How to lose weight with food on weight gaining medication?

[Joeslacker]

Hello. I've never had problems with my weight until I got older and got put on antipsychotics specificly Invega. Most the other anti psychotics make me gain even more weight but now I'm usually around 15-30 pounds overweight at any given time. Now Going into the food portion of what happens here as I do get enough exercise such as walking and even intense cardio and sometimes weight lifting.

I eat typically. Oatmeal,  Oranges,  Apples,  Orange juice,  Silk Almond milk unsweetened, Tyson Tenderbird chicken,  Hash brown paddies,  Walnuts (recently swapped from almonds) , Bananas,  100% whole wheat bread or sometimes white bread, Sometimes ham slices and Cheese sandwiches.

Basically stuff along those lines but I'm wondering is there anyway to revamp this in such a way where I wont' gain as much weight or maybe even lose weight with a better diet? I eat pretty clean for the most part and still am around 20 pounds above what I used to be at a slimmer weight. Also if it could be something cost effective if possible because I'm low income and have around 180 bucks a month on myself to spend. Thanks a million guys!

[Barb135]

Haha... maybe Florida isn't part of the U.S.  Personally, I love avocados, but I don't buy the ones grown here; they have about as much flavor as shoe leather.  :-)

Let's just agree to disagree on the Farmer's Market issue, because things aren't the same in all parts of the country and they do change over time as it becomes easier and faster to transport things like fruits and vegetables.  Even by your rules, if a farmer is within a certain distance from the market, but in another state, they can still qualify for the market and for all we know, the people selling the produce might be connected with the farm. As I noted, literally, ALL of our Farmer's Markets have organic vendors and trust me, most of their produce IS considerably more expensive than other produce.

You're absolutely right that you can't wash off 100% of pesticides/chemicals because produce has pores that allow them to absorb some of the chemicals, but then I didn't say you could wash off 100%, either... getting off some is better than not getting off any.

"washing with water reduces dirt, germs, and pesticide residues remaining on fruit and vegetable surfaces. Holding the fruit or vegetable under flowing water removes more than dunking the produce. Peeling or scrubbing produce like potatoes with a stiff clean brush or rubbing soft items like peaches while holding them under running water works best to remove residues. However, pesticide residues can stick better to waxy or soft-skinned fruits. If the produce was treated with wax, pesticide residues may be trapped underneath the wax.

Even more interesting, the specialist said that some fruit and vegetable washing products can be effective at removing dirt or residues, but they have not been proven to be any more effective than water alone. This is because water alone is effective at removing some surface residues. No washing method is 100% effective for removing all pesticide residues."  
http://npic.orst.edu/capro/fruitwash.html

The bottom line is that you're completely ignoring the fact that it's better to eat non-organic produce than it is to eat no produce.  For some people every dollar they spend on food could mean the difference between whether or not they can pay a light bill or buy medications.  Some simply don't have access to an affordable supply of organic foods and I'd sure hate to have them stop eating produce of any kind because they think  it's a waste of time unless it's fresh and organic because that's simply not true.  I was merely pointing out a possible place to find less expensive produce than what one might find in the grocery store...

Although I don't recommend canned foods because of sodium, sugar, or other additives, even that's better than no produce if one reads labels and gets the ones with the least additives.

[Paxiled]

I agree, which is why I said, it is what it is if you can't afford organic.  Another thing about washing products is that they may be more harmful than the residues -- it's like those who go to the gym and apply Lysol every time they use equipment because, heavens, someone else sat there.  The disinfectant is more harmful than anything on the person's sweat if applied repeatedly because it's essentially an antibiotic and is killing off the things our body has naturally to protect us from illness.  So yeah, there's no perfection in life.  But we have to consider that the most important input in our lives is the water we drink and the food we eat, and people who as this poster does can afford to buy meat can afford organic by just cutting down on meat intake, as meat is the most expensive thing we can buy outside of seafood.  Many more people can afford organic than know it.  As for the organic food at farmer's markets, again, know your market -- the research study I participated in showed that much of what is claimed to be organic at farmer's markets not only isn't but the farmers don't even know what organic means.  I didn't say don't use them, I said, find out who runs them and what the rules are so you can go to the good ones.  

[Barb135]

I agree with Paxiled about the diet but I understand that money can be a problem when it comes to buying food, especially fresh veggies, etc.  

