Sacajaweeda said:
To start, ive lost a lot of weight before without any assistance. including earlier this year using a 20-24 hour fast daily. lost about 30 pounds in 3 months.
3.5 months ago, i quit nicotine. have had a real hard time controlling cravings since then.
6 weeks ago, i started tirz. did 3mg for 3 weeks, and now on my third week at 6mg. im losing weight again, but im certainly still hungry and thinking about food. is this just the proper dose? is it not yet working and its placebo? am i just being mentally tougher and fighting the cravings? its really hard to tell. i had this idea before i started on the tirz that id be able to really feel a difference, physically. perhaps i was wrong? just curious what yall think. thanks!
Click to expand...
Having lost "a lot of weight before without any assistance" and still needing to lose weight does imply that you most likely regained a lot of that lost weight at some point.
I lost most of my weight from 145 to 75 kg without glp's then kept it off for a year, then started GLPs and eventually ended up at 64kg 2 years later. Trying to maintain the weight loss without versus with GLP drugs is a night and day difference, even if it does require combos /high doses of tirz15mg /reta6mg/cagri 0.5mg. I have probably got to normal or near normal BMI's 6 or so times in my life, but never managed to stay there for that long before now.
My belief based on reading the dismal long term results of 50 years of studies on weight loss from diet and exercise, is that they basically work short term but have appallingly low long term success rates. So I do not believe that deliberate calorie restriction via cognitive constraint or willpower is a sustainable process. It eventually nearly always fails.
On the other hand, unless you are the unlucky 5-10% who respond poorly to GLP drugs, keeping the weight off long term is more or less a solved problem if you stay on them. As far as I am concerned, this is by far the most important aspect of them, and until GLP's existed, there were no existing options short of surgery with any meaningful success rates for this issue. Losing the weight while not always easy is something that most obese people have done at some point, it is keeping it off that is the much harder much much longer slog.
I think given you are not feeling much effect from 6mg of tirz, you are probably not a super responder, but you will probably not get piles of side effects either. Do you find you feel full after eating smaller amounts of food than before? that was the first GLP effect I noticed. My way of looking at this situation is if you are deliberately and consciously restricting eating to get down to a certain number of calories per day, is that this process itself is generally not sustainable long term. Adjusting the dose of medication, gradually, to ideally get to a point where your calorie intake is low enough to cause weight loss at a reasonable rate, while feeling reasonably comfortable with levels of hunger and not having to deliberately not eat when hungry is much more sustainable long term. Still a good idea to eat healthier foods and extra protein, but I think restricting food choices a bit rather than quantities is more tolerable and thus more sustainable. And in terms of long term weight loss, tolerability is extremely important, the harder work it is , I think, the less likely you are to stick to it for years and years which is what it takes to solve the problem.
I do not think you should increase doses to lose weight faster, just 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.
