going up faster doesn’t get you there faster, it just gets you sicker faster
Learned this one the expensive way. Went up because the scale stalled, not because I actually needed to, and all I bought myself was two rough weeks and no extra loss to show for it.
Writing it up because I see the same impulse in this sub weekly: scale stalls, person assumes it's a dose problem, person goes up early, person gets sick, scale still stalls for another two weeks anyway because stalls are usually noise, not a dose signal.
best — the order this archive was captured in
your plateau was four weeks old when you jumped. that's not a plateau, that's a Tuesday. this happens constantly.
yeah in hindsight four weeks of flat scale is nothing, I panicked
the scale is noisy day to day, water/sodium/hormones/everything. a 7-day rolling average is the only line worth reacting to and four weeks of that flat is a genuinely different signal than four weeks of raw numbers flat.
this. raw daily weight has like a 1-2kg noise band for a lot of people, a monthly "stall" can be entirely inside that band
going back and rolling-averaging my own data now, mildly annoyed at past me
pharmacologically this tracks. GI side effects scale pretty directly with how fast the dose ramps, not just the dose itself — SURPASS-2 and the tirz dose-finding work both show discontinuation clustering around escalation steps, not around any particular absolute dose.
right, it's a rate-of-change problem more than a magnitude problem for most people's GI tolerance
doing the arithmetic on why this feels so bad: going from 2.5mg to 5mg is a 100% jump in one step. going 2.5 → 3.75 → 5 with an extra rung is two ~50% jumps instead of one 100% jump. same destination, half the shock per step, that's the whole rationale for the smaller bumps.
good way to put it in numbers instead of vibes, saving this explanation
lived this exact arc, dose up, three bad days, stall continued for another 9 days regardless, then broke on its own. the dose change bought me nothing but nausea. edit: checked my log, it was 9 days not "about a week" like I first said.
this is survivorship bias, plenty of people go up and it does resolve the stall, you're just assuming correlation was never causation for anyone
nobody said never. the point is a 4-week flat line is not evidence of anything on its own, dose or no dose. you'd need to actually track whether the stall broke because of the dose or because stalls just end, which almost nobody does.
ok that's a fairer version of the argument than the one I was reacting to, retracting some of that
delayed gastric emptying is most of the GI story here and it's also dose-and-rate dependent, so "go slower" is doing real pharmacological work, not just psychological comfort
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