You can always hit the frozen food section and see what they have on sale for frozen veggies.  Frozen is almost as good as fresh and national chain I shop in has packages of veggies for $1/each.  Each package is enough for me for 2 meals... Instead of cooking the whole package and having to eat it 2 meals in a row, I take out what I want to eat and put the rest back in the freezer for another day.  The next day I can take out something else...

You can also swap out your Tenderbird chicken for real chicken or frozen fish.  I know many people don't go for red meat, but personally, I like a steak or burger once in a while, so by utilizing the frozen section of your store, you might be able to save enough to splurge or get something else you like.  You can even get frozen fruit and whip up some desserts or smoothies with that almond milk to make things exciting once in a while.

Another thing to keep in mind is that ham has a lot of sodium which can cause fluid retention so that could account for some of your weight as well.  My weight sometimes fluctuates up to 5 lbs/day because of fluid retention.  Check the Tyson chicken along with the hash brown patties too along with anything else that's pre-packaged - they might have more sodium than you need.

[Joeslacker]

Frozen section for veggies I was always under the impression that just about anything in the frozen section can be bad as it has preservatives in it  but could I be wrong with the veggies and fruits? I like getting the fruits i like the fiber it keeps me regular. Also the tenderbird I think is a huge culprit to look at here. As I've heard from some doctors on youtube describe that these hormone and GMO filled meats such as tenderbird can actually mess with your hormones and ultimately lower your testosterone and cause you to gain weight.

Do you have any recommendations for natural chicken that I could get in a food store or do they even sell something like that at any of these commercial chains? Also , yeah I'll get rid of the hash browns or maybe limit them to like 2 paddies every other day if I can even be disciplined enough to do that. Also the sodium thing I think is brilliant dude that's something I think a lot of people overlook a lot of times including me. Also I'm getting a nutribullet or ninja something or other blender so maybe I can make somthing snack like delishious once in a while. It sure beats all the snack section at winco.

Thanks a million guys.

[Barb135]

If you buy veggies that are packaged in cream or butter sauces, etc you're right - they're full of preservatives and other nasty things, but if you buy packages of "just" veggies, they're as good for as fresh because they're picked and frozen at the peak of freshness.  Check the label of the package - there should be nothing in the package except the vegetables... I often buy a mix of broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots - by doing that, I've got 3 different colored veggies - green, white and orange.  You can buy a variety of single or mixed veggies and steam or roast them with spices or herbs you like to "dress them up" to your own taste...

It's good to buy fresh fruit and veggies whenever you can do it... This time of year, you can watch the Farmer's Markets.  I don't know where you live, but in my area, there's a Farmer's Market almost every day of the week. You can get a variety of fruits and veggies of every color of the rainbow and it's much less expensive than buying it in a grocery store.   I can get a lot of fruits and veggies at the Farmer's Markets in my area for $10 and they'll last me for a long time.  Extra can put in the freezer if you can't eat it right away.

You can make an awesome smoothie with a frozen banana (peel the banana, wrap it in plastic wrap so it won't turn brown, then put it in the freezer for a few hours), a couple of strawberries (if you have them but they aren't really necessary), about 1/2 cup almond milk, a dash of cinnamon and blend it all up.  It should end up like a milkshake...yummy.  You could even add a little peanut butter if you wanted.  I make smoothies with every kind of fruit, including berries, I can come up with.  Sometimes I use almond milk and sometimes I use coconut milk.  Even though coconut milk has fat in it, it's a more healthful fat than many others.  When I eat coconut milk or use coconut oil, I lose weight.  We do need healthful fats as well.

You can buy organic chicken, but it's very expensive.  I don't buy it very often because I can't afford it.  When I buy chicken (or any meat), I look for those that say they don't have added hormones, etc.  because you're right, the extra things do mess up our body.   I often buy chicken parts, like legs, thighs, breasts etc because my husband doesn't eat chicken and it's hard for me to eat a whole one by myself.  If I buy a package of thighs or breasts, etc I can split the package and freeze it in portions so I can only cook what I need at one time without having a lot of leftovers.  It saves quite a bit of money to do that...  

If I do buy a whole chicken, I roast it, eat as much as I can over a couple of days, then simmer the carcass until all the meat falls off, remove all the bones and skin, add veggies like carrots, celery, potatoes onions, etc (or whatever you like) and make soup.  I sometimes add a little brown rice, barley or macaroni to it.  This is good comfort food in the winter.  This is something else I can freeze in individual portions, so I don't have to eat it for days on end.  Of course, freezer space might be a problem for you, so that has to be taken into consideration too.

