If you are overweight or obese, you know that your overall health is at risk. After all, weighing too much can increase your risk of a range of ailments, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and cancer. For these reasons, when people struggle to lose weight on their own, they often turn to prescription diet drugs that can help them shed the excess pounds with greater ease and speed. But, are prescription diet drugs bad for heart health? Could they be doing just as much harm as being overweight in the first place? Keep reading to learn more about this important topic so you can make the right decisions when it comes to your weight and your cardiovascular health.
What Happens to Your Heart When You’re Overweight?
According to Everyday Health, when you are overweight, the extra pounds put a strain on your heart and cause your heart rate to rise. When you have an elevated heart rate, your heart muscle can become increasingly weaker over time. That, in turn, can eventually result in congestive heart failure, which is a serious condition. Beyond that, if your heart rate is very fast, your blood pressure could actually end up falling way too low, and you might even end up blacking out. Yikes!
What Happens to Your Heart When You’re on Prescription Diet Drugs?
As you can see, being overweight is certainly bad for your heart, and it can lead to a host of cardiovascular complications. However, it turns out that prescription diet drugs might have similar affects on the heart. So, while you might be thinking that you are taking a step in the right direction by opting to take a prescription diet pill to lose weight, you might actually be doing quite a bit of harm anyway.
Basically, prescription diet drugs usually contain stimulant ingredients that increase metabolism and heart rate. Therefore, if your heart rate is already elevated because you’re overweight, you can imagine how dangerous a stimulant that further increases your heart rate can be. Plus, for individuals who are already at risk of atrial fibrillation, which is a type of irregular heartbeat, the wrong prescription diet pill might even end up triggering it.
What Should You Do?
If you need to lose weight, but you also want to keep your ticker going strong, there are things that you can do. For example, there are certain prescription diet drugs, such as Belviq, that have been studied in order to prove their effectiveness when it comes to weight loss, as well as their safety when it comes to heart health, so talk to your doctor about those options. Beyond that, you can also look into over-the-counter weight loss pills, and you can try simple diet and exercise plans that can help you slim down safely.
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