 60s are showing up with type 1 diabetes. Dubbed “type 1.5” or LADA (latent autoimmune diabetes of adulthood), it is a true, insulin dependent diabetes never tested for at their age, until they nearly die despite medication, diet, & exercise. More & more, evidence is suggesting that diabetes is a progression, not several discreet diseases, & it’s a well known fact medically that most type 2s, regardless of how compliant they are with their diet & exercise, will end up on insulin within 3 years. That indicates a continuum of sorts. I know of many illnesses that seemed like something else or a different form of a disease, where research discovered a continuum existed that they hadn’t seen before. but I can tell you that all the adults I worked with in an inpatient research center in the late 80s-early 90s had struggled with weight gain from their insulin use. Many obsessed about getting several hours of workouts completed in a day, to avoid moving to an overweight status. Most non-obese type 1s struggle with weight gain. Until the advent of Levemir & Apidra in the last few years (levemir being a long acting insulin taken 2 times a day & Apidra being a short acting insulin used to cover for meals & high sugars for whatever reason they occur), all insulins caused weight gains. These 2 supposedly don’t cause weight gain but don’t cause weight loss, either – but do make it simpler to lose weight on insulin. And whether insulin is injected or if pills force the body to make it, it still causes weight gain unless, apparently, it’s one of those 2 insulins – both of which are VERY, VERY expensive (Levemir costs around $80/vial; I believe Apidra is closer to $120, or was last time I checked).

To me, all this means one thing: Diabetes is the epidemic that causes obesity, not the other way around. More & more research hints at this – but those researchers have learned from the peddlers of cures for obesity to word their research very carefully, to tantalize other researchers in the field who might come to the same conclusions, conclusions that might lead to a cure with a bit of creative thinking.

The problem is, OBESITY & DIABETES ARE HUGE MONEY MAKERS. To those out there who like to feed on the pain of others, you don’t solve the problem, you find a way to make money from it. Just think of all the diet books, products, clubs, places that send you icky frozen meals, gyms, herbal supplement companies, diet pill companies, & considering Alli, the OTC diet pill, has a side effect of “rectal seepage,” I imagine incontinence products & those who sell odor-killing items for use in hiding the smell of oozing stool, are also making a bit of money. Let’s not forget weight loss surgery – a surgery with such a high morbidity (disease causing) & mortality (death) rate that it would not be permitted were it not done on fat people. Yet, WLS patients lose a max of 80% of their excess body weight, some as low as 40-60%. Many fail & stretch the food pouch until they regain their weight. Others spend months after the surgery deathly ill from infections in the incisions (blamed on poor physical hygiene & body habitus, not on poor surgical technique in placing the incisions). For many, there is at least one complication of the surgery that will result in a prolonged hospital stay. At the 5 year point, where most studies stop following WLS patients, is when osteoporosis, loss of skin elasticity, osteoarthritis, heart failure (from prolonged malnutrition due to feeding issues), high blood pressure, avascular necrosis of the hip joint (necessitating joint replacement)…the list goes on & on. One of our neighbors aged a good 30 years after he hit the 5 year mark; he walks like an old man, in obvious pain. Although seeming healthy those first 5 years, to the point where I wondered if it might be safer than I thought, after that 5 year point it was like looking at a time lapse photography session spanning months & years, a session of someone aging way beyond their years in a short span of time. The kicker? HE’S STILL CONSIDERED MORBIDLY OBESE. That’s right, the WLS often leaves people that far from their goal weight.

On the diabetes side, why do we have tons of types of insulins, & things designed to balance the gastric hormones of leptin (which causes weight gain) & grhelin (which shuts down appetite & aids weight loss)? And, why do we have so many, many new type 2 diabetes pills that are pulled from the market as dangerous months to a few years later?

Why not a cure? BECAUSE DOCTORS & OTHERS ARE GETTING FILTHY RICH FROM OBESITY & DIABETES. Why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?

For that reason alone, I know the only research they’ll do into diabetes is research to find new ways to make money off diabetics while condemning fat people while they’re doing nothing at all to figure out why some people can eat enough at one sitting to feed a family of 6 for a week, do so every meal, & still end up rail thin.

You see, if they fix it, several things happen:
1. They stop earning money & so do the bloodsuckers who earn their living in “peripheral” markets
2. People realize they’ve likely been hoodwinked & start to sue
3. There will be no way to kill off enough people to make socialized medicine world-wide solvent

We can’t have that, now, can we?

And hows about adding our old friend prednisone and the like to the list? FOUR YEARS STRAIGHT I’ve been on this stuff. 60 pounds. Nothing will come off. And the 40 pounds before that came from the 1st round that was I was given a while before that and was able to get off of it. With everything I tried even after I was off the pred the first time, I only ever lost 8 pounds. So let’s add steroids you need to survive and function with a disease that makes it hurt for you to move at all to that list. I am SO TIRED of the assumptions about my weight. I am SO TIRED of people looking at me with ”that look”. You all know the one I mean. It’s the look you only get when it’s directed at you, and you only get it when you have a weight problem. “Eat a salad’ is a hilarious sling to throw at a stranger with a weight problem, BTW. Keep that one up. Perhaps I should tell you about my all celery 2 week fast, or my experience of drinking nothing but disgusting lemonade with pepper and syrup in it…while losing NOTHING. Well, there was some loss with the lemon thing, but it was nothing that wasn’t back in 2 weeks after eating normal, healthy food. So yeah, don’t get me started on this topic!

I gained 65 pounds in three years from Prozac, Zoloft, Atavan, and about five other drugs…thank you, thank you, thank you, somebody please make sure this woman is heard around the world.

It’s no surprise to me that there’s a sensible chemical solution to the seritonin weight gain problem — or that most doctors aren’t aware of it and just routinely harass patients. I don’t even want to discuss weight with doctors. Their ignorance and arrogance is so insulting that I don’t want to bother arguing it or dealing with the stress.

What seems crazy to me is that this information doesn’t get included with the drug itself. The weight gain in itself is enough to make a number of people who need antidepressants go off them, if they knew there was a way to keep it under control they might choose to use them.

Thankyou so much for this article-I`m going to print it & take it with me when I see my specialist next. It`s even more upsetting when the Doctors that prescribe such medications,then notice you have gained an enormous amount of weight (for the first time in my life) and then advise you that “you must lose weight somehow”???!!!

I agree with Elisa. Talking back to the TV can make you feel better (for a minute). I often do it too.
Thank you for a very interesting article, very enlightning. I was not slim and never exercised when I started taking all sorts of meds for Fibromyalgia and Fatigue, and of course gained more weight. Not long ago, I started to treadmill. I know I will never run any marathons, nor do I wish to, but at least, I feel like I have some sort of controle over the weight gain, which has seemed to stop.
Keep the instructive articles coming! This is a GREAT place to seek info. The comments are also good to read.
Thanks to all!

Thank you so much for this article. I have been on antidepressants for years and never heard from a doctor that the meds could cause weight gain – I was only told that I was being lazy & eating too much as my weight ballooned. After adding prednisone to my daily medication routine, I gained 150 pounds in 8 years and there seems to be no way of loosing any of it. I am a steroid-dependent asthmatic, so no getting off the prednisone; and if I don’t take anti-depressants, I curl up in a ball and hibernate. Talk about a catch-22.

Thank you! Thank you!

Unforunately endocrine problems such as diabetes, insulin resistance, hypothyroidism, adrenal problems, and so many other common issues all cause weight gain too. I wish doctors and the media would focus on medication and illness (including things like arthritis) as causes of obesity.