Will Increasing the Dose Actually Move the Scale?

Campdirtybirdz

Campdirtybirdz

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RS has dropped 80 pounds overall and is now on Tira 7.5mg, with 15 pounds left before reaching goal weight. Progress has stopped at this point. Would moving to a higher dose genuinely assist with shedding pounds, or does it mainly do a better job of keeping appetite in check? At the current dose, while doing keto and staying in a calorie deficit, RS usually doesn't deal with hunger problems. Switching over to Reta is also on the table. Curious to hear what others think.
 
First off

When you say you're stalling and not losing, have you used a body composition scale to see whether water retention is the cause? Then, how many weeks has the stall lasted? Look at your most recent weight loss alongside your current body composition—that might clear up a few things.

Switching to reta is another option worth considering, beginning at a 2 mg dose or 1.5 mg, to get things moving; since you're close to your goal, that could be a good move. But if you already have Tira stocked, you can always bump it up by .5 to see whether that does anything.
 
Stuck at the same weight for 2 weeks now. I don't have a body composition scale at this point. Been considering picking up a renpho scale, though the reviews I've seen are pretty mixed. RS has only just begun incorporating weight lifting into the routine. Really helpful advice 🙂
 
From what the trials indicate, there's clearly a link between higher doses and greater weight reduction, so increasing the dose should probably be beneficial. With reta specifically, given where you are right now, I'd stack it on top of your tirz rather than making a full switch and then having to climb up from scratch. Stay at 7.5 of tirz, layer in 2 of reta, and my guess is you'd notice a solid boost in fat loss.
 
Campdirtybirdz said:

RS has dropped 80 pounds overall and is now on Tira 7.5mg, with 15 pounds left before reaching goal weight. Progress has stopped at this point. Would moving to a higher dose genuinely assist with shedding pounds, or does it mainly do a better job of keeping appetite in check? At the current dose, while doing keto and staying in a calorie deficit, RS usually doesn't deal with hunger problems. Switching over to Reta is also on the table. Curious to hear what others think.
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That's the part that makes me laugh about folks who obsess over "calories." If fat isn't coming off, then you aren't in a calorie deficit — that's what the definition says. And honestly, how could anyone possibly pin down their calorie status for a given day unless they're strapped into metabolic ward machinery? A scale printing out a number, or some chart online listing a figure, doesn't make that figure yours for any specific day or week. None of this is aimed at you — it's just that the calorie idea is everywhere, tons of people swallow it whole, and then they're baffled when it "fails."

What I believe you were getting at is this: the quantity of food you're consuming hasn't gone up compared with what you were eating back when weight was still coming off, and now progress has stopped. So yeah — like ambot88 said, every trial shows higher doses generally produce bigger average weight loss. Those are AVERAGES, obviously, and for any 1 person there's no way to predict how much extra loss a given dose bump will deliver. Still, the data consistently indicates that more GLP juice in your bloodstream means more weight lost.

Think of it like using the gas pedal to manage your speed on the highway. Cruising steady at 60 MPH, and you want 70 MPH — you have to press the pedal down further. By how much? Hard to say precisely, maybe half an inch. That doesn't mean each additional half inch buys another 10 MPH. It means that once you reach 70 MPH, you shouldn't be puzzled that the car won't keep accelerating on its own without pressing the pedal down more.
 
Campdirtybirdz said:

Stuck at the same weight for 2 weeks now. I don't have a body composition scale at this point. Been considering picking up a renpho scale, though the reviews I've seen are pretty mixed. RS has only just begun incorporating weight lifting into the routine. Really helpful advice 🙂
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A 2-week pause doesn't count as a stall. Should the plateau stretch to 4-6 weeks, that could be the moment to tweak how much you eat or how you move. The body does adapt. Best of luck!
 
Going up to 10 could be worth a shot. Something else that has worked in my case: keep the 7.5 dose but move to a 5-day interval between shots.

Just my two cents, but I'd hold off on adding reta for now. You're doing great! and almost there at this point🙂
 
A question about protein. RS finds it hard to get past 100 gms each day. RS feels like RS is overeating. Would adding protein support fat loss, or only help keep muscle?
 
Campdirtybirdz said:

A question about protein. RS finds it hard to get past 100 gms each day. RS feels like RS is overeating. Would adding protein support fat loss, or only help keep muscle?
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No easy answer exists for that, unfortunately—it's a solid question. When your total food intake is capped (which you've confirmed it is), redirecting a larger share of it to protein tends to pay off. Push that to its logical endpoint—eating only protein—and you drift toward what's called "rabbit starvation" (search it if you haven't heard the term), which, viewed a certain way, may not be the worst thing for a GLP user. 😉

When weight loss starts from a traditional diet, folks frequently succeed even with very low protein intake (provided protein isn't being swapped out for processed or high-glycemic carbs), and the pounds lost lean more toward fat.

