Lamictal Day 67: Muscle Weirdness, Balance Issues, Appetite Returning?

I seem to be regaining my appetite.  I finished breakfast in under an hour today!  And it wasn't even hard work to eat.  My pdoc is keeping me at 150 mgs for a month, and then titrating up to 200 mgs, so I should have some normalization of appetite for a little while at least.

As I wrote in an early post, muscle stiffness is a common side effect of lamictal.  This has something to do with its anti-convulsant properties, but I'm not sure exactly what.  As with all brain drugs, though, paradoxical effects are not uncommon (remember those black box suicide warnings on antidepressant medications?).  I've been blessed with one of these -- my muscles are more relaxed and loose than they've ever been in my life.

The odd thing about this is that I can still develop huge knots in my muscles.  I've recently started to do interval training on the days when I'm not weightlifting.  For me, this means running on pavement.  Since my route is basically a circle of several blocks, and the sidewalk slopes down toward the street, there's some kind of stress being put on the muscles in my left leg.  I have a truly huge knot in my left calf, and another in my left IT band (that's the outer side of your leg, running from your hip to your knee, and keeps you standing upright like the homo sapiens that you are).


It's weird to have such huge knots without the surrounding muscles being stiff.  In the past, knots in my muscles have always, always been accompanied by general muscle stiffness in the rest of the limb -- sometimes throughout my body.  Oh well.  At least the lamictal seems to make it easier to use my foam roller to massage them.  I'm not in so much pain that I'm cursing like a sailor the whole time.

All in all, I only have one complaint about what lamictal does to my exercise routine, and it has to do with balance.  Over the past couple of weeks, my back has been feeling ... not quite stiff and sore, but nonetheless increasingly strained.  I couldn't figure out why -- my deadlift technique is good, and I've been watching it carefully.

Then during my last lifting session it hit me.  As I've written before, I'm working really hard to keep my balance during one-leg exercises such as lunges.  This, of course, places a lot of strain on my back.  When I'm not doing these exercises, I don't have balance problems at all.  Unfortunately my lifting routine inclues a ton of these exercises.  I'm not sure what to do about that.  When I figure it out, I'll post it here.