Looking back, what do you wish you'd known before starting a GLP-1?

James Payne

James Payne

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Some time lately has gone into reading this forum, and there is an enormous amount of information in it. No two members seem to have quite the same experience, which is honestly what makes it interesting.

Those of you who have used GLP-1s for a while — I'd like to hear something you picked up along the way that you wish you'd been told at the outset. It might be as small as a habit around food, a routine, keeping expectations realistic, or anything else.

Learning from people who have already been down that road is always worthwhile.
 
If only I had known that starting would leave me with no wish to stop, ever.

Nor did I expect it to open the door to other peptides that have turned my life around.

And that at this age — my 40's — this healthy, high-energy state would be mine.

Last of all...I wish this forum had come to my attention, and how simple going grey is, before I began buying from a reseller at $140 for one R10 vial. Yikes.
 
My sense was that a thread much like this one already happened, yet finding it now is beyond me 🤷🏻‍♂️.

Picking only one thing rather than a whole list, the hours this “hobby” swallows is what I misjudged. Researching one peptide after another, joining community discussions, running testing groups of my own, comparing buying options, etc. — all of it has been a lot of time.
 
Knowing how long a month really feels would have helped. A month. An entire one. Some weeks the scale simply refused to budge and I got very emotional about upping my dose. The thought ran: "What if being fat is just who I am? What if my weight starts dropping under 2lb/week?" (It did, but so what?)

Perimenopause brought the weight on quickly during its first 5 years, and I felt utterly cursed by it. Like a lot of women, I went from one gyno to the next seeking help and always came away feeling like the crazy one, because not a single goddamned one of them would treat a condition that 100% of women go through. In the end I brought my husband along to an appointment. He sat there quietly in a corner, and wouldn't you know it? Meds and labs came home with me for the first fucking time.

Anyway. The beauty of grey is never having to deal with a doctor's bullshit opinions.

Panicking and increasing your dose without waiting out the full month is a mistake at the level of the big picture. Trusting the process more is what I wish I had done.
 
Grogu said:

My sense was that a thread much like this one already happened, yet finding it now is beyond me 🤷🏻‍♂️.

Picking only one thing rather than a whole list, the hours this “hobby” swallows is what I misjudged. Researching one peptide after another, joining community discussions, running testing groups of my own, comparing buying options, etc. — all of it has been a lot of time.
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There was. Looking for it never even occurred to me.

In my case, it was this site and GB's, though picking them up took no time.
 
Shadow Dancer said:

If only I had known that starting would leave me with no wish to stop, ever.

Nor did I expect it to open the door to other peptides that have turned my life around.

And that at this age — my 40's — this healthy, high-energy state would be mine.

Last of all...I wish this forum had come to my attention, and how simple going grey is, before I began buying from a reseller at $140 for one R10 vial. Yikes.
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Couldn’t have put it better. Though funnily enough, working out how to get around the resellers is what taught me so much more, without my meaning to.

AllCourtTENNIS said:

Knowing how long a month really feels would have helped. A month. An entire one. Some weeks the scale simply refused to budge and I got very emotional about upping my dose. The thought ran: "What if being fat is just who I am? What if my weight starts dropping under 2lb/week?" (It did, but so what?)

Perimenopause brought the weight on quickly during its first 5 years, and I felt utterly cursed by it. Like a lot of women, I went from one gyno to the next seeking help and always came away feeling like the crazy one, because not a single goddamned one of them would treat a condition that 100% of women go through. In the end I brought my husband along to an appointment. He sat there quietly in a corner, and wouldn't you know it? Meds and labs came home with me for the first fucking time.

Anyway. The beauty of grey is never having to deal with a doctor's bullshit opinions.

Panicking and increasing your dose without waiting out the full month is a mistake at the level of the big picture. Trusting the process more is what I wish I had done.
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I need to remember to show your comment to my wife. Peptides are a no in her book, because her algorithm hasn’t got to her yet lol. My hope is that once she watches them working on me, she comes around. She hasn’t put on a ton of weight, but it is enough that she feels self conscious about it.
 
Just how much better I was going to feel.

Back in my thirties, dropping soda was enough to lose weight.

In my forties, clean eating plus a daily run did the job.