Hormone-driven weight loss—your situation—is messier, and the evidence we can draw on is far thinner. Lean mass took a beating with some of the older GLPs, though word of mouth suggests the dual and triple agonists are gentler on that front. If it were me, I'd put protein first during hormone-initiated weight loss and maintenance, even if doing so nudges me somewhere I don't love on the "calories" front.
 
So, listing what we can do:

1. Stay at the current dose, treating a 2-week stall as possibly just a fluke.

2. Move up to 10mg, the next dose level.

3. Take 7.5mg on a 5-day schedule.

4. Stack 2mg Reta on top of 7.5mg Tirz.

5. Switch directly to Reta.

??Decisions, Decisions??🙂
 
Campdirtybirdz said:

So, listing what we can do:

1. Stay at the current dose, treating a 2-week stall as possibly just a fluke.

2. Move up to 10mg, the next dose level.

3. Take 7.5mg on a 5-day schedule.

4. Stack 2mg Reta on top of 7.5mg Tirz.

5. Switch directly to Reta.

??Decisions, Decisions??🙂
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Well, if a complete rundown of choices is what you're after... LOL

6: Throw in survo/maz to make "ghetto reta."

7: Tweak the diet somehow.

8: Go for gastric bypass surgery.

9: Introduce another compound to boost GH.

10: Stop the treatment and let the weight come back.

11: Sign up at a nearby boxing gym.

Still, my guess is the majority would pick 2/3 or 4.
 
tubby said:

Campdirtybirdz said:

So, listing what we can do:

1. Stay at the current dose, treating a 2-week stall as possibly just a fluke.

2. Move up to 10mg, the next dose level.

3. Take 7.5mg on a 5-day schedule.

4. Stack 2mg Reta on top of 7.5mg Tirz.

5. Switch directly to Reta.

??Decisions, Decisions??🙂
Click to expand...
Well, if a complete rundown of choices is what you're after... LOL

6: Throw in survo/maz to make "ghetto reta."

7: Tweak the diet somehow.

8: Go for gastric bypass surgery.

9: Introduce another compound to boost GH.

10: Stop the treatment and let the weight come back.

11: Sign up at a nearby boxing gym.

Still, my guess is the majority would pick 2/3 or 4.
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🤣🤣🤣🤣
 
With 15lbs left before your goal, does keeping some TZ runway in reserve matter to you? That's something to weigh when you're deciding what to do next.

Best of luck! You're doing wonderfully. Losing 80lb is incredible!!
 
The first thing to ask yourself: at the dose you're on now, are side effects causing you problems? To give a more useful answer I'd want your starting weight, your age, your height, and how much you've dropped and across what period of time. That said, absent any side effects, there's no real argument against going up. If you've dropped 80 lbs — and again, more data would make this easier — then there's likely a solid case for raising the dose regardless, and continuing to raise it all the way to 15mg. That amount of extra weight is almost certainly enough to bring serious long-term health risks, and larger doses beat smaller ones at heading off the long-term health issues that stem from obesity, and probably also boost your odds of holding onto the loss if you stay on it long term. That means heading off diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, strokes, heart attacks and so on.

Something else I'd want to know: how do you feel about the calories you're taking in right now? Are you hungry much of the time, having to keep forcing yourself to eat below what your body is asking for? GLP's succeed, and succeed over the long haul, because they can solve this. So if you're still forcing yourself to eat less than you'd like, that's one more reason to go higher.

Naturally, just 2 weeks without the scale moving doesn't mean much — shifts in fluid balance can run several kilos in either direction and easily create what looks like a stall. If your intake hasn't changed and you were dropping at a decent rate before, it's probably fluid.

If the pace has been slowing gradually across a long stretch, a real stall is far more likely. Even so, you're in a strong spot and luckier than most: you've already shed a stack of weight and you still have room to raise the dose, so reaching your target is quite likely, and your response will have been better than average. Far more often the problem is that loss halts at the maximum dose before you get anywhere near your target, particularly in people with more severe obesity.

Whether or not to switch to reta doesn't strike me as a big deal, but tirz is working very well for you, and I'm assuming side effects aren't much of an issue, so a swap will disrupt your diet for a while as you gradually transition and build up reta doses. On top of that, reta is more likely than tirz to give you side effects, and there's a small chance you're allergic to it. Since it looks like tirz will get you to your target at somewhat higher doses, I don't see any clear upside to switching.
 
Thanks for such a thorough reply. Constipation, dry skin, and lately feeling cold all the time have been the effects. For the constipation, fiber gummies and mag c did the trick. I moisturize all over for the dry skin, and I figure dropping 80 pounds plays a role in always being cold. Meals are fairly steady each day: coffee, a Core Power shake at lunch, grilled chicken with avocado as a snack, and protein plus veg at dinner. Hunger is not a problem. What remains is that stubborn visceral stretched stomach fat, which is pushing me toward adding more exercise.
 