These are just some ideas of things you can do to give yourself some variety at less expense.  If you know someone who can help you learn how to cook, that would be much better than fixing prepared foods that have preservatives and sodium in them.   You might also find a friend who has a cookbook you could borrow and give that a try, too or perhaps check out a thrift or secondhand store - most of those have cookbooks relatively inexpensively.  Roasting or steaming is usually best for veggies to preserve the vitamins/minerals and you can experiment with herbs and spices.

[Joeslacker]

Thank you this helped quite a bit.

[Paxiled]

When I say colored veggies, I mean, yeah, greens like collards, kale, broccoli, dandelion greens, cabbage of all kinds, basically, all the veggies that are out there.  The reason I mention colored is, that's an indicator of a lot of antioxidants, a kind of nutrient that makes veggies so important as well as the assimilable minerals and other nutrients.  Personally, I eat only organically grown, which is not as much more expensive than it used to be, but here's the thing -- if you cut down on red meat, which is very expensive, and substitute some of those meals for legumes as your protein source, the veggie are miraculously converted to being very inexpensive because meat is really really expensive.  I love animal food and am not in any way a vegetarian, but I never eat meat during the day, only for dinner, and even then my animal food is usually seafood, which is rich in essential fats.  Now, seafood is always expensive unless you fish and I don't, but you can reduce the cost by buying it frozen and buying the less expensive varieties.  Cooking simply isn't hard, actually, but the taste will depend on the quality of what you start off with.  Organic veggies are a lot sweeter tasting than petroleum farmed foods and they use seeds that were hybridized for flavor as well as other things, so you don't need to do much to them to make them taste good.  Steaming is easy, fairly quick, and you don't need to add any seasoning at all.  As for frozen veggies, actually, it's very possible frozen veggies have more nutrients and are fresher than fresh veggies.  This is because they typically are frozen at the farm these days, whereas the "fresh" food we buy often comes from far away and is a week old by the time we get to it.  I prefer the taste of fresh, but frozen is fine.  I'm not sure it saves you money, though, as long as you buy what's in season.  Farmer's markets are okay, but make sure you know the market you're shopping at -- make sure the rules of the market require the farmers to have grown the food they're selling.  Most farmer's markets have almost no organic food, they might very well have picked it up that morning at the local wholesale food district the same as your local supermarket does, and the quality might be poor which means taste will be a problem and turn you off to eating veggies.  Farmer's markets are run by someone or some group and can tell you what the rules are.  A real tell is if you find a bunch of things that don't grow in your part of the country -- that's a bogus farmer's market.  So if you live on the East Coast and see fresh avocados or kiwis, it's a bogus farmer's market.  So as mentioned above, frozen veggies are fine but taste isn't as good as fresh.  Organic is sweeter so you don't have to spend a lot of time learning how to make it taste good.  While you're doing other things when you come home, you can steam some brown rice in one pot and the night before cook your legumes and you don't have to watch over it.  Pretty easy and there you go.  Oh, and if you roast veggies, you don't need spice, but if you dribble a little olive oil on them, they are really yummy and again don't take any time to cook at all -- you'll even find yourself liking brussels sprouts and other veggies you didn't know you liked.  Go ahead and have your meat dishes, just fewer of them, and you won't spend as much money and you'll be eating leaner and healthier.  Don't give up what you like always -- just less often.  Eating should be enjoyable.  Now, some foods are a lot healthier to eat than others, and health is a bigger subject than this -- I mentioned the has browns because potatoes in general, and especially fried ones, are very high on the glycemic index, which means they turn to sugar very quickly after you eat them and if you don't burn it off quickly can make some people gain weight easily.  Knowing how quickly food metabolizes into sugar is a very good gauge of how much weight a person with a weight problem will have -- others never gain no matter what they do, but we're not talking about them.  Peace.

[Barb135]

I live on the east coast and we have fresh avocados - they do grow in Florida; though, admittedly our avocados aren't as good or as healthy as the ones grown in California... In addition, some of the vendors actually go pick their produce up from the fields overnight from neighboring states, so just because it may not be locally grown doesn't mean it's a bogus Farmer's Market... It also depends on where you are as to whether or not there's organic produce at your market... Almost every market we have here has some organic vendors.  

It's also important to know that there are some items that are more important to buy organic than others.  There's the list called "the dirty dozen" that should be organic - those are: strawberries, spinach, nectarines, apples, grapes, peaches, cherries, pears, tomatoes, celery, potatoes, and sweet bell peppers.  These products are most likely to be contaminated.

