4 ms·

I’m always kind of envious of the people who were able to lose weight on GLP-1 drugs. I lost a bunch of weight a few years ago, and still need to lose a lot mor

• bradleyy 7mo ago
  Hey, I can identify. Sending good thoughts your way.
• cthalupa 7mo ago
  That's unfortunate! It might be worth checking out Tirzepatide or Retatrutide once it is released. The GIP and Glucagon receptors might be better targets for you, even if the GLP-1 receptor seems to not help.
• pitched 7mo ago
  I really had thought (with no research) the correlation between mental health and glp1 effectiveness went the other way around. Thank you for this check-your-biases moment, you probably just saved me a ton of embarrassment down the line, if these drugs ever enter my life.
  • phil21 7mo ago
    I don’t think there is remotely enough data on the subject to make any confident statements either way yet. I think the only very confident thing I can say after watching and helping dozens of folks get started on these drugs is that everyone’s biology is vastly different. I have friends who have lost close to a hundred pounds on the starting doses of their chosen GLP-1. I have other friends who barely lost anything after a year at max dose. Some of these people in both groups are highly motivated to lose weight and some are simply taking the drug as a magic fix and expending zero other effort into changing their lives. Some have very difficult mental issues and relationships with food, some have very few hangups on the subject. I have never been able to predict with high confidence how any particular person is going to react to taking them. By and large the results are close to magical for the majority of folks, and there may be some correlation with folks who combine the drug with other lifestyle changes - but those are just general averages I see and certainly not scientific.
• brap 7mo ago
  Wegovy/Ozempic didn’t do anything for me for months. Then my doc put me on Tirzepatide+Phentermine combo and I forgot what being hungry even feels like.
  • bobsmooth 7mo ago
    How long have you been on Phentermine? For me it stopped working after only a couple weeks.
  • vladgur 7mo ago
    Do you have to remind yourself to consume things like proteins, etc to prevent muscle loss?
    • cthalupa 7mo ago
      I couldn't hit my macros on tirzepatide - couldn't get enough protein without feeling sick to my stomach. One of the reasons I swapped to reta. (though as a general note for anyone reading, just getting enough protein isn't enough - you need muscle stimulus too. Getting enough protein will help reduce the amount lost but if you really want to stop it, you gotta do resistance training)
• amelius 7mo ago
  Did you try those zero-sugar candy bars (often labeled as protein bars)? They work quite well for me, no messing with GLP-1 necessary.
  • j-conn 7mo ago
    Which do you like? Barebells salty peanut and chocolate dough over here. Though the sugar alcohols certainly aren’t great for you either, I think they were recently linked to stroke risk
    • bitwize 7mo ago
      Munk Pack is a good brand. They're like Kind bars but sweetened with allulose.
      • amelius 7mo ago
        Thanks for the link. I also hate the sugar alcohols. However: > But allulose isn’t approved for use in Canada or Europe. There, it’s considered a “novel food,” which means it hasn’t been available long enough for sufficient testing, according to those governments’ standards. > And it’s important to know that the FDA’s GRAS status doesn’t mean that allulose has been rigorously tested. > “We don’t have studies regarding the safety of allulose at this time,” Dr. Hazen shares. “But if it follows similar trends to what we see in some other sugar substitutes that are sugar alcohols like erythritol, I would suggest there’s reason to be cautious about how much of it you consume.” https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-is-allulose https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-is-allulose
        • bitwize 7mo ago
          I don't consume more than like a few grams per day to sweeten things like coffee, as well as the 5g or so in a single Munk bar. I seem to tolerate it well.
    • amelius 7mo ago
      I'm a Barebells Coco Choco "fan", though I'm aware of the stories around sugar alcohols. I think those bars are way too sweet anyway. They could use far less sweeteners. Would love to hear about more responsible options.
• 01100011 7mo ago
  It lets me more or less skip a meal but holy hell I am craving sugar more than ever. On the whole I'm cutting calories and have lost a lot of weight, I just wish I didn't want sugar this much.
  • Teknoman117 7mo ago
    I’ve always been more of a savory kind of person myself. I’d take biscuits and gravy or a steak over sweets any day! But I feel you on sugar. Took me a long time to cut sugar cravings. A decade ago I cut regular soda out of my diet, which a few years later led to me cutting out pretty much anything sweetened. Realistically it wasn’t the sweetness for me, it was the “mouthfeel” or doing something with your mouth. Just straight sparkling water satisfied the entire craving for me. The hardest thing for me to give up / heavily cut back on was fried things. Maybe that’s the result of my parents using french fries as the reward food when I was a kid…
  • bitwize 7mo ago
    Try allulose-sweetened stuff. Allulose is a sugar your body doesn't metabolize like sucrose. It has zero calories and does not increase your blood sugar. It's a component of maple syrup and so does taste a bit maple-y, but better than most artificial sweeteners and even stevia leaf extract (stevia and aspartame have a "tang" to them I dislike).
