Has anyone stacked low-dose Cagri with Reta for food noise?

bokonon said:

I keep my weekly adjustments to 0.5mg, or 1mg at most. One perk of gray market peptides is that we can pick any dose we like, so there's no need to follow the big step-ups that come with pharma's pre-filled pens. That said, the side effects I've had are what keep me very cautious.
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I hear you. It's good to know someone else didn't simply hold out for 4 weeks. I've generally aimed to increase every 3 weeks, but by week 3 I could tell I needed to move up.

Flash-BCR said:

I realize this goes beyond what the OP asked, but the OP and everyone reading should also think about sema as a way to break through a plateau...I have both cagril and sema on hand, and on my reta dose I was noticing a bit more hunger than I get from my tirz dose...I'm running the minimum sema dose between my reta and tirz pins, and I'm loving how it bridges the hunger gap between pins flawlessly...

At lower doses I don't really experience symptoms, and it wipes out the food noise....I might give cagril a try at some point, but I'm wary of the fatigue and GI issues some people report with it...glad I went with the sema..."a ladyJ recommendation™" 👍
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The fatigue aspect definitely worries me since I'm very active, and I don't want that to suffer.

lessthanhalf said:

What strategy makes sense at this stage really comes down to your context. Are you aiming to drop 10 kilos or 60? Age, height, starting, current and goal weights would help.

The most straightforward path is to keep raising the reta dose until it does the job well — meaning hunger or food noise is kept reasonably in check at a calorie intake that produces weight loss at a sensible pace, with no major side effects. Forums are full of claims that reta isn't strong for appetite suppression or food noise, but in reality it's the most effective weight-loss drug, and almost all of that comes from eating less, plus perhaps a bonus 1-200 kcal/day of metabolic boost via glucagon agonism. That effect is dose dependent, smaller at lower doses, and the notion that some threshold dose like 4mg is where it kicks in simply isn't sound science.

The one genuine downside of adding low-dose cagri now, while you're still titrating reta, is figuring out which drug is responsible for what — whether useful effects or side effects. In theory, a lower reta dose plus some cagri might deliver similar weight loss to a higher reta dose with fewer side effects, but that hasn't been studied yet, and cagri overall has fairly high rates of side effects. Generally I'd suggest the simpler route first: raise the reta dose if side effects aren't an issue. If you have a lot of weight to lose, then adding cagri (or elora) to a high reta dose makes sense. And start cagri low, like 0.25mg/w, especially when adding it to tirz or reta.
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To answer your question, I'm 30 and honestly I don't have much weight left to lose at all. Right now I'm 5'7 and 66kg. I began reta on August 10th and I'm down 9kg. Before this I lost 25kg naturally and kept it off for 1-2 years. At the moment I'm just trying to get lean before I potentially attempt a slow bulk. When I first started reta it wiped out the noise completely and I was amazed at how quiet my mind was. After years and years of obsessing over food, it was my every thought, so having some of those thoughts return made me want to shut it down again because I can't believe how freeing it is. It's nothing like before but still it was niggling.

I'm still losing weight at a reasonable rate, I'm still in a deficit, and I'm still hitting my targets. Honestly I was going for a harsher deficit of 700-800 rather than my usual 250-500, and I'd been hitting that since August. This week it's been closer to 500, which is still more than reasonable I know! Thanks for sharing 😊
 
Clavicular's Hammer said:

Not looking to argue either — we're all here to learn

I haven't gone through the studies myself, but even though 12mg was the maximum that got studied, a large share of participants dropped out at those high doses. That suggests the highest practical dose for most people lands around 8mg, where many report severe side effects, or where some probably begin building a massive tolerance.

Instead of pushing ourselves to failure, I'd suggest going only slightly above the dose that activated glucagon — 4-6mg.

Then stack a second, also moderate, dose of a compound that's better suited to hunger suppression.

Just my two cents, and a protocol that comes closer to what's practiced in real medicine.
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My take: bump the Reta to 4mg and layer tirzepatide on top of it.
 
Clavicular's Hammer said:

Not looking to argue either — we're all here to learn

I haven't gone through the studies myself, but even though 12mg was the maximum that got studied, a large share of participants dropped out at those high doses. That suggests the highest practical dose for most people lands around 8mg, where many report severe side effects, or where some probably begin building a massive tolerance.

Instead of pushing ourselves to failure, I'd suggest going only slightly above the dose that activated glucagon — 4-6mg.

Then stack a second, also moderate, dose of a compound that's better suited to hunger suppression.

Just my two cents, and a protocol that comes closer to what's practiced in real medicine.
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I'm not trying to attack anyone directly — it's just that a few of the claims being made don't line up with what the research on these drugs shows.

In everyday clinical practice, combining multiple GLP or amylin agonists is essentially unheard of, and that includes cagrisema, since none of these combos are approved yet or backed by published studies. That could change down the road if data emerges that doesn't originate from a forum, but as of now it hasn't.

