lessthanhalf said:
Sacajaweeda said:
Before this, I've dropped a lot of weight with no help at all. Earlier this year I even did a daily 20-24 hour fast and shed about 30 pounds over 3 months.
I quit nicotine 3.5 months ago. Since then, keeping cravings in check has been genuinely rough.
Tirz entered the picture 6 weeks ago. I ran 3mg for 3 weeks, and I'm now in week 3 at 6mg. The weight is coming off again, but I'm definitely still hungry and food is still on my mind. Is this simply the right dose? Is it not working yet and it's placebo? Or am I just being mentally tough and pushing through the cravings? It's really hard to tell. Before starting tirz, I figured I'd physically notice a real difference. Maybe I was wrong? Just wondering what you all think. Thanks!
If someone dropped "a lot of weight before without any assistance" yet still has weight left to lose, the likeliest explanation is that a good chunk of it came back at some point.
My own path: I went from 145 kg down to 75 kg with no glp's, held that for a year, then added GLPs and landed at 64kg 2 years later. Comparing maintenance without GLP drugs to maintenance with them is like night versus day, even when it takes combinations or high doses of tirz15mg /reta6mg/cagri 0.5mg. Across my life I have probably hit normal or near normal BMI's 6 or so times, yet never stayed there for long until now.
From what I have read in the grim long term data covering 50 years of diet and exercise weight loss studies, my conclusion is that they deliver short term but have truly dreadful long term success rates. That is why I do not buy deliberate calorie restriction through cognitive constraint or willpower as something sustainable. Sooner or later it almost always collapses.
Conversely, barring the unlucky 5-10% who respond poorly to GLP drugs, long term maintenance is essentially a solved problem as long as you remain on them. To my mind that is the single most important thing about them, and before GLP's there was nothing except surgery with any meaningful success rate for this issue. Shedding the weight, though not always simple, is something most obese people have managed at some point; holding it off is the far harder, far longer grind.
Since 6mg of tirz is not doing much for you, you are likely not a super responder, though you probably will not get piles of side effects either. Do you notice fullness after eating less food than you used to? That was the first GLP effect I noticed. My read on this: if you are deliberately and consciously capping eating to hit a certain number of calories per day, that process itself tends not to hold up long term. Slowly adjusting the medication dose until your calorie intake is low enough for reasonable weight loss, while hunger stays tolerable and you are not forcing yourself to skip food while hungry, is far more sustainable long term. Eating healthier foods and extra protein is still wise, but I find trimming food choices a little rather than quantities easier to live with, and therefore more sustainable. And for long term weight loss, tolerability matters enormously; the harder the whole thing is, the less likely you are to keep at it for years and years, which is what solving the problem actually requires.
I would not raise doses to speed up weight loss, only to make the process more comfortable.
The fact that these drugs are actually good for you is amazing. It is pretty hard to think of other drugs where this applies to such a high percentage of the population, basically anyone who is obese and to a slightly lesser extent overweight., is almost certainly going to be healthier in the long term taking glp drugs than not taking them, and not just from the weight loss. ( this is not yet proven in healthy younger populations, but is very likely ) And in general maximum doses are better than lower doses at preventing long term health issues like diabetes or heart disease. Higher doses might even help better than lower doses with kicking the nicotine habit.
