Maintenance - How are you maintaining?

[Skidude]

woundcarping said:

The dose that works is capped by how bad the side effects get.

If we call efficacy the ability to hold weight steady, then that dose won't match whatever dose produced the loss in the first place.

While maintaining, sides can mean things like quality of life, or having to put in effort to keep appetite or food noise in check, and so on.

What I usually suggest is to weigh yourself on a consistent basis and apply a simple moving average so you can figure out your weight at whatever dose you're on. You'll want some margin of error so you don't end up chasing your tail, though weighing daily and making adjustments off a 14 day SMA cuts down on that noise.

Eventually you should land on a dose and rhythm that "just fits," and you can stay on that until something shifts the math.

Right now I'm cutting on 20mg Reta/2.5mg Tirz/1mg Elora. Going by my August experiment, my maintenance estimate will start by dropping the Reta to 8mg/week. Depending on sides, I might lower or drop Reta in favor of Tirz, and/or raise Elora.

I figure I'll be at maintenance by mid November, though it depends on how this last bit of abdominal fat responds.

Habibibi said:

I've been in maintenance for 6 months, and I've actually been at the same dose for even longer than that. My schedule is once a week, since that has worked well enough for me, and having it on a weekly basis keeps things simpler mentally.

My weight really hasn't shifted much, and the loss that did happen came entirely from fat, so body composition got better even though I only dropped around 2-4 pounds. It's probably not realistic for me to stay at this dose forever, but in my situation, any decrease will happen gradually, whenever it becomes necessary.

Flash-BCR said:

I've reached my goal weight, and my approach is to keep taking 5mg tirz on Mondays along with 5mg reta on Thursdays....

Rather than tapering the GLPs downward, my plan is to move food upward....Throughout my weight loss I've managed to eat larger amounts, it was simply that I didn't feel like it....For me the GLPs act as a hard floor, and I'm hesitant to let that disappear and allow food noise the opportunity to come back and take control again....

gusterbuster said:

Honestly, it varies lol. When you hit maintenance while still actively dropping weight, the usual move is to lower the dose and add food until your homeostasis settles in. But if things had already plateaued, that dose and that amount of food are probably your maintenance point.

For me, I'd keep the same frequency. Splitting into 2 shots a week is what I already do, since a single shot leaves me feeling it too strongly right after, followed by a day or two of white knuckle hunger before the next one lol.

All of this..

15mg Tirz has been my dose since Aug 2025.

My intake is higher, yet the scale shows a small drop.

Should the loss go too far, my dose comes down.

Weekly dosing, no stacking, 27% lost

 

[BNLFL]

Reta is the only thing I use, and I've been on it since the start of the year. I've been in maintenance myself for about 6 weeks now. My doses went from 10mg down to 8mg, then 6mg, and I gave 4mg a shot. 4mg was absolutely terrible. These days I alternate between 6 and 8mg based on what the scale says on Friday. I'll gain 1 or 2lbs, then lose 1 or 2lbs. Basically, I'm maintaining. I'm eating a bit more, nothing unhealthy, and having a few extra beers now and then. Mostly now. The crazy thing, and I've mentioned this quite a bit recently, is that my stubborn belly fat is slowly getting smaller. I'm certain the sit ups and weight lifting are helping.

 

[Flash-BCR]

BNLFL said:

Reta is the only thing I use, and I've been on it since the start of the year. I've been in maintenance myself for about 6 weeks now. My doses went from 10mg down to 8mg, then 6mg, and I gave 4mg a shot. 4mg was absolutely terrible. These days I alternate between 6 and 8mg based on what the scale says on Friday. I'll gain 1 or 2lbs, then lose 1 or 2lbs. Basically, I'm maintaining. I'm eating a bit more, nothing unhealthy, and having a few extra beers now and then. Mostly now. The crazy thing, and I've mentioned this quite a bit recently, is that my stubborn belly fat is slowly getting smaller. I'm certain the sit ups and weight lifting are helping.

Give Tirz a shot....

 

[janedoe]

I've been in maintenance since May 2025. My starting protocol was 1mg Reta plus .125 cagri. Over time I titrated the Reta up to 3mg, along with .25 Cagri, for maintenance purposes. In November 2025 I dropped the Cagri, since I accidentally shed about 15 extra lbs while maintaining, going past my goal. I'm still following the Reta 3mg 1x per week protocol for maintenance. My weight is stable.

 

[fatjacked]

My weight loss has begun to stall near the goal I set at the beginning. There are another 5-10 pounds I'd like to shed, but I don't want to pay the same price in lean mass that the previous 50 cost me, so right now my priority is body composition. That means I'm holding steady at my current dose (12.5 mg tirz), being careful to take in plenty of protein, and testing whether I can increase my effort in the gym and with recovery.