• rootusrootus 7mo ago
  You missed out on both of the weight suppression tricks, which really does suck. Appetite suppression (or reduction of food noise) is pretty useful, but GLP1s also tend to punish you mightily if you overeat. For me, even if I were hungry, overeating will make me hurt for hours. I could not gain weight on this even if I wanted to. There are some difference, too, between the various drugs. I never tried ozempic, I went directly to tirzepatide (zepbound). And then to retatrutide. I will say that reta is in some ways the most interesting, because it has less appetite suppressing activity than tirzepatide (this is common, not just me), but it still cuts my stomach capacity quite a lot, and ramps up my metabolism. I had stalled at about 90 pounds down with tirzepatide, and reta immediately knocked off another 15. I track calories, and I had changed nothing. Felt more hungry, still lost more weight. Wild. From one rando to another, I recommend trying tirzepatide. Or try semaglutide again but stacked with cagrilintide -- some people get pretty great results with that, similar to tirz.
  • Teknoman117 7mo ago
    Yeah I might just have to go get it out of plan. Kaiser covers Ozempic, but none of the Tirzepatide based medications. (Edit: looks like that might have changed) I am a big guy (6’4, 330 lbs), but I was amazed that Ozempic just seemed to do nothing. I was having the gastric side effects, but I could still eat 3000 calories a day if I cheated without feeling anything.
    • gedy 7mo ago
      I highly recommend Zepbound, you might try it.
  • AussieWog93 7mo ago
    Similar experience here with Tirzepatide. Overeating is punished swiftly and painfully. If it works for you, look into getting one of the 15mg pens and counting clicks in order to get more doses per vial. I've been on the one pen for 3 months now and it's still got plenty of juice left.
    • 7mo ago
• sublinear 7mo ago
  I went down from 390lbs to 240lbs gradually over 5 years. I have maintained a weight of 240lbs since then (6'1" tall). The first year was the most dramatic loss of 100lbs. I was miserable and didn't know what I was doing other than counting calories. The rest of it was more considerate of total nutrition, and that's what made my good eating habits stick. I say this because while I'm not a doctor I think GLP-1 is probably unnecessary for the vast majority of patients. Better food and information is more available than ever before. I would strongly advise to watch your A1C and get out of the diabetes danger zone if you are. Most people can drop a few percent in as little as 6 months and it makes a massive difference in mental health. Blood glucose has a direct impact on the brain and overall cardiovascular health. If you drink alcohol, you might want to take a break also to let your liver/kidneys/pancreas do their jobs properly and restore insulin sensitivity and other hormones. Look into the "fruit paradox", and more generally get a good salad in for lunch to address nutrient deficiencies. Not crappy salads either. You're not a rabbit. Treat them like the amazing sandwiches without bread that they are. Sounds like old advice, because it is, but I find people aren't listening because they want to more deeply understand why to do it and what the effects are. Convenience and unintuitive pricing are false bargains that get in the way of healthier habits. Focus on nutrition and not quantity. Change your groceries, change your life.
  • rootusrootus 7mo ago
    > I say this because while I'm not a doctor I think GLP-1 is probably unnecessary for the vast majority of patients. We have mountains of evidence that willpower fails for something like 99% of everyone, which is far from a vast majority. I applaud anyone's efforts to become healthier, however (though 240 at 6'1" is still obese, I would still explore medicine if I could not get any lower "naturally").
    • sublinear 7mo ago
      Thanks for the reply. Your perspective framing this as "willpower" is precisely what I'm concerned about. I didn't need any willpower to do this and I'm not even humblebragging nor think of myself as a tough guy. I'm saying that healthy habits are simply a matter of understanding. If someone wants to take GLP-1 on top of that, it's their call. Many seem to be under the impression it's so vital for their specific situation to lose weight or avoid a heart attack and I think that's plainly false. We shouldn't be feeding fear, and humans aren't that unique. I did not change my diet. If anything I just added more variety with a specific intent and it worked. Even just changing the order in which one eats things (fiber before sugary foods) can make a big difference. Once I got the blood glucose under control all the strong cravings and eating mistakes basically went away on their own without my conscious effort. The body is all connected and driven by hormones.
• rjurney 7mo ago
  So try Mounjaro. It works better.
• tsoukase 7mo ago
  Try Fluoxetine 20mg, first 1 per day, later 2. Glp-1 doesn't work in stress related obesity.
• meetingthrower 7mo ago
  that's too bad. I'm microdosing tirz -- 1/2 the "starter" dose they use to titrate you on, so essentially 1/4 of the therapeutic dose. Totally helped me reduce appetite driven snacking and eating. I still enjoy food, but now I leave half a beer left on the table. No problem. Makes you wonder what free will is like. I am in a totally different setup than you though - 225 weight, goal to get down to 180 (my Army weight was 170.) I exercise a lot, and lost 30 pounds through diet two years ago. But it was the hardest thing I've done since Ranger school! So paintful to not eat enough. Gained it all back. I'm in month one of tirz and it is as easy as pie.
  • Teknoman117 7mo ago
    Yeah, the 18 months it took me to lose that first 100 pounds was about the most miserable I've ever been in my entire life. Constantly hungry, constantly thinking about food, exercising 3 hours a day, having to sit out of social events because more than half of them involve going to restaurants, etc. It really opened my eyes to just how food centric society is.