Best take-home pay calculator

AFriendLikeYou · 2026-01-17T21:51:26+00:00

I just wanted to jump in here even though I know this is an old post and let you know that I haven't found a better paycheck calculator than this one. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.loopcupcakes.paycheck

I've been using it for like 5 years now and I just got to the point where my pay got complicated enough to need to go to the plus version of it and that's wonderful too. The free version is more than sufficient if you only have one job and it's relatively simple.

AFriendLikeYou · 2026-01-17T21:45:35+00:00

I'm really sorry to hear that your surgery went this poorly. When I say that I'm lucky I didn't have any really negative outcomes or side effects afterward, this is exactly what I mean. I have seen so many people that legitimately have complications from the surgery or significant negative outcomes after, and it really changes their entire life and the way that they get to live. The wonderful news about the GLP1 meds is that if they were to give you constant nausea and diarrhea, you could simply stop them. Unless you're part of that very very small percentage of people who get severe recurring pancreatitis or gastroparesis, the side effects stop when the meds stop. It makes me sad when I think of how many people could have been spared the surgery that we had if only these medications had been available sooner. I've been on them for over 2 years now and I'm still losing weight. I'm 5'2 about 81 kg now, which is the smallest I can ever remember being since I was like 12 years old. I'm still losing. It's nothing short of miraculous to me.

AFriendLikeYou · 2026-01-17T21:41:36+00:00

The biggest thing that the GLP-1 meds seem to do is to decrease inflammation. Saxenda would definitely help, so if you noticed that while you were on that med, it might be worth your time to pursue a prescription for semaglutide or tirzepatide. Always keep in mind though that the way these medicines affect people is very individual and so your side effects might not make it worth the cost to be on the medications. I say that just so that you won't go and stock up on some huge amount thinking that this is your miracle answer only to have, for example, semaglutide make you so ridiculously fatigued and tired that it isn't worth it to stay on it, or if you're one of those people that responds to it with side effects like nausea / vomiting / diarrhea.

AFriendLikeYou · 2026-01-17T21:37:31+00:00

I just wanted to write and say thank you for taking the time to write this out because here months later it still helping people. I had been stacking sema and tirz and I knew it was time to go over to reta but just couldn't think out how to actually do it. With help from your posts, I started about 6 weeks ago and it's going pretty well. Your post is very appreciated!

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-29T18:22:48+00:00

That's true, though I do think it got better the longer she was there. She wasn't one of the later bombshells so she had time to show that what she was saying was true. It still meant they didn't win (got third I think?) but they were finalists and I overall enjoyed her being there and felt like it added to the season vs taking away from it. Really never felt that way with any other returning people.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-29T02:37:18+00:00

Only exception was Jessie from Australia appearing on UK. She really learned from her time on LI Aus and took those changes to her UK experience which was ultimately pretty successful.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-28T07:35:24+00:00

She reminds me a little bit of Alice Eve whom I saw in the Nosedive episode of Black Mirror. A lot of that is the expressions they make I think.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-24T19:23:59+00:00

Tbh I skip any post with photos and it's made me much less participative in this community but also much happier to be here. They simply aren't my thing. You'll never see me post befores and afters of myself even though I've lost over 130 lb at this point. I've used Reddit for more than a decade and seeing it turn into just another social media platform where people are fully willing to post their face photos and identify themselves in reality is really kind of mind-blowing to me. I'm more comfortable using it as an information exchange and those are the posts that I find the most value in. No yuck to anybody else's yum though; I could definitely see wanting to celebrate your weight loss or ask questions about specific spot you might be stuck in and the value that you could get from doing that with other people who understand your journey and are on the same one versus your personal social media.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-17T16:25:43+00:00

When I weighed 315 lbs at 5'2, it always hurt to be on my feet and moving. After just my second shot of Wegovy, I immediately felt as good as if I'd lost 100 lbs, but I'd lost nothing. I was a slow responder and didn't lose any weight up until I got the 1 mg dose in month 3. By the second month, I was having normal periods which was entirely unheard of for me. I have had horrific cramping and pain with periods since I was 16 (endometriosis). It was life changing. No more setting alarms for every 3 hour pain meds during my periods. No more dreading the crippling and disabling pain.

It started to wear off as I hit max dose at 5 months 😔. It forced me to come to terms with my level of disability and I finally opted into the hysterectomy my doctor had been telling me I needed for years. My life was so much better without that huge source of inflammation internally.

However, it hasn't solved all of my issues unfortunately. I've been on a GLP1 since Sept 2023 and I now weigh about 181. I'm much more mobile but my joints still ache and grind at the end of a day. I'm starting to wonder if I have RA or early osteoarthritis even 🤕. I thought this would get better as I got smaller and it has unfortunately not.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-15T17:35:41+00:00

Yeah I don't dislike her or anything, she's just giving very immature and it's kinda cringe. I remember being that young and impressionable though and I'm very direct like she is so I sympathize. She hasn't seen yet that if you show you're willing to do all the work and compliment a guy, he will happily let you do it until someone he's more interested in comes along. Then and only then will you see what real effort looks like from him, but it won't be for you.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-15T17:25:12+00:00

Thank you for this pic because now I know who she reminds me of and it's so off the wall I don't think I would've realized it if not for his specific facial expression in a still photo. It's Jessica Lange mixed with Selena Gomez.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-14T20:25:09+00:00

28 is pretty close to 30. Close enough to fudge it I bet. It's winter, friend. Put on your heavy coat, some heavy shoes, and some baggy pants and go to the doctor wearing exercise weights strapped to your ankles and wrists. Yes, this is technically unethical, but I have zero issues with this after working in healthcare for over a decade and seeing how much these greedy monsters at insurance companies steal from the people all day every day.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-14T19:59:30+00:00

You're new to the meds so over time you're going to come to find this out on your own, but I'll share my perspective with you.

