Does strong pain medication influence weight gain?

Judda2014

Hi MyFitnessPal Community
I started tracking my weight and my daily food in August 2014. At the end of 2018, I had lost 25% of my original weight of 97 kgs or 24 kgs. To say I was thrilled is an understatement!! I loved watching the downward trend in the progress chart.
However in 2020, an old back injury came roaring back to life. Since then, I have had 3 more major surgeries and started on a cocktail of serious medications. Three months ago, I had an Abbott Neural Stimulator inserted into my left butt cheek.
I have gained 12 kg. I just can not move it. I am desperate to get back to 73 kgs. I track my food. Some days all I eat is a banana, some almonds and about 10 cups of white tea. But my tummy continues to bloat out and I get heavier. I am panicking and anxious because I can’t walk far, I can’t exercise and I can’t do the things I used to do. I’m confident the Stimulator will eventually work for me but my weight gain is causing me huge distress.
How can you help me?
1. Do you take meds that have caused weight gain?
2. How did you counteract that?
3. Any and all advice gratefully appreciated.

AnnPT77

Have you talked to your doctor about this?

If that's typically what you eat, you'd expect to lose weight. If that was just an extreme example . . . what matters is your average calorie intake over a period of time, rather than the extremes.

Reduced daily life activity certainly reduces your calorie needs, possibly by quite a lot.

Medication can increase scale weight, but the mechanisms tend to be one of:

* Fatigue, i.e., we move less and burn fewer calories (poor sleep can be the trigger of fatigue, or other things about the drug)
* Joint pain (limiting movement)
* Water retention (which is not fat gain)
* Constipation, for obvious reasons, since the stuff in the digestive tract has weight, and shows on the scale, but isn't strictly body weight
* Increased appetite, which should be obvious if calorie counting consistently

Generally healing takes extra calories vs. health, but perhaps not enough to offset some other factor.

I have taken meds in the past (estrogen antagonists/antagonists for breast cancer) that have a reputation for weight gain as a side effect. I didn't gain weight, but was increasing activity and eating more veggies because of the cancer history, so may've offset the effect (which is largely via appetite or fatigue, or joint pain IMU with those drugs). I took steroids for a while; they have a reputation for extremes of water retention, but frankly there was so much going on then that I wasn't paying much attention to weight, and there were other factors tending to drive it down (like nausea - because this was during chemo).

Generally, fat gain/retention is about calorie intake. Some medical conditions or meds can obviously increase other than fat . . . that's why I'm asking if you've discussed the weight gain/retention with your doctor. If you do, take several weeks of honest calorie logs with you to your appointment, and if the doctor is unhelpful, ask for referral to a registered dietitian for help.