buffed2day said:
Mimsy said:
happydappy said:
In just 3-4 months you dropped 30 lbs? Incredible! Well done!!!
Appreciate it! Yes, that's right. I dropped from roughly 255lbs down to around 220lbs. My reta journey began in early April. The pace has eased off, though, versus that sharp decline during the first ~3-4 weeks. Moving from ~227lbs to ~220lbs required more time. Even so, the loss is still creeping downward.
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That's awesome! How have you been dosing?
I stuck to cycles of roughly 3-4 weeks before bumping the dose up, which is what a lot of the material I came across during my initial research appeared to suggest.
- Week #1-3 - 2mg/week - 1mg x 2 to gauge side effects
- Week #4-5- 4mg/week - 2mg x 2 to gauge side effects on a bigger dose
- Week #6 - 4mg/week - moved to doing x1 week E6D
- Week #7 - 6mg/week - x1 week E6D
By that point the "hunger" was creeping back in, so instead of E6D I switched to E5D.
- Week #8-9 - 6mg/week - x1 week E5D
- Week #10 - next shot is Sat AM
I'm torn on whether to go up to 8mg since ~Week 7-9 has been sluggish next to how it started, though I can't really complain because weight is still coming off, just not at the same pace. Maybe that's preferable to dropping a lot more so fast. So I'll likely remain at 6mg for another ~2-3 weeks and reassess.
Potency is the other topic I've been digging into. The "hunger" sensation clearly returned around Week #6, yet I could still feel it doing its job. Before, half a large pizza went down without much effort. Now I can hardly manage ~3 slices. Sure, it was my first pizza since starting reta, but it's obvious I can't put away that kind of junk food the way I used to.
On the potency question, my partner and I bought 30mg vials that came already reconstituted, and since our doses stayed small for about a month, those same vials lasted us ~3 months. I looked into it a lot and the general consensus seems split. Research and other sources say potency begins to drop ~30-40days after reconstitution and refrigeration. Others claim that's not the case and it can hold up much longer. We'll see whether the hunger improves and it hits as "hard" as it did at the start. If not, then it's likely just our bodies adjusting rather than anything to do with potency. We'll find out in ~1 week when the original vials run out and we switch to the new 20mg one, which we should both get through in ~a month.
The 30mg vials are nearly gone, so from here on we'll use 20mg vials, but only reconstitute one at a time and leave the rest as powder in the freezer/fridge.
I want to lose enough before something happening in 8 weeks, yikes