tapered slowly over four months instead of stopping cold, regain was 4kg not 24
Coming off deliberately after 22 months, worked with my prescriber on a gradual step-down over about four months rather than just stopping. One year post-taper: regained 4kg of the 38kg I'd lost. Not zero, not nothing, but a completely different number than the abrupt-stop stories I'd read going in, which is why I'm posting the specifics.
best — the order this archive was captured in
4 of 38 is roughly 10.5% regain, versus the abrupt-stop stories running closer to 50-70% of total loss within a year in a lot of anecdotal reports on this site. That's a meaningfully different outcome, even accounting for n=1. edit: fixed my own arithmetic, 4 ÷ 38 is 10.5%, I originally wrote 15% by mistake.
appreciate you doing that percentage, "4kg" alone doesn't mean much without the denominator and I should've led with the ratio myself
the ratio really is the whole story here, 4kg means something completely different depending on whether the starting loss was 10kg or 40kg
worth the caveat that SURMOUNT-4 and STEP 4 (the actual published data on stopping) tested abrupt discontinuation, not a slow taper like yours, so we don't have trial-grade evidence that a slow taper causes less regain, just that abrupt stopping causes a lot. Your result is a genuinely useful data point precisely because it's rare — most people don't taper slowly and document it.
completely agree, I'm one data point on a question the trials haven't directly answered, trying to be careful not to oversell it as proven
Genuinely valuable post, correctly hedged in the comments about what is and isn't proven by trial data. This is a model tapering writeup.
would love a log of the actual four-month step-down schedule if you're willing to share it, purely as "here's what one person did" reference, not asking for a recommendation
working on writing that up properly as a separate post, will link when it's done
one good data point on an under-studied question is worth posting even though it's not proof of anything at scale, glad this exists
bookmarking the actual ratio, 10.5% regain is a genuinely different mental picture than "4kg" floating alone would have given me
fwiw this is the most useful tapering post I've read this month, appreciate the honesty about the n=1 limits
appreciate the caveats throughout, this reads like someone trying to be genuinely useful rather than just proud of a number
read this before anything else today, good place to start