Is Your Medicine Cabinet Widening Your Waistline?
Common meds that cause weight gain and how to keep it from happening
Did you know that the medicine that’s calming your anxiety or the one that’s helping dull the pain from that toothache could be making you fat? So says Dr. Joseph Colella, weight loss expert, bariatric surgeon, and author of Skinny People Just Don’t Get It.
We asked the doc to pinpoint four common medicines and their bulge-inducing side-effects. Read on to find out if any of them are in your medicine cabinets.
“Sleeping pills are another surprising appetite increaser. They work on the brain in a similar manner as some common sedatives like Valium and Xanax in that they accidentally stimulate the appetite center and make you convinced that you’re hungry,” Colella says. He likens it to a ‘case of the munchies.’ “The mechanism here is almost identical to those cravings,” he adds.
