Omxxl said:
Bep2030 said:
I've now been using reta for 1.5 years. Since I've reached my goal weight, I take 2mg once a week as a maintenance dose. In the past, I was doing 5mg split across two injections per week.
The one side effect that's really giving me trouble is a drop in libido/sexual desire. When I stopped completely for a few weeks, I did see a small uptick in libido (though it still wasn't back to where it used to be). But the food noise returned too, so I restarted reta at a maintenance dose. I'm going to give kisspeptin a try now, hoping it will address this problem.
If reta has been part of your routine for a few months and your libido has pretty much vanished, the truth is you're far from the only one — I went through the same thing. It's a lot more widespread than most people let on, and almost nobody brings it up. Typically several factors pile up together. When your body is stuck in a long stretch of eating less, it simply isn't interested in sex, particularly if the cut is aggressive, and on top of that the queasiness and overall digestive strangeness from these meds hardly get you in the mood. For many people, though, the real culprit is hormonal — rapid fat loss can throw off your estrogen and testosterone, because fat tissue itself makes hormones, so shedding it quickly can crash your levels harder than you'd think. Then add low iron, B12 or zinc, all of which are extremely common during a hard cut, along with the tiredness, stress and mood swings that come with the medication, and you've got a lot stacked against you.
What has genuinely worked for others (and for me) is getting proper bloodwork rather than guessing — request estradiol, total and free testosterone, SHBG, prolactin, a thyroid panel, ferritin, vitamin D and B12; that gives you far more information than any supplement can. If you're dropping weight very aggressively, it may really be worth easing off the pace a little, and don't cut fat too low in your diet either, since it's literally the raw material your body uses to produce sex hormones. Sleep and stress deserve more credit than they get too — constantly elevated cortisol essentially competes with your sex hormone output. Choosing weights over pure cardio also appears to help keep hormones on a more even keel. And frankly, simply being open with your partner and removing the pressure helps more than any of the physical measures.
As for supplements, zinc is worth a mention because it's often low in people on hard cuts and it contributes to testosterone production; vitamin D if you're deficient (which many people are without realizing it); maca root, which has some genuine research supporting it for libido even if the effect is modest; and omega-3s, which assist more indirectly with hormone production and overall energy. Just get tested before you start taking things blindly — there's no point in zinc if your levels are already fine.
If you're already following some kind of medical protocol, really just raise this with whoever is overseeing it; slowing the rate of the cut or correcting an actual deficiency tends to do more than anything you can buy off the shelf.
