Still deciding between semaglutide and tirzepatide

[woundcarping]

I think if you asked people who have taken all three to give you advice it would be:

If you're starting fresh and you're going to be going to the gray market, just start with retatrutide.

My own personal experience was I started on semaglutide and got up to the max dose (at the time) of 2.4mg. I didn't really experience very much weight loss at all and had awful GI side effects... so much gastric pain!

I then switched to tirzpeatide, but because I had already started on semaglutide, it took a higher dose of tirzepatide to be effective. I didn't start seeing any weight loss until I got up to 10mg and I'm now at 15mg.

What we see, anecdotally, a lot in the community is people who are then on tirzepatide switching to retatrutide reporting that they don't feel anything near the appetite suppression that they did when they were on tirzepatide.

However, clinical trials have shown that (despite that valid observation), retatrutide produces superior weight loss results.

If you went straight to retatrutide from the get-go you wouldn't have anything to compare it to and that's probably a good thing.

Plus, if you start with retatrutide and titrate up effectively you should lose the weight you want to lose. If you hit a wall and a plateau then things like eloralintide - which will experience increasing availability in the gray market - will be the thing to add to your arsenal to get you over that hump.

So truthfully, from experience "if I knew then what I knew now" I would say:

1) Retatrutide with an eye to adding Eloralintide down the road
2) Tirzepatide
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3) Semaglutide

I simply can't advocate the lesser effective medication that typically produces more side effects.

Recommending Reta to someone that is looking to lose say 15% seems short sighted.

I switched from Tirz to Reta after 4 weeks because I wanted to lose 30-35% and Reta was the better choice.

 

[Skidude]

Recommending Reta to someone that is looking to lose say 15% seems short sighted.

I switched from Tirz to Reta after 4 weeks because I wanted to lose 30-35% and Reta was the better choice.

I think the consensus I have seen is Reta is a personal choice based on a number of factors.
Many, who have been in this space a long time, believe it should not be the first line solution.
There are many reasons behind this, perhaps some will elaborate or a search can provide more insight.

For me, I believed I would consider Reta if I did not get my desired weight per week goals met.
There is an advantage of not losing too quickly as well.

I hit goal within 7 months losing a total of 64lbs or about 1.5lbs per week; which was my desired rate of loss.

If that 1.5 would be 52 weeks, or 100+ lbs I would have been ok with that rate as well.