Crazy first week

[lessthanhalf]

I had thought about recommending that you split your doses to deal with the skin sensitivity, but in your case it doesn't look like things got worse as the dose went up. With me, it's been completely steady for multiple months and clearly flares up whenever the dose goes up even a little.

At 2kg weekly, that's 37lbs across 8 weeks, or 16.8kg. Even if 2 to 4 kg of that is water, 13-15kg over 8 weeks is still extremely fast, particularly since you aren't very overweight. If you're feeling fine, not worn out or beaten down, then I suppose it's doing its job, but that's a very large daily calorie deficit for someone your size. I'm guessing you're both fairly active and not taking in many calories. Losing 14 kg of fat in 8 weeks works out to 1.75kg per week, and at 7700kcal per kg that's a 1925 kcal/day deficit. It's likely a bit lower than that, since some of the loss will be muscle and other lean mass, which carry fewer calories per kilo than fat, but still.

 

[smallbrainchud]

lessthanhalf said:

I had thought about recommending that you split your doses to deal with the skin sensitivity, but in your case it doesn't look like things got worse as the dose went up. With me, it's been completely steady for multiple months and clearly flares up whenever the dose goes up even a little.

At 2kg weekly, that's 37lbs across 8 weeks, or 16.8kg. Even if 2 to 4 kg of that is water, 13-15kg over 8 weeks is still extremely fast, particularly since you aren't very overweight. If you're feeling fine, not worn out or beaten down, then I suppose it's doing its job, but that's a very large daily calorie deficit for someone your size. I'm guessing you're both fairly active and not taking in many calories. Losing 14 kg of fat in 8 weeks works out to 1.75kg per week, and at 7700kcal per kg that's a 1925 kcal/day deficit. It's likely a bit lower than that, since some of the loss will be muscle and other lean mass, which carry fewer calories per kilo than fat, but still.

The skin sensitivity problem has thankfully decreased a great deal. At the beginning, when I was only on 4mg, it was really difficult to put up with. These days, at 8mg, it mostly appears only if I'm chilly, and even in that case it's quite mild.

Honestly, I feel quite good. Fatigue and sleep problems aren't something I deal with. My lifestyle isn't active at all. I work at a desk, and after getting home I sit at yet another desk lol. Fast food is still part of my diet and I drink lots of flavoured energy drinks, so I'm not starving myself or restricting what I take in. Losing muscle is something I expect too, but that doesn't bother me.

Next month I'll start a new thread with progress pictures, once I'm a bit happier with how I look. By then, I hope and expect to be somewhere in the 170~ range (77kg - 81kg).

Edit: At the time this was taken, I had been lifting for 9 months, so if nothing else, I'm somewhat excited to get back into the gym and rebuild any muscle I lose after reaching my goal weight of 170lbs.

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/GYM/comments/1i7y7z6/120lbs_dumbbell_bench/

 

[lessthanhalf]

The degree to which energy expenditure fluctuates is striking, and the usual methods for estimating it are far from precise. From what you describe, your intake would have to be 1500kcal per day at minimum — possibly higher — and the pace of your weight loss implies a deficit of at least 1500kcal/day on top of that, putting you above 3000 kcal/day even though you are neither severely obese nor especially active. For my part, after shedding a large amount of weight, I now have to keep my intake at 1600-1800kcal/day or below simply to avoid putting weight back on.

 

[smallbrainchud]

lessthanhalf said:

The degree to which energy expenditure fluctuates is striking, and the usual methods for estimating it are far from precise. From what you describe, your intake would have to be 1500kcal per day at minimum — possibly higher — and the pace of your weight loss implies a deficit of at least 1500kcal/day on top of that, putting you above 3000 kcal/day even though you are neither severely obese nor especially active. For my part, after shedding a large amount of weight, I now have to keep my intake at 1600-1800kcal/day or below simply to avoid putting weight back on.

I'm with you 100%. I haven't bothered trying to analyze why it happens; watching the number on the scale go down is enough for me. Once that early water weight came off at the beginning of my reta run, I assumed the fast losses would stop, yet here we are — guess that's the whole "miracle drug" thing. Oddly enough, I sat at 202lbs for roughly 5 days, then the scale began moving downward again, which struck me as strange.

Because I advanced so fast in the gym and overtook people around me even with a workout plan that was far from "efficient," I'd always chalked it up to genetics. My response to reta has only made that belief stronger.

Back when I was dropping from the 190's down to the 170's, 1500 calories/day was my routine. Without reta, 1600-1800/day would leave me feeling genuinely starved.

 

[zkprv]

smallbrainchud said:

zkprv said:

smallbrainchud said:

tl;dr: reta/2mg/6 days/-8.7lbs

Given the trials and everything I'd read, I expected reta to perform well — but still, my starting weight on 4/3 was 229lbs, and this morning the scale read 220.3lbs. We're not even at the 1-week mark yet.

On top of that, the way it kills appetite is honestly hard to believe.

That said, I did run into a handful of side effects, and some were worse than others.

My very first injection went into the lower right area of my stomach, and I lay down for a nap afterward. A few hours later I woke up with a heart rate around 100ish!! For several hours I felt pretty awful. Oddly, I was also freezing cold? And my mouth was insanely dry. Any touch to the skin around my triceps felt tender and really uncomfortable. Mostly, that faded after 2-3 days.

Today I chose to pin early, this time in the lower left area of my stomach. My appetite suppression seems to be wearing off and cravings are climbing, so I'm switching to a reta schedule of every 6 days. My plan is to keep updating this thread each week as things progress. Once I hit my goal weight of 170, I'll share before/after pictures. One thing I'm happy about: my face looks and feels less puffy.

After that first wake-up experience, my sleep has been fine. Dreams are nothing unusual.

Great work! Nearly 9 lbs gone in less than 7 days is seriously notable, and reta's hunger blunting is definitely real. It lines up fairly closely with what I saw on Trz

One gentle caution, though — there's a ceiling on how much fat your body can free up and oxidize each day, no matter how large the deficit is. The classic reference here is a 2005 theoretical paper from Seymour Alpert, which set the figure at roughly 31 kcal per lb of body fat per day.

Push the deficit past what your fat stores can supply, and the additional shortfall won't translate into extra fat loss — it will largely come from muscle breakdown instead. The downstream effects can include lean mass loss, a slower metabolism, greater tiredness, and poorer outcomes over time.

At around 220 lbs today, it could be useful to estimate your sustainable deficit so you can keep going hard without losing muscle. Any of the popular AI chatbots online can produce a table for that if you pose the question to them.

why does this reply read like AI-generated junk?

I'm not a bot. Why would you assume that? I shared it as a reminder -- people I know tried the 'cut as many calories daily as possible' approach and ended up with health issues. What I was getting at is that there's a ceiling on how many calories the body can pull from fat each day, no matter how big the deficit is.