Weight loss & antidepressant HELP

Get a food scale. Use it to weigh everything, and log everything into your food diary religiously, no skipping, cheating or forgetting.

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10634517/you-dont-use-a-food-scale/p1

Hey hey!

I'm in a similar boat to you- I'm on medication that causes an increase in appetite. It sucks!

But here's what's worked for me. Like with everyone, your own experiences may vary:

1. I did some research into why my particular medication causes appetite increase. In my case it's due to blood sugar dropping really quickly on it. This was Good To Know- so I decided that I'd work on reducing sugar and upping my relative intake of proteins/fats/complex carbs to keep that blood sugar nice and steady all day.

2. I kinda just came to terms with the fact that one of the downsides to being on medication that works really well for my own health issue is that I'll be hungry more often. When I feel hungry and I know I've eaten enough- well, I've gotten to a stage where I shrug to myself and think, hey, this sucks but it's a million times better than my pre-meds symptoms. Ya win some, ya lose some!

3. Weigh/measure/log food. I know- and you know as well!- that on appetite-increasing meds, I simply can't trust my instincts with regards to how much food to eat. If I eat until I feel 100% satisfied, then I'm eating too much. That sucks! But logging everything means I can kinda outsource that instinct.

4. I've found that an 8:16 IF window works really well for me. It's kinda a way of hacking my brain/stomach. Cause on IF, I'd expect to be hungry towards the end of my 16 hour fasting window. Being hungry then would happen whether or not I was on meds. Cause if you don't eat for 16 hours, how are ya gonna feel? Hungry! And keeping all my calories to within 8 hours means that I get 8 whole hours of the day when I get to feel reasonably full. Which is both nice at the time, and also really helpful in keeping my willpower. I think there's no way I'd have the willpower to handle being hungry all the time! So chucking the hungry-time into half the day and getting a half-day of a break from being hungry, every single day, helps me out a ton.

and finally...

5. Not beating myself up over it. Listen, things are complicated and sometimes we need to lose out on one aspect to gain on another. Being on a medication that causes increased-appetite at the same time as working really well? Eh, it's gonna make weight loss or maintenance that bit harder. Which means that sometimes you're gonna put on a bit of weight. That's not a reflection on you or your willpower or any of that stuff. It's just a thing that happens, and that's Okay. You just gotta figure out new strategies.

I know when I started on my own medication I gave myself a few months 'off' from worrying about weight, where I was 100% focused on seeing how my meds worked and my own recovery. At the end of those few months.. well, my jeans sure were tighter. But I think that if I'd tried to lose weight in the first few months, the combination of adjusting to meds, handling other side-effects, dealing with picking up the pieces from my illness and all of it would have been too much to handle. Similarly, it's okay if you focused on adjusting to living with your higher dose of antidepressants for a while! We can't handle everything at once. So like.. see where you're at, be kind to you and best of luck!