Every one of those side effects might just as easily come from the weight you have lost or from changes in what you eat, rather than from the medication itself. So that does not tell us much. I did notice, though, that you had already mentioned hunger is not really a problem for you. As for feeling cold, that definitely happens partly because you have lost some insulation and partly because your metabolic rate has dropped along with the weight loss.

Even when hunger is not particularly noticeable, a larger dose will in all likelihood lead you to take in fewer calories overall, which means more weight loss.

How old and healthy, or young and unhealthy, you are would matter a great deal when judging how necessary full 15mg doses are for long-term health problems. The older and less healthy someone is, the more important it becomes, in my view at least. Nobody else here brings this up, so I think it deserves saying again.

100 grams of protein per day ought to be more than sufficient, depending somewhat on body weight, to limit muscle loss. I would be surprised if going above that amount changed much. In my experience protein is by far the most satiating food per calorie compared with anything else, so that is one edge it has over other kinds of food.

I would still favor raising the dose. It does not sound like side effects are likely to be a problem when moving to 10mg. I certainly do not belong to the group that says keep doses as low as possible and raise them as slowly as you can, particularly when more severe obesity is involved. If your goal is to lose more than 20 or 25% of your body weight, I cannot think of any reason not to eventually reach full doses, unless side effects get in the way.
 
i'm pretty new around here, but i'm discovering that my way of thinking and my approach seem to put me in a different group than most folks, so i'll throw in my 2 cents and find out if that lands me in hot water.

in that first opening post you mentioned that hunger isn't a problem for you at your current dose and with your current diet. that's a good thing. with a diet that isn't supported by medication, you'd normally expect to feel some degree of hunger, and i realize just about everyone in this community seemingly wants to dodge that entirely, but if it isn't bothering you right now, why not simply reduce your intake a bit more until you do notice a little hunger, before you go up in dose? or you could flip it and tack on, say, a 10 minute walk each day to nudge yourself into a mild deficit, again without raising the dose, so you keep your possible... runway? (if i'm using that term correctly, somebody please tell me) intact with the meds, like someone els pointed out.

fat loss doesn't move in a straight line every time, and a 2 week "stall" isn't anything wild. your fat cells attempt to hold the same size for as long as they can by pulling in water while they're actually shedding stored fat, essentially checking whether they'll be refilled soon, and afterward they release all that extra water in what many fitness folks call the "woosh," when the loss basically catches up after the retained water gets dropped. if you keep pushing the meds higher without letting your body work out that the fat is genuinely gone, you'll wind up at the max dose with nothing left to do except pile on additional compounds.

congrats on the 80lbs by the way, that's massive. you've gotten this far and done a great job, so my opinion is just to wait another couple of weeks and see whether your body catches up.
 
Sure, a 265lb individual dropping 15lbs is harder than someone at 330lbs doing the same, since it comes down to percentages. From 330, I dropped 63lbs. There are still another 15 I'd like to shed.

I'm now in month 2 at 15mg. At some point between 10 and 12.5mg/week, I went over 100 days without the scale budging. I kept following "the study" schedule, yet the only thing that got the scale moving again was eating less. In my opinion, the entire protein obsession exists just because it isn't easily stored. It's a buzz-word. Being mindful of it is fine, of course. But I'll be dambed if I drink those lead fortified protein drink. I'd eat horsemeat thrice a day before touching that shit.
 
In my experience, the most satiating food per calorie is very lean meat. It also keeps hunger away for a longer stretch. I take in roughly 3g/kg/day, and I don't use protein powders or shakes at all — only low-fat dairy and meat. One upside is that you get a bonus of extra calories: digesting and metabolising protein burns around 20% of its calories, so for every 100 calories you eat you effectively get 20 cal at no cost, and free calories are welcome when you're trying to shed weight. That means if my daily protein intake is 800 kcal, the impact on my weight only amounts to 640 cal. That works out as one small extra snack each day, or a bit more or quicker weight loss.

As you approach a normal weight, your body fights harder to hold on to fat, cutting energy expenditure to match how much you're eating whenever it can. When I began at 145kg, I dropped 6 kg per month on the dot until I reached roughly 90kg, and then across the following 6 months the loss gradually slowed until it stopped completely, even though my calorie intake never changed at all during that whole period (about 1600kcal/day). The fall in energy expenditure caused by weight loss and metabolic adaptation can be enormous. Going from 6kg/mo to nothing is a drop of 1500kcal/day in under a year. And that 1600 a day was the amount I needed to eat just to avoid gaining weight — noticeably lower than what you'd predict for my age and activity level.
 
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