Before starting Reta, I worried that I would need to stay on it permanently to hold onto the weight I lost. Back then I was eating carnivore style, one meal a day, and the scale kept climbing anyway. A health coach helped me see the problem: even with clean food and a deep calorie deficit, I had dieted my thyroid into the ground, and my body kept pushing its baseline metabolism lower in response. Switching to 3 meals a day that included carbs (1800 calories) turned things around. The weight didn't fall off dramatically, but at last the trend pointed the right way.
That brings me to my point. If you take something like Reta, the root reason you put on weight in the first place still has to be dealt with. Low thyroid, low testosterone, eating at McDonald's every day, inflammatory foods, and so on. Getting off the GLP1s means tackling that first.
Still, even though I believe I am now handling the original cause of my weight gain, I am seriously thinking about staying on Reta for life at a maintenance dose once I reach my target weight. The additional benefits that Reta and other peptides offer beyond weight loss are too good to pass up.
Our modern world is nowhere near pristine, and that creates a range of health problems, since pollution in the environment and the food supply is hard to dodge. So my thinking has shifted: lifelong peptide stacks and TRT may be reasonable adaptations for modern living. A lot of the illnesses people usually die from are metabolic in origin and come from things such as chronic inflammation. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's (type 3 diabetes), and others.
When you weigh the price of a bit of TRT and peptides (alongside a clean diet and exercise) against doctor visits, drugs, and hospital stays, this new "lifestyle" looks far cheaper over the long haul. I am not out of the woods yet, but compared with 6 months ago I am doing much better.
