INTRO Greetings fellow peptidians!

[DragonOfTheSea]

My wife and I are both 43, living in SoCal, and we're doing this together.

For a long time, I kept expecting some huge health blowback from GLP-1 meds to finally surface… eventually, though, I stopped resisting. Reta is coming soon and brings a whole range of advantages, plus a recent doctor's appointment flagged non alcoholic fatty liver disease, and on top of that neither my wife nor I were happy with our bodies—so here we are.

Just like plenty of others, my start was on Reddit- read, dig, repeat. Dosing, dosage strengths, titration, and so on became clear enough to me. That path eventually brought me to this place, where I've kept up the same read, dig, repeat cycle.

8 weeks ago I got us a Tirz scrip, and we're underway, sourcing several formulations and testing which suits each of our bodies best- compound concentrations / pure. Side effects have made things bumpy at times, but we're reading our bodies and getting it tuned in. For each of us, weight loss comes to about -3lbs/wk. We've also changed our diet (beyond just eating less, obviously).

In the future I intend for us to switch to Reta. Already I've put in more than a dozen hours digging through these forums, picking up and grasping the grey area of reconstitution, filtration, and testing. At first it seemed somewhat daunting, but by now I've grown fairly comfortable with it.

I'm eager to keep going on our peptide path alongside this forum and its members as useful resources and peers- thankful for spots and folks like this.

Cheers!

 

[vande250]

Welcome aboard! It's always nice when two people decide to do this side by side — you've got someone right there with you when things get rough or go well, and that counts for a lot.

From what you describe, you've followed the same path many members here have taken: Reddit → hours of reading → figuring out dosing and titration → then stumbling onto the reconstitution and testing world. At the start it can feel like a lot, but the picture gets clearer once the mechanics click.

On top of that, ~3 lbs/week for both of you is excellent progress, particularly when diet is changing too. You both seem to be going about this carefully and watching how your bodies react, which is really the key with these compounds.

Fatty liver worries push plenty of people to start as well, and the encouraging part is that losing even a moderate amount of weight can have a real effect there. When that's combined with the lifestyle adjustments you described, the payoff tends to build fast.

Looking forward to hearing how it goes for the two of you, especially if/when Reta comes into the picture later on. Keep the updates coming — the real-world experiences are what make this community so helpful.

Cheers and welcome!

 

[DragonOfTheSea]

vande250 said:

Welcome aboard! It's always nice when two people decide to do this side by side — you've got someone right there with you when things get rough or go well, and that counts for a lot.

From what you describe, you've followed the same path many members here have taken: Reddit → hours of reading → figuring out dosing and titration → then stumbling onto the reconstitution and testing world. At the start it can feel like a lot, but the picture gets clearer once the mechanics click.

On top of that, ~3 lbs/week for both of you is excellent progress, particularly when diet is changing too. You both seem to be going about this carefully and watching how your bodies react, which is really the key with these compounds.

Fatty liver worries push plenty of people to start as well, and the encouraging part is that losing even a moderate amount of weight can have a real effect there. When that's combined with the lifestyle adjustments you described, the payoff tends to build fast.

Looking forward to hearing how it goes for the two of you, especially if/when Reta comes into the picture later on. Keep the updates coming — the real-world experiences are what make this community so helpful.

Cheers and welcome!

Thanks a ton! Both my wife and I can't wait to go through this entire process.

Honestly speaking, the main reason I'm doing this is for her—over the past year she's been really depressed and harsh on herself about how she looks, to a troubling extent that's bleeding into and draining her job and social interactions. She's not the type to get into extensive reading and all the detailed investigating, but that's totally me, and I'm glad to take that on for her sake, for her joy. What she's achieved so far is clearly beginning to shift things for her, and I'm sure that within the coming months, rather than just staring at figures on a scale, she'll notice herself dropping—since she's a visual person, that's what she requires and I'm eager for it.

I realize opinions are divided about Tirz / Reta stacking, yet I'm pretty sure we'll kick off a double low dose stack before long.. I'll probably keep the Tirz at 5-7.5mg since food noise is great for us right now, and increase the Reta gradually. We've also been doing split dosing from week 2 @ 3.5days precisely each week (Monday 8pm/Friday 8am) to help control her sides, but it's also really helped keep food noise very low consistently.

When I add in the Reta, I'm planning to begin at 2mg, but divide that dose too, and on a different/opposite timetable from the Tirz, again to reduce possible sides.

 

[DragonOfTheSea]

Figured I'd share where things stand for us:

My wife has spent the past several weeks dealing with nausea as a side effect.. we attempted to let things stabilize once she was @ 5mg (split 2.5/2.5), yet despite that stretch of time, 2mg/pin appears to be her ceiling, so that's the dose we're keeping her at for comfort.

As for me, I'm still at 7.3mg (split 3.65/3.65), and I remain pleased with the sides and the absence of food noise.

Earlier this week I managed my first reconstitution of 2 vials of Reta- hospira and filtered- went smoothly.

Wednesday was our first Reta pin: 1mg for my wife (because of side effect worries), and 2mg for me. It's Saturday now, neither of us has had any sides, and we're both at ease with continuing- probably bumping her to 2mg and me to 4mg beginning next week, then giving it a couple weeks to gauge efficacy.

Two weeks back we both saw loss slow down, though we were also traveling internationally, so our eating wasn't as clean as it normally is, nor as regimented.

She gets discouraged but I'm confident we will continue to see progress and hope that she's happy with her next weigh in, as I expect she will.

Our pins now happen every M/W/F (Tz/Rt/Tz) and seems like a sustainable and easy to follow schedule for us. Excited to see how stacking Reta adds to our progress!

 

[DragonOfTheSea]

Oh! I nearly left out something — my latest labs.

When I first shared my story, I mentioned getting a complete workup back in early January. That workup ended up being a big reason I decided to hop on the GLP-1 train: my AST and ALT came back elevated, and an ultrasound afterward showed NAFLD.

Earlier this month, roughly 2 months later, I went in for another set of blood draws. Both AST and ALT have already dropped quite a bit, and now they sit inside the “normal” or acceptable range! Woo!!!