My fifties hit hard: roughly 70# arrived across 3 years, and running, fasting or clean eating did nothing to shift it. Constantly hungry and thirsty, I watched my blood sugar creep upward. Desperate, I began oral weight loss drugs, which held for a couple of months, and once my insurance stopped covering them I eventually found tell health tirzepitide.

At last the weight started coming off, and my daily running was delivering the kind of results I remembered from my forties. Blood sugar, blood pressure and insulin all slid back into the acceptable range.

Without Glp1 medication, statins and metformin would have been my companions for life.

Anyone taking statins or metformin is fine by me, but personally the juice wasn't worth the squeeze — both produced side effects that turned exercise painful.
 
One of my favorite Rush lyrics comes to mind.. "all the world's indeed a stage and we are merely players".

Being "played" by outfits that set the rules, poison our food and then push us into wildly overpriced medical insurance plans which refuse care regardless is not something I enjoy.

This gray space is where I want to be — my own decisions, my health handled at a price I can manage.

** Edit- My answer, I suppose, is that I wish I had found out about it sooner.
 
1. Knowing that glp's beat every other peptide by a factor of 10, at least, is what I wish I'd had going in

2. I wish grey had come into the picture before a ton of money went to other peps.
 
That it would come off so fast and so easily, so that an exit strategy could have been planned earlier. These days I'm titrating down slowly, 10 pounds beyond my goal and still losing.
 
Besides remaining with a Sema compounder far longer than I should have, I wish someone had warned me off the "last supper" of half a pizza right before starting Reta. That decision comes with a bill. Don't ask me how I know.
 
Turbo-Farmer said:

Just how much better I was going to feel.

Back in my thirties, dropping soda was enough to lose weight.

In my forties, clean eating plus a daily run did the job.

My fifties hit hard: roughly 70# arrived across 3 years, and running, fasting or clean eating did nothing to shift it. Constantly hungry and thirsty, I watched my blood sugar creep upward. Desperate, I began oral weight loss drugs, which held for a couple of months, and once my insurance stopped covering them I eventually found tell health tirzepitide.

At last the weight started coming off, and my daily running was delivering the kind of results I remembered from my forties. Blood sugar, blood pressure and insulin all slid back into the acceptable range.

Without Glp1 medication, statins and metformin would have been my companions for life.

Anyone taking statins or metformin is fine by me, but personally the juice wasn't worth the squeeze — both produced side effects that turned exercise painful.
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My own story looks much the same. Weight crept on through my thirties, yet diet plus extra exercise took it back off easily enough. In my 40s and my 50s it grew harder, though low carb and keeping moving still did the job — at times for several years running.

Now that I'm in my 60s I have made peace with the fact that diets simply don't work, since the weight comes back in the end. If it all returns anyway, what was the dieting ever for?

So I spoke to my PCP. 6 hours from my first shot, I already knew GLPs were the answer I had been looking for, the way to drop the weight and keep it off forever. 5 months on, with goal nearly reached, I am certain this weight is staying off. Some form of GLP will be part of my life from here on.
 
If only I had known, at the very beginning, that resources such as this forum existed. My GLP journey started with a Big Name tele-health compounding company, at over $2,000 a year. Then, purely by dumb luck, my wife happened to mention a co-worker using "Grey Market" Triz via the well known big online dealer. I went that route briefly, until I came across the wealth of information here. Availability and cost savings now sit alongside the information. And now I have the feeling of power over food and weight that I NEVER had. Watching and FEELING my body return to where it stood decades ago. That, back when I began, is what I wish I knew.
 
Going in, my assumption was that the weight would come off and then I would taper. That the drop in food noise would be this dramatic never crossed my mind. Loads of food noise was something I already knew about; picturing what quiet would feel like was beyond me. I also assumed giving up certain favorite foods was off the table, yet on Reta those foods mean nothing to me! They aren't missed. A reseller was my starting point, just to test whether I even liked Reta. Going grey 3 weeks later was not something I saw coming.
 
bada bing said:

"Forever" is what it would be, and that this would sit fine with me.
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Whenever the question comes up about staying on glp1 forever, my answer is “for the rest of my life, which is longer than it would be without it”
 
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