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Why Do Antidepressants Cause Weight Gain?

If you are experiencing depression, you need to seek help and get treatment. While medications are useful in helping you restore your normal mood, they can also cause you to gain weight if you take antidepressants for a long period of time. For some, this could be another reason to be depressed.

  1. Which Antidepressants Cause Weight Gain

    • Nearly all antidepressants list weight gain as a potential side effect and some seem to cause larger amounts of weight gain than others. "Tricyclic antidepressants and monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are more likely to be associated with weight gain than are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). The exception to this may be long-term use of paroxetine (Paxil) --- an SSRI that's more likely to cause weight gain than are other SSRIs," according to Daniel Hall-Flavin, M.D.

    Who Gains the Most?

    • About 25 percent of the people who take antidepressants can expect to gain weight. While weight gain on antidepressants will vary from person to person, if a person gains weight within the first week of taking antidepressants, he or she is more likely to see larger weight gains overall than a person who doesn't gain weight during the first week of antidepressant treatment.

    Weight Gain That Is Relative

    • People sometimes suffering from depression may lose their appetite. When antidepressant therapy works and their moods improve, their appetites return and they begin eating normally. This leads to weight gains.

    What Causes the Weight Gain

    • No one is absolutely sure why antidepressants cause weight gain, but some believe the medications affect appetite and metabolism. This is not surprising since antidepressants affect your brain chemicals, which besides regulating mood, control appetite. The opinion comes from anecdotal evidence. Doctors have worked with patients who have said they don't change their eating habits, yet they gain weight (indicating a metabolic change) and other doctors say their patients complain about being hungry all the time (appetite change).

    What Can Help

    • If you are beginning to gain weight on a particular medication, talk with your doctor about changing medications. Wellbutrin and Paxil are known to cause weight gains, but Effexor, Zoloft and Serzone generally do not cause gains or do so in small amounts. The downside to this is that a different drug may not be as effective in controlling your depression.

    Eat Healthy and Exercise

    • If you do begin to gain weight while taking an antidepressant, then make sure to eat a well-balanced diet. Choose healthy foods and you can at least make sure the weight you do gain won't be fat. Don't try and restrict your calories, though, as you could cause a brain chemical imbalance. Begin exercising and you might even be able to balance out the medication's weight gain with exercise's weight loss effect.

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