Which Comes First: Depression or Weight Gain?  Don't address
your weight before your mental health   For many people, weight
is depressing. Whether consequent to society's hateful weight
biases, which expose individuals with obesity to mood-killing
bullying, scorn and discrimination, or to personally held
beliefs and attitudes, there's little doubt that weight is often
a huge psychological burden.  [See When Science Met The Biggest
Loser.]  There's little doubt, too, that those who struggle with
both weight and depression often feel a tight relationship
between them, that their depression would lift were they to lose
weight. And for some it does.  A recent meta-analysis of the
impact of intentional non-pharmacologic weight-loss programs on
depression revealed that indeed weight loss is associated with
an improvement in mood. But that's not the whole story. And so,
before you rush out and join a weight-loss program, you need to
know that the mood benefits shown occurred in folks enrolled in
behavioral weight-l