The bottom line is that it's better to eat non-organic fruits and veggies if they aren't available or if buying organic strains the budget than it is to not eat them at all...  In many/most cases, scrubbing/washing well is sufficient to eliminate pesticides and/or other chemicals that might be present.

[Paxiled]

Barb, we all know Florida isn't actually part of the East Coast -- or maybe even the US.  It's a tropical climate unlike any other in the US and it does have a lot of things that you normally think of as growing elsewhere.  I bet most people don't know their winter tomatoes come from Florida.  As for Florida avocados, I don't like avocados -- when I grew up in California nobody actually ate them, they all were dying on the ground -- but a Florida avocado is hardly an avocado at all and would discourage newbies from ever eating one!  The best ones grow in Mexico, but the organic ones are mostly from California if you want the kind of avocado people think of when they think of avocados.  So yeah, Florida is an exception.  But as for picking up things from a neighboring state, that violates the rules of any genuine farmer's market.  What you want from a farmer's market is good grown by the farmer who is selling it so you can ask how he grew it and and how fresh it is, etc.  Picking it up from a neighboring state is not different than buying from the supermarket and won't be at a different price -- in fact it will be cheaper than at the farmer's market.  I'm sure this is way more info than anyone wants, but I was in the organic produce biz for many years and I also did a study of farmer's markets for a Nader organization, and most of them are in fact bogus.  Why this is important is that to go to one you have to get up very early and use up a lot of your day not at your convenience, and the only reason to do this is to get something you can't get at the local supermarket or health food store which has more reasonable hours.  And it won't be less expensive unless the farmer selling it grew it and therefore didn't have to pay a middleman to buy it.  You cannot wash off pesticides -- this is not logical and is harmful propaganda.  While you can wash off the most intensive accumulations of it on the outside of the food, many foods we don't eat that part of it anyway -- avocados, anyone? -- you can't wash off what's on the inside, and plants eat not only from the soil but also from the leaves, so everything on the outside is absorbed to the inside.  Over the years of eating this accumulates so it adds up to tons of toxic chemicals consumed.  Cancer build slowly in exactly this way.  As for the dirtier foods, they're all dirty because you're ignoring the fertilizer and the herbicides, which are used on all conventional farms.  The fertilizer and a lot of applications are petroleum-based, which means not only is it toxic but also highly estrogenic, not a good thing.  Just better to avoid it if you're able to.  If not, it is what it is.

[Paxiled]

A lot of medications have this as a side effect, and it's really hard to deal with.  It happened to me on Paxil.  As for your diet, you're really not describing a well-rounded way of eating.  You mention some foods that are never healthy, such as ham and hash browns -- fun, but not really good for you and not good for losing weight.  On the other hand, nobody wants to have a diet that has no fun at all in it.  But you don't mention veggies at all, which should have been the largest category of food.  Do you eat meals, or just stop and eat easy to prepare foods?  How old are you and have you learned how to cook and do you have time to do it?  A basic meal would consist of legumes for protein, whole grain for energy, and lots of colored veggies for antioxidants.  Animal protein at most once a day and try to make that fish as much as possible.  But frankly, I ate great when I was on paxil and exercised a ton and still gained a lot of weight over a period of years because I didn't eat like a monk.  I like food.  To counter the effects of medication, you have to eat optimally unless you're one of those lucky people who don't get this side effect.  There's a book on this called the Anti-Depressant Survival Guide by Hedaya.  I think the recommended diet isn't all that great in it, as it's very heavy on dairy and other things that don't seem optimal, but he's a functional physician, a psychiatrist who also practices medicine, and it might give you some ideas.

[Joeslacker]

I don't eat very prepared meals I can say that much. Typically it's just me throwing something in my air oven. I don't use a microwave since it kills nutrients and is basically useless. As for the whole grains I get those from my organic oats cereals. I haven't learned how to cook however it is nice that you mention that I know someone in the family whose really good that I could probably spend some more time with doing something like this with him.

By colored veggies what exactly do you mean by colored? Not the typically greens you would get or? I do occasionally get bell peppers , jalapenos, and I used to get celery a lot maybe I should get that back in. And for the animal protein just once a day seems pretty low as I have pretty big cravings for meats.

Also yeah I'll try and get to the local library to check out that book seems like it would give me some more knowledge on my particular lifestyle.

Thanks a million dude.