Before I started zepbound last year, my most extreme weight loss happened during the stressful year that my wife was dying from cancer. Do not recommend.
I’ve had good results from 6 months on Zepbound. I’ve been on the 5 mg dose for 5 months and have lost about 30 lb. In the first 3 months I did lose more muscle mass than I should have, but for the past 3 months I’ve been focusing on getting adequate protein intake. Next week I will be seeing my doctor to recheck my muscle mass.
Is that a typo? I started with a 2.5 mg dose which I understood was sub therapeutic and just to let my body adjust to the drug. I thought 5 mg was the lowest therapeutic dose. I don’t know what 45 ml refers to. My pen administers 5 mg in 0.5 ml of solution. 45 ml is almost a quarter cup. Surely you’re not injecting that much?
Also I might add that I had already lost 60 pounds by diet and exercise before trying to lose the last 15 pounds with GLP-1s. My BMI is now 31 and I seem to be stuck there.
Recent very pertinent article in the Washington Post. The author was taking Tirzepatide mixed with B-12 made by a local compounding pharmacy. They developed liver failure and ended up receiving a transplant. The author claims that compounding pharmacies are less regulated than manufacturers and possibly less safe.
“Though patients are frequently told of the benefits, we are not informed of the risks. That’s because the FDA has never evaluated whether compounded GLP-1s with B12 are safe or effective. Patients taking a GLP-1 mixed with B12 are thus unknowingly participating in a massive experiment, except these pharmacies aren’t required to report the effects.”
The author also claims that “Many of these pharmacies rely on active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) sourced from unregulated overseas suppliers. In my case, we later learned that the pharmacy obtained its API from China, where many of these ingredients are produced in facilities not registered with or inspected by the FDA.
I’m pretty much exactly where you are, I lost 50 pounds on my own, and then another 20 on Mounjaro, but the 5 mg dose was making me sick, so for now I’m on 2.5 mg, which is not very effective so far. I was off completely for 4 weeks while my doctor made sure I wasn’t developing more serious issues. I really want to lose another 40 pounds, but that seems unlikely.
I found a precarious sweet spot (so to speak) before I started getting nauseated and vomiting. The medicine made me feel slightly icky at least part of the time, and eating was no fun any more; there were times when I was really meh about eating even when I was sort of hungry. That’s when I lost weight the most reliably. If eating is still fun even when I’m not hungry, it’s very hard for me to lose weight. A lifetime of indulgence is a hard habit to break.
That’s less than the starting dose. Per Eli Lilly, at the 2.5mg starting dose you’re not expected to lose weight.@jsc1953 got borderline scammed in my opinion..
I understand the value that the compounders brought when tirzepatide was in real shortage. But now many of the pharmacies are just completely off the rails inventing workarounds to pretend that they’re doing something that allows them to continue to make copy drugs. Weird dosage schedules, and unneeded additives like B12* are just part of the shell game.
Worse, I think, is that the folks on the compound aren’t actually for the most part seeing real doctors and coming up with a weight loss plan. It’s just prescription mills writing these. I worked with an technologist and came up with an exercise and diet plan to go along with my shots. And I lost a little over 70 pounds in a little over a year.
* regarding the addition of B12 to the vials, a recent study showed that B12 actually deactivates something like 10 to 30% of the tirzepatide in the vial.
FWIW the genetic variations between good responders and relative non-responder, as well as those more or less likely to experience nausea, are being elucidated.
For people using GLP1 receptor agonists, there is large variation in weight loss1. In a study of semaglutide efficacy, the average reduction in weight from baseline was 10.2%, but 4.9% of patients achieved over 25% reduction from baseline, and 32.2% achieved less than a 5% reduction from baseline or even weight gain5. …
…To investigate the genetic basis of this variability, here we conduct a genome-wide association study of self-reported weight loss and treatment-related side effects in 27,885 people following GLP1 receptor agonist therapy. We identify a missense variant in GLP1R that is associated significantly with increased efficacy of GLP1 medications (P = 2.9 × 10−10), with an additional −0.76 kg of weight loss expected per copy of the effect allele. Furthermore, we identify associations linking variation in both GLP1R and GIPR to GLP1 medication-related nausea or vomiting, with the GIPR association being restricted to people using tirzepatide. We incorporate these findings into a broader model of GLP1 medication response, and demonstrate the ability to stratify patients by efficacy and side effect risk. These findings provide direct genetic evidence that variation in the drug target genes contributes to inter-person variability in response and lay the foundation for precision medicine approaches in the treatment of obesity …
