Prednisone causes weight gain. It increases hunger, water retention, and puts fat in the worst places–particularly the face and abdomen. This is how to cope with prednisone induced weight gain through diet.
Hello there my name is dennis and i’m making this video for those of you out there who may be taking prednisone and having difficulty keeping your weight the same and for those of you who have problems gaining a lot of weight since you’ve started taking prednisone as you may have heard prednisone is a drug that’s given for people with inflammation in their body
Or autoimmune diseases sometimes it’s the only thing that can help them keep whatever autoimmune disease they have in check so that you can have a normal quality of life in my case i weighed about a hundred and fifty five or something like that before i started taking prednisone and after i started taking it i had gained about 40 or 50 pounds a few months ago i
Went on a diet even though i’m still on the prednisone and lost i’ve lost about 25 pounds so far now it hasn’t been easy the first 20 pounds or so basically to starve myself and cut down on my calories but then toward the end i found out about atkins and low carb diets and how those can be helpful as well the problem that i was having was is that when you take the
Prednisone it makes you incredibly hungry it stimulates your appetite by a significant amount and when you do eat you tend to store more water and salt in your body so you’ll have more water weight but it also puts weight around the face like in the cheeks around the stomach sometimes behind the neck and you get a lot of central body obesity which is the worst
Kind of the most ugly kind unfortunately for me the biggest problem i had up with all of it is basically hunger and what i’ve discovered is that if i eat more of a higher fat moderate protein but very low carbon i’m able to keep the hunger at bay and i’m still able to eat enough that i’m not starving all the time in my weight stays pretty much the same i like i
Said i’ve lost about 25 pounds so far and i’m i’m feeling a lot better because i have done that and i’m not starving anymore which is really really nice it’s my understanding that when you’re on prednisone and other leuco court avoids that your body needs more protein and it tends to hold on to the water so if you’re eating higher protein than you did before it’s
Something that your body is basically needing anyway it can be incredibly frustrating for people who are on prednisone because it seems like no matter what you do you’re going to gain weight and that isn’t necessarily the case the problem with of course the prednisone is that when you do even though when you lose weight you’re still going to have weight on your
Cheeks and in your face and around the stomach and and stuff like that because it changes the way the hormones of the prednisone changed so your body stores fat so that’s just one of the unfortunate consequences but at least you can try and keep things a little bit more controlled than than what they were if you just were to eat like a high carb diet you your
Body would just go crazy and gained a ton of weight i noticed for me when i was going and getting fast food and drinking pop or soda or whatever you want to call it i gained weight tremendously fast same thing goes with pizza the bread in it for whatever reason makes me gain absolute ton of weight and it also makes my stomach feel a lot more bloated and kind of
Sick feeling since i cut these things out my stomach feels i’m talking butter there’s been some days where i’ve just been ravenously hungry and i tried to be careful about keeping my carbs low i try and do about 20 grams of carbs a day and that would include when you read the back of it’s like making sure it doesn’t have sugars in it as well so in general what
Do i eat tally up like for breakfast i’ll have bacon and etics which basically have almost no carbs with the bacon you got to check to make sure that it doesn’t have a lot of sugar in it or any sugar if you can help it some bacon’s are cured and sugar same thing goes with ham another process meats and then for lunch i’ll have i can have steak home with about you
Shouldn’t have more than about 4 ounces of cheese in a day stay away from the kind of cheeses that i think cottage cheese isn’t no no but you can have and real fresh cheese’s you got to watch like more of the like cheddar cheese and provolone an american i eat those kind of cheeses about 4 ounces the cheese is okay and then you got to make sure that you get enough
Vegetables in your diet but green leafy vegetables even though they have carbs they’re relatively lower in carbs compared to other kinds of carbs so i’ll have about two cups of salad and then one of their kind of vegetable for up to three cups of salad a day and then with the dressings i got to make sure that the car pirlo on those some dressings like i like ranch
And that’s usually pretty low carb but you get again you get a watch because so can i have sugars in them from i drink coffee some people noticed when they drink coffee it makes their blood shift extra blood sugars and they get hungry from having coffee i noticed sometimes i do still have to be careful with it a lot of times i drink it black but if i have espresso
I’ll put a little bit of heavy cream in it because that has little carbs and then i’ll put splenda in it but i will use table sugar at all because that’s just unknown oh definitely make you gain weight some of the foods that i don’t eat that i really watch out for and i’ve noticed my cholesterol numbers and stuff have gotten a lot better since i’ve been following
This diet is i won’t eat again sugar i don’t drink pop i don’t have dessert like pancakes or cupcakes or pie or things like that i don’t have pasta not even whole-grain pasta i don’t eat bread and i’m a whole grain bread people say well you know whole grains are better because they don’t digest as fast so they don’t raise your blood sugar and cause you to gain
Weight as easily but i noticed for me they do and for a lot of people they do my wife is type 1 diabetes and she tests her blood with a blood glucose monitor and even when she eats whole grains it still makes her blood sugar’s get really high so i’m not completely convinced that complex carbs and whole grains are necessarily ok for you if you’re someone who’s
Taking prednisone or here’s somebody that is carbon tolerant i don’t eat french fries anymore i really try to stay away from some of the fast food places i used to go to if you are going to get fast food just to get the burger you can have like a you know a little bit of onion ketchup you got a watch they actually make hides makes reduced sugar ketchup now that the
Sweetened with splenda and it actually tastes really really good so that isn’t a bad compromise to try you got to watch out for sauces like barbecue sauce things like that can you have carbs in them and which are basically turn to sugar in your body and it can be a problem but the biggest thing overall of all of this really is just keeping hunger at bay and trying
To keep the weight down one other benefit will notice is that if you keep your carbohydrate level low and your fat level a little bit higher to keep you more full and your protein level about moderate that you’ll notice that the weight won’t be coming on and also that you won’t be retaining as much water which prednisone again will make you do so that’s really
A positive thing when your your body holds on to the sodium where when you’re having prednisone so you may want to watch how much sodium you take yeah especially if you have high blood pressure as a side effect from taking friend ism for a long enough time i know for me i have high blood pressure from having taken prednisone now for several years and when i more
Sodium i noticed my hands feel worse puffy and and i do retain more water so that’s something that you may want to take into consideration i mean maybe you’re one of those people that it’s not the case for you and you just have to see on your own how it affects you but overall to me the following like a napkins kind of diet or low-carb diet has been tremendously
Helpful as someone who is taking prednisone and doesn’t have any prospects right now of getting off that if i take ten milligrams of prednisone a day which is higher than what you should be for a long time but it’s not nearly as high as some people have to do if i was on a much higher dose i know that i would be even hungrier and have even more side-effects and if
You’re one of those people i think the diet might help you a lot more than it has even helped me so i just i wish you the best of luck with everything and hang in there prednisone can feel like the worst drug in the world because of the side effects but consider the alternative if you’re one of those people who has all sort of colitis and you know the side effects
From that or someone who has sarcoidosis or like me someone who has arthritis you know the prednisone helps me to still function like a hormone normal human being without it my body stiffens up my joints hurt and i can’t i can’t really do anything i’m very very non-functional about it so i’m grateful for it and i’m glad that i found a diet that helps me kind of deal with it as well
Transcribed from video
Prednisone and Weight Gain By denisthelawyer
