Is it possible that my body has just stopped responding to any type of GLP1 medication?
I was on Wegovy for a while - over a year. Had amazing success then my insurance stopped covering it. Was off it for about 5 weeks then started compound semaglutide. Didn’t work so I switched to Tirz peptides. Still nothing so I just added (this week) 1 mg of Survoduride.
I do get sulfur burbs but literally no cessation of food noise or appetite. I’m ravenous and gaining weight. I worked SO hard to lose the weight (I lost over 100 before taking the wegovy) and I’m terrified of gaining it all back.
I did also try cagri but it just made me so exhausted,I was falling asleep at work.
I’d love any ideas. Thank you!
I do not know if the original poster is still around or has sorted this problem out or not, but anyway.
Restarting or changing GLP medications once you have already lost 100 pounds, is a totally different physiological state to starting them before losing weight. I think it is important to understand this issue otherwise the effects over time do not seem to make sense and it seems like they stop working, or you develop tolerance, which is not what is happening. And I see people getting stuck in this logic trap all the time on this forum.
When you start to lose weight your body is used to a high caloric intake, and has a much higher than normal metabolic rate due to increased weight and increased wastage of excess calories as heat. So that at the start weight loss is rapid, especially if you are severely overweight.
After losing that much weight , your body reacts by conserving energy, dropping resting metabolic rate. Calories consumed by your body per day goes down quite a lot just from losing the weight, but then on top of that you get metabolic adaptation to chronic starvation reducing calories consumed per day by quite a lot more.
When I was losing weight I ate the same number of calories per day at the start and at the end, about 1600 to 1800 kcal/day. At the start I lost exactly 6 kilograms per month from 145 kg to about 90kg , then with no change in diet weight loss gradually slowed down and finally stopped at about 75kg.
Unfortunately that is not the only problem. As you lose weight hunger increases as well . It is this combination of lowered metabolic requirements , so that you have to eat a fair bit less than normal to maintain the lower weight , plus more hunger than normal that makes keeping weight off long term really hard.
So whether you were taking GLP medications to lose the weight or not, you are still in this state after losing weight.
If you stay on the medication or change it to another it will seem like it is not working , as you are no longer losing weight and you are more hungry, but if you are not putting weight back on then it is actually working perfectly. At best Tirzepatide can cause about 25% weight loss on average, so if that 100 pounds was 25% of your start weight then it has worked as well as the average, and 50% of people taking it will lose less than 25%, and 50 % will lose more.
If you are on maximum dose of 15mg a week and gaining weight then there are no good easy answers, other than experimenting with higher doses or combining GLP medications like adding cagrilintide. Or some of the other suggestions in this thread.
I only started GLP medications a year after losing most of my excess weight so I have personal experience of this state, and they help a lot to keep hunger under control and reduce or prevent weight regain better than anything else ever has before. But they are not perfect and for people with more severe obesity they do not entirely solve the problem , but they do help, and 25% less overweight is a lot better than 0% less overweight.
