# Need good alternative to elavil



## littleitaly112 (Aug 9, 2009)

Hey everyone.....So glad I found this site. It's so nice to be able to interract with people who actually understand what I am going through!!Well, here's my problem. I have been on elavil/amitriptyline for over a year now....and what a fantastic drug. I actually felt normal (or as close to normal as an IBS sufferer can feel). Problem is, I couldnt take the sneaky weight gain any more. I work out 6 days a week and try real hard to eat healthy (brown bag to work every day, etc etc), but I seemed to be putting on weight anyway. Told my doc and he suggested lexapro. I started at 5 mg 2 weeks ago and was supposed to go to 10 mg today. But the nausea was a bit too much to deal with. It got a little better from the first couple days, but was still bothersome. Plus the general feeling of weirdness....basically feeling like I'm on drugs. So I did some web research and found that it seems the side effects do subside with continued use. So I was feeling a little better about this until I found a site which indicated the tremedous withdrawel symptoms. Scared me to death, so I basically have stopped taking it.I will be calling my doc on Monday, but I am just curious if any of you can recommend something that works like the elavil minus the weight gain. I'm really hoping I can have my cake and eat it too!! LOLThanks a lot...NicoleFYI I am IBS-A


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

I think all the tricyclics have that same sort of issue, but how much is hard to judge as everything varies so much.You might look at Buspar http://anxiety.emedtv.com/buspar/buspar-and-weight-gain.html which is a related med for anxiety, but not and antidepressant and doesn't have weight gain very often. It can make people light headed, especially if you don't eat breakfast.If you need to stick with antidepressants this article has a bit of info on which ones seem less likely to cause ithttp://depression.emedtv.com/antidepressan...eight-gain.htmlSometimes exercise actually doesn't help that much with weight loss as people tend to be hungrier and often do treat themselves for working out hard with more calories than they burned off. So you can work out more to lose more weight but end up making it harder to lose weight.http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/20...ercise.myth.cnn and http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,...914857,00.html/ have some info on that.You might need to count the calories you are taking in as "healthy" does not mean "low in calories". You can eat enough healthy food to be gaining weight consistently, people do it all the time. If you eat more calories than you burn you gain weight and your body doesn't just store junk food calories, it will store calories no matter what food they came from.


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