Hi there<\/p>\n
Thanks for your email and for getting in touch.<\/p>\n
It is very good that you tested and were able to access HIV meds. Although it must have been difficult when you first found out, HIV treatment is very effective.<\/p>\n
Most people put on a little weight when starting treatment. This is because before treatment, HIV was using energy from food to make your viral load \u00a0high. HIV meds are really effective at reducing your viral load to much lower levels, so if you haven’t changed your diet or become more active, most people put on weight.<\/p>\n
Rather than using slimming products, your clinic will usually advise as a first step to adjust your diet to eat fewer calories each day and also to be more active with exercise. What has your clinic said so far?<\/p>\n
Your clinic should also weigh you before and after you start treatment and measure your waist and hips so that any weight changes can also be monitored.<\/p>\n
Do you know your CD4 count and viral load test results from when you were diagnosed?<\/p>\n
Often a low CD4 count (if less than 350) or high viral load (if above 10,000-50,000) might be linked to putting on more weight.<\/p>\n
Although you asked about slimming products, there are many different companies that make these claims, often they are not effective. Some are just bad advertising and some work in ways that are not good for you – ie by affecting your digestive system and causing bad diarrhoea. These may or may not affect HIV meds, so please ask your clinic about these.<\/p>\n
Generally, diet and exercise are safer ways to reduce weight, even though this is more difficult and might take a longer time. Do this slowly is also much safer than trying crash diets which also don’t really work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey. I’m a 28 year old, living with HIV in South Africa. I have started taking my ARVs this year in January, but I have gained weight in all the wrong areas.<\/p>\n
Can I drink any of the slimming products? Will it have any negative impact on my ARV?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,38,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-newly-diagnosed","category-side-effects","category-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}