Tirz never worked

dk2001

dk2001

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My brother has used Tirz for 18 months. He went through the entire dosing schedule, reaching 15 mg. The weight loss was minimal. At his job, he sits for long stretches, and while he doesn't exercise with strict consistency, he does so whenever possible. We're debating whether to add something such as ipa/cjc or make the change to reta. Advice would be appreciated. In general, he's a large person—his muscular build is visible, yet he still has fat on him.
 
Before you add anything, I'd check how he's using the Tirz—it's a tool, but you need to use it correctly.
 
That sounds really frustrating. There's not a lot of detail in the post about caloric intake, macros, hydration, etc.
 
dk2001 said:

My brother has used Tirz for 18 months. He went through the entire dosing schedule, reaching 15 mg. The weight loss was minimal. At his job, he sits for long stretches, and while he doesn't exercise with strict consistency, he does so whenever possible. We're debating whether to add something such as ipa/cjc or make the change to reta. Advice would be appreciated. In general, he's a large person—his muscular build is visible, yet he still has fat on him.
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Have his labs been examined in depth? Factors such as insulin resistance, thyroid function, cortisol levels, inflammation, testosterone, sleep quality/sleep apnea, etc. can all heavily influence how well a person responds to these medications. Certain individuals titrate all the way up on tirz and yet the scale hardly budges, since a separate metabolic problem is lurking beneath the surface.
 
dk2001 said:

My brother has used Tirz for 18 months. He went through the entire dosing schedule, reaching 15 mg. The weight loss was minimal. At his job, he sits for long stretches, and while he doesn't exercise with strict consistency, he does so whenever possible. We're debating whether to add something such as ipa/cjc or make the change to reta. Advice would be appreciated. In general, he's a large person—his muscular build is visible, yet he still has fat on him.
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Switching to reta or another GLP agonist might be worth a shot. That said, stacking Ipa+cjc at this point doesn't strike me as useful. Alongside some active training it could contribute, but on its own, with no activity, it won't burn fat. In fact, using that stack tends to increase hunger.

After 7 months on prescribed mounjaro, I gave reta a 3 week trial. For me, though, reta combined with ipa+cjc did nothing at all. I was hungry nonstop. Once I went back to tirz, things returned to normal. That's just my own experience, and people can respond differently.

I began ipa to protect my muscles following 20 weeks of mounjaro treatment, and 3 weeks ago I added CJC No Dac.

SW:101kg LW:24 kg in 31 weeks. I have reached my GW. Using tirz and ipa+cjc for maintenance at the moment.
 
IMHO, people jump straight to adding another compound or making a change way too fast.

Go back to the fundamentals:

You will not drop weight if your calories are not below maintenance.

GLPs are not magic. What you put in your mouth is still on you.

So what are you actually eating?
 
I suggest logging everything you eat — each sauce, each pat of butter, cooking oil, all of it. Once you do, the totals become obvious. Take a chicken sandwich: you figure chicken is a healthy choice, yet the bread alone can be 300 calories and the mayo can be 400 calories. I did manage to lose weight, and it came off gradually, but only because I counted calories and kept my intake near 1200 while weighing 200 pounds. I don't exercise either, though my job keeps me moving.
 
Tirz had no effect on me.

Over and over I read that it's just a tool, that exercise and a calorie deficit are still required. Fine, I accept that. Yet my understanding was that Tirz should help quiet food noise and curb hunger, which in turn makes cutting back on eating more manageable. So if the food noise isn't being silenced, why bother taking it at all, and in what sense is it a tool then? I'm capable of exercising and maintaining a calorie deficit on my own, without Tirz, and doing so would be the healthier route.
 
