Hope the scientists on this board will explain this better than me about weight gain and antibiotics.

My LLMD told me I would most iikely gain weight with antibiotics because of the inflammatory reaction that would occur during treatment.

Inflammation causes a person to become insulin resistant. The insulin is there, but the inflammation in the body blocks the insulin from entering the cell.

The insulin is then stored as fat.

This might be what causes the weight gain. Older folks sometimes gain weight around the middle.

TIME Magazine, Feb. 23, 2004 ran a front cover story, "The Secret Killer".

The surprising link between "inflammation" and....., other diseases.

I don't know if you can get it from the web, but here's their website:
www.time.com

Your library would definitely have a copy of the article.

As for thyroid problems....,

Also, as BambiLand pointed out on her recent thyroid post that some Labs are slow to change the NEW 2002 standards for TSH.

TSH used to be 10 as the high.

Now they've moved it all the way down to 3.
Some men feel best at 2 and some women feel best at 1.

This TSH value may later be lowered below 3.

I checked my LAB Corp. results & they hadn't changed their values. TSK! TSK!

Hope that helps some.

The bodies metabolism gets down regulated by some sort of endocrine cascade, which nobody seems to fully understand. Basically when this happens you store more of the calories that you eat and your body temperature goes down. Something like when you go on a starvation diet.

Once the lyme is brought under control, the weight typically drops off with out even trying. I lost 20 lbs within a few weeks when the Lyme symptoms started to abate, I did not even realize that I was loosing it until I went on the scale.

In a normal situation you cannot really loose more than about 2 lbs a week on average, even with less than 800 Calorie intake per day and vigorous exercise. This has both to do with the amount of calories you can actually burn with exercise as well as the automatic down regulation that occurs with reduced food intake. To see it drop off like that was somewhat of a shock since I did not change my eating habits at all!

In some cases, the pitutitary gets damaged, in which case some people are put on human growth hormone to increase the metabolism and get rid of mental foggyness that sometimes accompanies this.

If you are really really sick you can try to loose weight but it likely won't work and may make you sicker (skipping a meal would wipe me out).

I still don't understand the mechanics of this effect but it is interesting. There is something in the food that that body needs and I tried to figure it out. But despite trying all sorts of mineral and organic suppliments as a substitute for the needed meals, I never could find it. I was hoping that I could identify a particular substance so as to figure out what the body was deficient in. But the experiments provided no insight into the phenomina.

Hope that helps answer your question.