[PSA] Wegovy is not what most of this community thinks it is
Wegovy is not what most of this community thinks it is. If you already knew this, the post is not for you and you can scroll on.
Steady state after a dose change takes four to five half-lives, so the fair judgement point on a new step is about a month, not four days.
The escalation schedule in the trials existed to keep people on the drug. It is a tolerability ramp, and it is why the label reads the way it does.
Delayed gastric emptying is most pronounced early and attenuates with continued dosing, which is why the constipation usually fades at a stable dose.
Happy to answer the boring questions. Those are usually the ones worth asking.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Weight change and appetite change are different endpoints on different timescales. Conflating them is where most of the confusion on this board starts.
reflux made the first fortnight rough at each step up, then flattened out. Predictable enough that I started planning around it.
STEP-1 ran 68 weeks and landed just under 15% mean body weight change on 2.4mg. It is an average of a wide distribution, not a target you have missed.
The mental model that finally made this click for me: there are two curves, and people watch the wrong one.
The first is exposure, which is set by the dose and smoothed by a week-long half-life. It changes when you change the dose and then settles over about a month. The second is body weight, which is exposure filtered through appetite, food, water, sleep, training and the scale itself, and which moves in steps rather than a line.
Almost every "it stopped working" post is somebody watching curve two over a fortnight and drawing conclusions about curve one. If the appetite effect is still there, exposure is fine. Wait the month.
Do sulphur burps track the day after the shot, or is it there all week?
the appetite signal and the scale move on different clocks
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staying at 0.25mg for an extra month is a legitimate plan
The mental model that finally made this click for me: there are two curves, and people watch the wrong one.
Right, and the timescale is the bit that keeps getting lost. Judge a step at a month, not at a weekend.
Minor fix — the half-life is about a week, not about a day. The rest of your point stands.
Small correction: 2.4mg is the maintenance ceiling on the label, not the starting maintenance dose. The distinction matters for anyone reading this later.
This matches me almost exactly, right down to the sulphur burps showing up on the second day and being gone by the fourth.
The weekly interval comes out of the half-life — roughly a week — so you are on a smooth curve rather than a series of spikes. That is also why moving your day slightly does very little.
That figure is the 68-week trial mean, not a weekly rate. Dividing it by the weeks gives you a number that does not mean anything.
the first four weeks are a tolerance check, not a weight-loss phase
STEP-1 averaged just under 15% at 68 weeks, so a 10% year is not a failure
Dropped my injection day by two days once because of travel. Nothing happened. The panic was worse than the effect.
Research-use-only material is not approved for human use, so anything in this thread about how a compounded or research vial "should" behave is a chemistry discussion, not a dosing one.
- 1STEP-1 ran 68 weeks and landed just under 15% mean body weight change on…10 comments in this branch · started by u/ines_castellanos
- 2The weekly interval comes out of the half-life — roughly a week — so you are…6 comments in this branch · started by u/arne_amankwah