Seasonal1 said:
ladyj779 said:
sunnygirl said:
Mood said:
sunnygirl said:
Hey everyone! I began reta in may, and it's july now. The scale has moved just 4 pounds. I want to stay optimistic about this journey, but 4lbs seems low for 2 months. Should I be considering a switch to triz already, or is it too soon and I should stick with it longer?
Here's my dosing so far, taken once a week:
first dose: 0.5 mg
Second dose, 0.5 mg
Third dose, 1.0 mg
Fourth dose, 1.0 mg
Fifth dose, 1.0 mg
Sixth dose, 1.5 mg
Seventh dose, 1.5 mg
Some folks have raised the question, yet I'm not certain I've come across a reply about your target amount of weight to drop (CW/GW)? Plus, what's the source of your reta, and has it undergone testing to confirm you're actually receiving the dose you believe you are? Also, you're still on a relatively low dose.
Personally, I didn't have a lot to shed, and I'm using reta for recomp rather than pure weight loss. At first I did drop a fair bit of weight (mostly water), but then it plateaued and my weight has stayed pretty steady for a number of weeks. Even so, during that stretch I've tightened my belt by 2 notches and I look noticeably leaner. So try not to fixate only on the scale, especially if you're seeing other wins like looser clothing, etc.
And above all, glp-1s are merely tools — you still have to work out and eat properly (both quality and quantity). What you get out depends on what you put in.
I'm at 170 lbs, and my goal weight is 140. I can't talk about where it came from, but it's a well-known spot that folks on here use. After I made that post, I went ahead with my next dose and bumped it up to 2.0mg. I've been snapping photos to track how things are going, but honestly I just look less puffy rather than actually different. My eating has improved a LOT since I started reta — even at the lower doses my appetite shifted. But everyone told me my dose was low, so I get that each person's body responds differently.
A bunch of people were suggesting to begin at a low dose, and they mentioned still dropping a significant amount of weight even on small doses of reta. That's the reason I went with the more cautious route. I don't regret starting low one bit, though maybe I was expecting a bit more than I should have lol. It's fine, I'll just wait and see what happens now that my dose is going up.
Choosing better foods is a great step! That said, weight loss happens when you take in fewer calories than your body requires to stay at its current weight.
If you've already been counting calories, that's great news! It means you now know your maintenance level. From there, cut your daily intake by a meaningful amount. And if calorie tracking isn't something you've been doing, now's the time to begin.
This reply nails it. I'm on a different forum that's overrun with newbies, and any time someone mentions a stall lasting a few weeks or months, the sole advice they receive is that they're starving themselves and should add 300 to 500 more calories. In reality, the problem is usually exactly what you've laid out here.
One more thing I'd mention: weighing your food matters, and you shouldn't eat back the calories you burn through activity. This medication is a tool for building a calorie deficit — it isn't some magic fat-melting pill. GLPs aren't a shortcut; the effort is still on you.
I have to say I disagree with much of this — not the absurd part about eating more calories to drop more weight, but the notion that this has to be hard work, that GLP's aren't a shortcut, and that they aren't magic fat-reduction pills (or, more accurately, injections). To my mind that is precisely what they are, and it is how they were built to function. Research comparing GLP drugs used alone, with no guidance on improving diet or exercise, against use combined with diet and exercise counseling is scarce, and I suspect that is because it would look somewhat negligent not to at least push better eating and exercise — but how much of a difference that actually makes over the long term, I am very unsure. Diet and exercise can definitely produce short term weight loss, no question, yet their long term track record is honestly quite poor, and I can't see any solid reason why layering GLP drugs on top would transform a treatment that doesn't really work into one that suddenly does.
The way these drugs work is chiefly by cutting appetite so you eat less, which automatically produces a calorie deficit, and that in turn leads to weight loss. They carry other metabolic effects that contribute too, but eating less is the main mechanism. None of this depends on following some particular or special diet, or even counting calories — it comes about through the drug's action on appetite control systems in the brain as well as hormonal systems, and they can even improve food choices without any deliberate effort.
As I understand voluntary, conscious calorie restriction (essentially any low calorie diet), it can and does produce weight loss, but the way people's brains are wired makes it inherently mentally draining, and eventually the finite supply of motivation and cognitive control runs out, so people drift or snap back to their older, firmly established eating habits — and since those habits are what caused the obesity to begin with, the lost weight tends to come back. A minority do manage moderate losses of 5-10% and keeping that amount off in the medium term isn't unusual, but holding onto a massive weight loss is uncommon, with long term success rates somewhere around 5% or so without GLP's or surgery.
My view is that you're better off taking the GLP drug and letting it do its job of making you eat less. Eating healthier foods is never a bad idea, but I don't believe deliberate calorie restriction is needed, or even helpful, over the longer term, and the GLP dose should be adjusted to reach a calorie deficit that yields a sensible rate of weight loss. Piling what amounts to a standard diet on top of the drugs will likely improve short term results, but it makes the whole process less tolerable — and for weight loss to be achieved and kept off long term, tolerability is critical, since you don't want a boom and bust cycle with your weight. The advantage of GLP's — and I think this is by far their biggest benefit — is that they let people keep the weight off long term, as long as you keep taking them. So treating them exactly as a shortcut or magic solution may well be the best approach; they work without any special diet or exercise plans. And I think diet is not a good long term answer to obesity, and that exercise, while extremely beneficial for health and always a good idea, is actually not very effective at producing weight loss (it might help a bit more with maintaining it).
I wouldn't be so sure this is the right approach for people who are mildly overweight (without obesity related health problems). It might be, but I'd want to see some research first.
Using GLP drugs to get out of the obese state makes improving diet easier, since the drugs tend to push people that way anyway, and the better hunger control makes sustaining healthy eating far easier, because while on them you mostly won't feel like eating thousands of calories of unhealthy food in one sitting. Exercise also becomes much more enjoyable and carries a far lower risk of injury once you're no longer obese or severely obese, which raises the odds of sticking with it longer term. Even if you never improve your diet and stay sedentary, using GLP drugs to reduce or resolve obesity sharply lowers long term health risks, and that is a major benefit. Realistically, on average, those with severe obesity are less likely than the average non-obese person to have very healthy eating patterns and to exercise regularly, and often this won't change with GLP-induced weight loss, or won't change long term — but that doesn't cancel out the benefits, and in this group the reduced risks from the GLP drugs and the weight loss may matter even more given the added risks of the less healthy lifestyle.
I think viewing it as a treatable chronic metabolic medical condition is a more useful way to see it, and stripping away as much as possible of the guilt, shame and need for constant effort to stay on track raises, rather than lowers, the chances of long term success.