Among the many people self-experimenting online, what you're describing is a fairly common approach and appears to work reasonably well. Drug companies are certainly investigating combinations too. It sounds sensible and is probably harmless, but real scientific backing is still missing — the exceptions being the cagrisema trials and some very early, unpublished results for elora and tirz. Personally I'm running tirz/reta/cagri.

There's no solid evidence that tolerance develops to the appetite-suppressing or weight-loss effects of GLP drugs, whether at low or high doses or over any timeframe. Tolerance to certain side effects does clearly occur. Higher doses also produce more side effects, so when they aren't necessary, lower doses are perfectly reasonable. However, for the population these drugs were developed for — people with significant or severe obesity or obesity-related health conditions — a very large share will need the maximum tolerated dose, or 12mg of reta, to get anywhere close to a normal weight range. For people without obesity this doesn't apply; the goal there should be the lowest effective dose possible, since rare serious side effects can happen, and in younger people who aren't carrying much excess weight there's no major medical risk reduction from using them — so in that group the risks could genuinely outweigh the benefits.
 
lessthanhalf said:

I'm not trying to attack anyone directly — it's just that a few of the claims being made don't line up with what the research on these drugs shows.

In everyday clinical practice, combining multiple GLP or amylin agonists is essentially unheard of, and that includes cagrisema, since none of these combos are approved yet or backed by published studies. That could change down the road if data emerges that doesn't originate from a forum, but as of now it hasn't.

Among the many people self-experimenting online, what you're describing is a fairly common approach and appears to work reasonably well. Drug companies are certainly investigating combinations too. It sounds sensible and is probably harmless, but real scientific backing is still missing — the exceptions being the cagrisema trials and some very early, unpublished results for elora and tirz. Personally I'm running tirz/reta/cagri.

There's no solid evidence that tolerance develops to the appetite-suppressing or weight-loss effects of GLP drugs, whether at low or high doses or over any timeframe. Tolerance to certain side effects does clearly occur. Higher doses also produce more side effects, so when they aren't necessary, lower doses are perfectly reasonable. However, for the population these drugs were developed for — people with significant or severe obesity or obesity-related health conditions — a very large share will need the maximum tolerated dose, or 12mg of reta, to get anywhere close to a normal weight range. For people without obesity this doesn't apply; the goal there should be the lowest effective dose possible, since rare serious side effects can happen, and in younger people who aren't carrying much excess weight there's no major medical risk reduction from using them — so in that group the risks could genuinely outweigh the benefits.
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No problem at all.

One point I want to make clear: I never claimed that combining Reta and cagri is something doctors endorse or that science has proven. What I'm getting at is that in conventional medicine, practitioners generally don't push a single compound to its maximum dose.

In the original Reta trial, 16% of participants dropped out at the 12mg doses, and a later follow-up put that figure at 18%. That means under medical supervision, a very large number of people simply couldn't handle those doses. And as you noted, those doses were aimed at heavily obese participants, while plenty of people in these forums are looking to shed 30-40lbs rather than 150lb.

You're correct that there are unknowns around mixing, but research on it is ongoing, and this entire space is full of unknowns.

For my part, I plan to use moderate doses of agents designed for different purposes so each one's benefit is maximized. I won't arbitrarily max out one first — going above 6mg of Reta offers me nothing.

Actually, now that I'm approaching my goal weight, I'm dropping below 4mg, back to the levels from before I had any RHR increase, to finish my cut and get my sleep quality back.

I'll switch to Tirz once my Reta runs out.
 
I've been searching for research on combining several GLP's, but I can't find any studies that are either active or planned. Has anyone come across links to such studies?

The only combination trials I've managed to locate involve adding an amylin analogue to a GLP-1, or pairing separate GLP-1 and glucagon agonists such as mazdutide.
 
TriDiddy said:

Before you add another compound, I'd raise your Reta dose to at least 4mg. Research indicates the glucagon component only becomes fully active from 4mg onward, so below that point you haven't gotten the full benefit of all 3 receptors that Reta engages.

For what it's worth, I went up very gradually and I'm now in my 12th week at 4mg, with a planned step to 6mg next week. At 4mg the results were very effective for me.
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Lilly's reports back this up. Full glucagon involvement comes at 4-8mg of Reta, which is also the suggested maintenance dose. If it were me, I'd keep titrating Reta up to at least 4mg. My own stack is 5mg Tirz plus 5mg Reta plus 1.5mg Cagri, and for the moment that combination feels like my sweet spot.
 
trey915 said:

Lilly's reports back this up. Full glucagon involvement comes at 4-8mg of Reta, which is also the suggested maintenance dose. If it were me, I'd keep titrating Reta up to at least 4mg. My own stack is 5mg Tirz plus 5mg Reta plus 1.5mg Cagri, and for the moment that combination feels like my sweet spot.
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Last night I moved up to 4mg, so I'll see how that goes 😌 I've also considered adding tirz instead of cag.
 
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