I don't know, I tend to notice the effect wears off over time. Not sure it's a good idea to consume it permanently. Perhaps a better use would be for short periods to course correct.
Anecdotally, the dose required to maintain a stable weight seems to be lower than the dose required to lose weight. Most people tend to regain some weight when going cold turkey.
The safety profile of the drugs with diabetics, and the health benefits that come from the associated weight loss may make permanent use a net benefit for most people. There appears to be little, if any, "course correction" effect from taking it for short periods of time.
It depends how you define "short period of time". When I started, I lost 40kg in a matter of 5 months. Is that short? If you develop a tolerance to the product, then it doesn't protect you long term from gaining back weight, combined with you losing the option to do a rapid descent.
I am not saying that those variations are great from a health point of view, but they are certainly not as bad as staying obese.
Yeah that's quite short. Healthy weight loss is typically in the ~.5-1 kg/week, while this is an extended period at 2-4x that rate. The effect that will have will largely depend on what your starting weight is, but unless you're starting significantly north of 140kg, it seems like the amount of muscle (and maybe bone density?) loss would be pretty severe.
I have found the same thing, but my experience (YMMV; not recommended that you take my advice!) is that a one week break almost entirely resets it.
I now take a one week break every few months and have not noticed any decline in effects over time.
My suggestion would be to find an endocrinologist that specialises in obesity and these weight loss drugs. They will have dealt with patients who have experienced tolerance and have developed ways to work around it from real life experience. Obviously well-studied protocols with evidence would be preferable, but with how new these drugs are there hasn't been long enough to collect it yet.
I’ve been on it for years, at a lower dose though, the counter action by the body is probably dose dependent so my theory is lower for longer is more sustainable. I think people get attached to the rapid weight loss, coupled with the high expensive, incentivizes higher doses. I take gray market supply and it’s rather cheap.
Also it should be mostly used as an adjunct to strict diet and exercise.
People find they need to increase to higher tolerable doses to ensure their hunger is satiated. But also, you need to increase your protein and fiber intake to maintain that satiation. I tried going up to 10mg and I had such a sick feeling. 5mg I could tolerate. Some people are up 15mg.
According to all the studies, this is absolutely the worst thing that you can do. GLP-1s are revolutionary, but when you go on them, you should intend to stay on them for life. When patients first go on them, they lose both muscle and fat, and when they go off them, they regain just fat, and in many cases they're in a worse situation than they would be if they hadn't gone on them in the first place.
Letting your weight fluctuate up and down in giant swings is, in many ways, harder on the body than just staying at a steady weight, even if it's overweight.
There’s nothing in these drugs that makes you lose more muscle than fat, you don’t lose any more muscle than if you do a regular diet, not even slightly.
Second, the drugs don’t do anything to cause you to gain back mostly fat, and people going off them have more success, not less, than your average person who loses weight rapidly whether through diet or other means.
The average person who is 50lbs overweight because they gained 5lbs a year for a decade will lose all of that weight within 6 months with nearly entirely positive side effects, and if they stop taking it, will regain a bit less than they did before, meaning it would take another decade to get back to where they were. That is unequivocally a huge net positive.
It’s not like Testosterone which does have dramatic negative effects when taken long term and can cause dependency.
It also happens to be extremely effective at reducing bad habits, and yes those habit changes persist after quitting - not perfectly, but surprisingly so. This even works for smoking, drinking, and gambling.
GLP-1 definitely doesn’t prevent you increasing your percentage of total calories from protein, and doing regular resistance exercise. That was the advice from my doctor, and while I’m only 2 months in, weekly scans have not yet shown any significant decrease in lean mass. I don’t see any reason why they would, as long as I continue eating protein and lifting heavy things.