 

[Troposphere]

fatjacked said:

My weight loss has begun to stall near the goal I set at the beginning. There are another 5-10 pounds I'd like to shed, but I don't want to pay the same price in lean mass that the previous 50 cost me, so right now my priority is body composition. That means I'm holding steady at my current dose (12.5 mg tirz), being careful to take in plenty of protein, and testing whether I can increase my effort in the gym and with recovery.

That's the right approach.

Keep going, you're headed in the right direction.

 

[WeezinDaJuice]

SoCalGirl said:


I think I might see a glimmer of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel. Maybe another 15 lbs. or so to go. And then it's a lifetime of maintenance. Let's just say with the new year coming up, it may be time to maintain. Doing 4mg RETA and .5mg to 1mg of Cagri weekly right now. Haven't ever gone higher than this.

How do you begin to maintain? Do you start titrating down? Do you just drop the dose? Do you quit weekly and go monthly? I think I have about three months before I need to figure this out.

Once there - do you lock in your dose for life? Do you keep adjusting? Do you ever start and stop and restart?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

I'm in a similar spot, sitting about 10lbs from where I want to be. These days it's really about body composition and getting my metabolic health as dialed in as possible.

At 8mg Reta the weight loss has plateaued, though I've got a small group Elora buy coming up that I'll use as an off-ramp. My plan is to play around with it so I can bring my Reta dose down, testing until I land on an equilibrium.

 

[lessthanhalf]

It partly comes down to what you mean by maintenance, but from late 2023 onward — after dropping from 145kg to 75kg and then staying between 75 and 83 for a year — I was fairly satisfied. Considering my starting point and my typical weight across the years, that felt like a win, even if I was still somewhat overweight. The catch was that holding there demanded an incredibly rigid way of eating built around keeping hunger and binge risk as low as possible, and I simply had to tolerate feeling hungry much of the time.

2024 was when I began low dose ozempic. In Australia I could just manage the prescription cost at $145 Aud/mo for 1mg/w. It made me feel pretty rough — nausea and malaise — even when I split it into 2nd daily microdoses of 0.22mg, or 0.8mg/w, yet it still beat constant hunger.

Then in 2025 I came across grey peptides and switched to tirz. Side effects were barely noticeable, even at 15mg, though I was still somewhat hungry, so I brought in reta. Since then I've run reta 6-8mg plus cagri 0.5 plus tirz 15 for 1 and a bit years, which took off another 13kg down to 64 kg; right now I'm 67 kg. Even on that whole stack, the side effects are milder than they were on low dose ozempic, and far easier to live with. I'm very near the point of eating when hungry without gaining weight, which is basically the holy grail. My end weight doesn't worry me much as long as it stays under roughly 70-75kg; I'm just hunting for the sweet spot between hunger and side effects.

None of this would be within reach without grey GLP drugs. Even endocrinologists would hesitate to prescribe several weight loss peptides at once, since combo clinical trial evidence is still so thin, and the expense would be out of the question anyway.

 

[HereKittyKitty]

Flash-BCR said:

Reading his posts can be tricky at times…I notice gloomy forecasts, I write a response, and then he's gone chasing some other windmill….meh

Honestly, the original comment didn't fully make sense to me either, given that Reta hasn't received FDA approval and isn't available on the market yet....

 

[BNLFL]

Flash-BCR said:

Give Tirz a shot....

similar to how I still have weight to drop, whereas another person does.

 

[moodypenguin]

woundcarping said:

The dose that works is capped by how bad the side effects get.

If we call efficacy the ability to hold weight steady, then that dose won't match whatever dose produced the loss in the first place.

While maintaining, sides can mean things like quality of life, or having to put in effort to keep appetite or food noise in check, and so on.

What I usually suggest is to weigh yourself on a consistent basis and apply a simple moving average so you can figure out your weight at whatever dose you're on. You'll want some margin of error so you don't end up chasing your tail, though weighing daily and making adjustments off a 14 day SMA cuts down on that noise.

Eventually you should land on a dose and rhythm that "just fits," and you can stay on that until something shifts the math.

Right now I'm cutting on 20mg Reta/2.5mg Tirz/1mg Elora. Going by my August experiment, my maintenance estimate will start by dropping the Reta to 8mg/week. Depending on sides, I might lower or drop Reta in favor of Tirz, and/or raise Elora.

I figure I'll be at maintenance by mid November, though it depends on how this last bit of abdominal fat responds.

Here's my approach. It was roughly a year ago today that I reached my goal weight. After that, price pushed me to change medications (mounjaro -> wegovy), and I adjusted the dose based on how I felt and what the scale was showing.

Lately I'd crept up 3-4kg. Not happy with wegovy, yet mounjaro was out of reach financially, so I went the grey route, and reta has gotten me back on track.

Honestly, I believe this is something you do for life. Eternal vigilance & all that.