Sadly, a minority of users — roughly 5 to 10% — drop very little weight while on GLP medications. A graph shared in a recent post illustrated this distribution of weight loss quite plainly. Setting aside all the advice about counting calories and so on, the whole point of these drugs is that they should function independently of that, and for most people they do: appetite drops, intake falls, and the required calorie deficit follows on its own. Whether trying to turn the whole thing into a conventional diet-and-exercise regimen would actually change anything strikes me as doubtful, since over the long haul those approaches simply are not very powerful. Besides, a full year is a reasonable stretch to judge a trial. The remaining avenues worth exploring would be reta, or better yet cagri — reta because it also acts on glucagon, cagri because it works through amylin receptors. Even when GLP-1 and GIP activation fails to produce results, that tells you nothing about whether amylin or glucagon pathways might succeed. Eventually I hope solid research into GLP non responders will appear, but so far there is very little.
 
toologic said:

Tirz had no effect on me.

Over and over I read that it's just a tool, that exercise and a calorie deficit are still required. Fine, I accept that. Yet my understanding was that Tirz should help quiet food noise and curb hunger, which in turn makes cutting back on eating more manageable. So if the food noise isn't being silenced, why bother taking it at all, and in what sense is it a tool then? I'm capable of exercising and maintaining a calorie deficit on my own, without Tirz, and doing so would be the healthier route.
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That's basically what happened to me with Reta around week 3. It felt like the effects vanished. Bumping the dose didn't change anything. I've just begun Tirz and it's already hitting harder than Reta ever did, so hopefully this is the one that works. It's fascinating how each person responds so differently. Reta works wonders for some. But it truly looks like it comes down to the individual.
 
Jfrick11 said:

dk2001 said:

My brother has used Tirz for 18 months. He went through the entire dosing schedule, reaching 15 mg. The weight loss was minimal. At his job, he sits for long stretches, and while he doesn't exercise with strict consistency, he does so whenever possible. We're debating whether to add something such as ipa/cjc or make the change to reta. Advice would be appreciated. In general, he's a large person—his muscular build is visible, yet he still has fat on him.
Click to expand...
Have his labs been examined in depth? Factors such as insulin resistance, thyroid function, cortisol levels, inflammation, testosterone, sleep quality/sleep apnea, etc. can all heavily influence how well a person responds to these medications. Certain individuals titrate all the way up on tirz and yet the scale hardly budges, since a separate metabolic problem is lurking beneath the surface.
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As far as I'm aware, he hasn't done that. I'll mention it to him, appreciate it
 
Also, when you're trying to eat in a calorie deficit, there are basically 2 things at play: the volume of food going in (how much you're actually putting in your mouth), and how calorie-dense that food happens to be.

My thinking was that if I kept just 1 of those 2 things low, I'd still lose weight, and that held true for quite a while. Then it stopped working, and I had to accept it and begin making sure BOTH were kept at low to moderate levels.
 
toologic said:

Tirz had no effect on me.

Over and over I read that it's just a tool, that exercise and a calorie deficit are still required. Fine, I accept that. Yet my understanding was that Tirz should help quiet food noise and curb hunger, which in turn makes cutting back on eating more manageable. So if the food noise isn't being silenced, why bother taking it at all, and in what sense is it a tool then? I'm capable of exercising and maintaining a calorie deficit on my own, without Tirz, and doing so would be the healthier route.
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100% - in my experience, and that of quite a few other people I know who've taken these meds, when they do work you don't really have to stress much over calories, macros, exercise and so on. Food just stops interesting you, you can hardly manage to eat, you feel full constantly, etc. If anything, it goes the other way - you end up having to push yourself to get some calories in.

My take: if you happen to be among those unlucky folks who are on these meds and STILL have to track calories, then they aren't doing much for you.
 
For a number of us, calorie counting isn't necessary — when the medication kicks in, it does the job extremely well (that's my experience, and others have said the same).

That said, there are people who get nothing from GLP's at all, and others who fail on 1 GLP yet do fine on a different one.

Sema gave me no results whatsoever across a year, while tirz is where things finally began to shift.

So if nothing is moving for you, look into the other factors that play into weight loss (insulin resistance, sleep apnea, thyroid issues, and so on), and begin logging what you eat.

It's incredibly easy to rack up extra calories through fats, oil, nuts and seeds and the like.
 
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