I am not quite overweight enough to be officially eligible for a prescription for tirzepatide or semaglutide, and I wasn’t all that interested in them anyway given their (side) effects and mechanism of reducing metabolism.
I started experimenting with a low dose (1-2 mg / week) of grey-market retatrutide about a month ago, after seeing the clinical trial results and all the anecdata about how good it is. For me the metabolic effects were immediate: I get less hungry, feel fuller for longer after eating, and generally have more energy. I am also losing weight effortlessly (a bit less than 1 lb / week, after initially losing some water weight faster at the beginning), which was my original main motivation for trying it. I am hoping to lose another 10-15 lbs or so and then reduce or maintain whatever dose I need to stay at that weight.
The only negative side effects I have experienced so far are a slight increase in RHR (mid-high 60s → low 70s), and a small / temporary patch of red, slightly itchy skin around the injection site. I work out with weights semi-regularly and haven’t noticed much impact on strength one way or the other, nor have I noticed an impact on my sleep quality, which was / is generally good.
I also feel a little bad about benefiting from Eli Lilly’s intellectual property without paying them for it, but there’s no way for them to legally sell it or me to legally buy it from them right now. Probably when it is approved by the FDA I’ll try to talk my way into an actual prescription for it, which I would be happy to pay $1000 / mo or whatever, for both peace of mind and ethical reasons.
(Grey market suppliers seem mostly fine risk-wise; it’s not a particularly complicated molecule to manufacture if you’re an industrial pharmaceutical manufacturer, and not that hard for independent labs to do QA testing on samples. The main risk of depending on these suppliers is that customs will crack down on importers / distributors and make it hard to get.)
The other risk is that long term use will have some kind of more serious negative side effect or permanently screw up my previously mostly-normal / healthy metabolism in some way, which won’t be definitively knowable until longer-term clinical trials have completed. But the benefits I am getting right now are real and large, and carrying a bit less weight is likely to be good for my all-cause mortality even if there are some unknown long term risks. So all things considered it seems worth the risk for me, and not worth waiting multiple years for more clinical trial data.
Looking into all of this has definitely (further) radicalized me against the FDA + AMA and made me more pro-big pharma. The earliest that retatrutide is likely to be approved for prescription use is late 2026 or 2027, and initially it will likely only be approved / prescribed for use by people who are severely overweight, have other health problems, and / or have already tried other GLP-1s.
This seems like a massive waste of QALYs in expectation; there are likely millions of people with more severe weight and metabolism problems than me for whom the immediate benefits of taking reta would outweigh most possible long term risks or side effects. And the extremely long time that it takes to bring these drugs to market + general insanity of the prescription drug market and intellectual property rights for them in various jurisdictions pushes up the price that Lilly has to charge to recoup the development costs, which will hurt accessibility even once it is actually approved.
OK yeah, retatrutide is good. (previous / related: The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s Actually Work, 30 Days of Retatrutide, How To Get Cheap Ozempic. Usual disclaimers, YMMV and this is not medical advice or a recommendation.)
I am not quite overweight enough to be officially eligible for a prescription for tirzepatide or semaglutide, and I wasn’t all that interested in them anyway given their (side) effects and mechanism of reducing metabolism.
I started experimenting with a low dose (1-2 mg / week) of grey-market retatrutide about a month ago, after seeing the clinical trial results and all the anecdata about how good it is. For me the metabolic effects were immediate: I get less hungry, feel fuller for longer after eating, and generally have more energy. I am also losing weight effortlessly (a bit less than 1 lb / week, after initially losing some water weight faster at the beginning), which was my original main motivation for trying it. I am hoping to lose another 10-15 lbs or so and then reduce or maintain whatever dose I need to stay at that weight.
The only negative side effects I have experienced so far are a slight increase in RHR (mid-high 60s → low 70s), and a small / temporary patch of red, slightly itchy skin around the injection site. I work out with weights semi-regularly and haven’t noticed much impact on strength one way or the other, nor have I noticed an impact on my sleep quality, which was / is generally good.
I also feel a little bad about benefiting from Eli Lilly’s intellectual property without paying them for it, but there’s no way for them to legally sell it or me to legally buy it from them right now. Probably when it is approved by the FDA I’ll try to talk my way into an actual prescription for it, which I would be happy to pay $1000 / mo or whatever, for both peace of mind and ethical reasons.
(Grey market suppliers seem mostly fine risk-wise; it’s not a particularly complicated molecule to manufacture if you’re an industrial pharmaceutical manufacturer, and not that hard for independent labs to do QA testing on samples. The main risk of depending on these suppliers is that customs will crack down on importers / distributors and make it hard to get.)
The other risk is that long term use will have some kind of more serious negative side effect or permanently screw up my previously mostly-normal / healthy metabolism in some way, which won’t be definitively knowable until longer-term clinical trials have completed. But the benefits I am getting right now are real and large, and carrying a bit less weight is likely to be good for my all-cause mortality even if there are some unknown long term risks. So all things considered it seems worth the risk for me, and not worth waiting multiple years for more clinical trial data.
Looking into all of this has definitely (further) radicalized me against the FDA + AMA and made me more pro-big pharma. The earliest that retatrutide is likely to be approved for prescription use is late 2026 or 2027, and initially it will likely only be approved / prescribed for use by people who are severely overweight, have other health problems, and / or have already tried other GLP-1s.
This seems like a massive waste of QALYs in expectation; there are likely millions of people with more severe weight and metabolism problems than me for whom the immediate benefits of taking reta would outweigh most possible long term risks or side effects. And the extremely long time that it takes to bring these drugs to market + general insanity of the prescription drug market and intellectual property rights for them in various jurisdictions pushes up the price that Lilly has to charge to recoup the development costs, which will hurt accessibility even once it is actually approved.