How I learnt to love my new body after gaining two stone on antidepressants

I’ve struggled with weight my entire life. At 5’10”, I’ve always been a generally large person. I consistently joke that everything about me is big, except for my teeth and wrists!

All that being said, I’ve been really frustrated over the last five years with my weight. I had lost a lot of weight in my early and mid-20s when my job required me to run all over Washington, D.C. with little breaks. I was also looking for love and stupidly thought the number on the scale mattered when it came to finding romance. It wasn’t until I was in my late 20s and met my now husband that I realised it doesn’t matter what you look like when love is involved.

In January 2017, I had an episode that, at the time, I thought was a panic attack. I had to call an ambulance and friends to meet me at the hospital and it was utterly embarrassing. Laying in the hospital bed that next morning, after my parents drove down from Pennsylvania to meet me, I had a frank conversation with them about the fact that I should go on antidepressants. 

I had resisted going on them for a few years, during the stress of my journalism job in D.C. and then again when my husband hadn’t proposed to me, and I was struggling with the status of our relationship. At the time, I didn’t realise that antidepressants served multiple purposes—they weren’t just for depression. I didn’t feel depressed, I felt quite the contrary. I loved my life and felt genuinely happy with things despite the stresses I mentioned above.

I remember my mother asking: “would you rather feel sad or be fat and happy?” after I expressed my concern about weight gain on SSRIs. I did not want to have another panic attack like I did so I agreed to start generic Lexapro and find a therapist.

The therapist helped me immensely. I enjoyed seeing someone that I could talk to who had no idea about anyone I was speaking about. She was a completely neutral party and it made me feel so relaxed to share my concerns.

Over the next four-and-a-half years, I continued to have the panic attacks, or ‘episodes’ as my husband and I nicknamed them. We thought they were due to our bulldog passing away, then again because we were thinking about moving home to Pennsylvania, my relationship with my husband, our wedding prep since he had proposed in 2020, the list goes on. My antidepressant got changed to generic Prozac and the dose got upped. I saw another therapist and visited another one while home visiting my parents. Nothing seemed to work.

All the while, I could see from January 2017 through where I was at that point (via my FitBit app) that my weight had crept up, making quite a significant jump when I started the SSRIs. It was incredibly frustrating and made me very upset. I internalised a lot of my weight struggles (and still do!), often thinking of myself as a failure.