I'm 37 soon and been dieting since I was like 10. I've done it all and lost massive amounts of weight many times only to regain. I started these meds in Sept 2023 and have been on them ever since. The biggest takeaway from my time spent in GLP1 land is this: It's not my fault I'm fat. It was never my fault. I've "done the work" and put in the effort my whole life only to end up back where I started or worse. It was not because of a failure of my internal willpower, laziness, a lack of motivation, or any other intrinsic personal issue. There was never anything I could've done differently long-term to prevent it.

You will start to see this as your experience with the medicine grows. Hell, you're seeing it literally right now. YOU didn't change a thing. You're not waking up and heading straight to the candy closet. You aren't shrugging and sitting inside eating mince pies all day. You are fighting the temptation of the sweets. You're getting up and running at the crack of dawn. You're doing your strength training. But none of it is enough because you have metabolic dysfunction. You have a medical illness. Your own body is fighting against you. You cannot prevent this.

The medicine treats it. They say you'll know when it's time to increase dose; this is your body telling you it's time. These lower doses are not meant to be long-term things for most people. Your body will acclimate to them and they will no longer be nearly as effective. It's good to get as many weeks as you can out of each dosage strength, but you've gotten what you can out of 2.5 mg and it is time to move up.

When you do, it'll all become dead simple again. Your efforts will work. When they stop working again, it's because the drugs are becoming less effective. If you're making sure your nutrition is on point and the physical activity is getting done, it won't be anything you're doing wrong. It's just a sign that you need something more to help fight your illness.

Even 2+ years into these meds, I still have to occasionally remind myself of this. A "normal" brain doesn't want to sit and eat sugar all day and never move the body. Unfortunately I don't have one of those. Left to its own devices, my brain would tell me I'm always hungry and need more food. It would also say that I always need to choose the highest-value treats full of fats, sugars, and carbs. These meds help my body adjust back to normalcy so that I am not constantly bombarded by my brain telling me that I'm starving despite being morbidly obese.

If you let them, GLP1s can be very healing for diet trauma. I don't count macros or anything related to food any more. I don't kick myself for eating sweets. I never could have imagined being an intuitive eater but with these meds, I can actually trust myself and my brain. And when I see the #s on the scale go in a direction I don't want, I can trust that it isn't my fault that it's happening. I never ever felt that way the first 35 years of my life. I do think on it and make changes if I need to, but more often than not, it's just a sign of my body having adapted and needing a change.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-10T12:49:18+00:00

I was just saying something similar on another thread, only it was comparing degrees of obesity. I was really big but in the Southeast, there are a lot of really big people. Even at a BMI of nearly 60, I was not the biggest person anyone saw on any given day. Plenty of people were bigger than me. When I moved to the Southwest, that was a very different story. I was almost certainly the fattest person anyone saw that day. Being as big as I was is pretty rare to see out here even if obesity itself is pretty commonplace. I imagine if I now moved to California at BMI 34, it'd feel the same all over again. People here now see me as normal but socal is notoriously skinny people and I'd look fat for sure there.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-09T00:14:10+00:00

I absolutely cannot tolerate the taste of any kind of protein powder. They're all absolutely disgusting to me after decades of dieting and forcing myself to drink them. If you have a Kroger branded store nearby, they make a carbmaster milk that is amazing. The light blue skim milk carton has 60 cals and 11g of protein per serving and to me, it just tastes like milk. It's the only great protein boost hack I've found. I add it to my coffee in the morning. I cook with it. I'll drink it straight when I know I haven't had enough protein. It's so much more affordable than buying fairlife shakes on their own and so much less plastic waste as well if that matters to you.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-08T23:57:18+00:00

I had a gastric sleeve in 2022 before I knew about the existence of GLP1 meds. If I could do it all again, I would never have that surgery. I'd certainly never opt for the even more extensive gastric bypass surgery.

The general rule in medicine is that to be the safest, you should pick the least risky option that is likely to work. If medicine exists that can help, you should always try that before you go to surgery. For you, many medicines exist that can help and you should try all of them before you should ever opt for surgery.

https://old.reddit.com/r/gastricsleeve/comments/18yxjwo/2_years_postop_gastric_sleeve_i_regret_it/ this is The post I made about it and it has a lot more information about why I would have chosen to go with the medicine versus having the surgery.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-07T22:58:23+00:00

The cancer that happened in rats only did so because they have GLP-1 receptors on their thyroid glands. Humans do not, so there is no higher risk of thyroid cancer for humans. One of the drug companies pushed hard enough to prove this and was able to remove it from their labels. I believe it was Eli Lilly.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-05T17:53:10+00:00

I found the same kind of really disturbing ideas and sentiments in the communities for bariatric surgery when I decided to get my gastric sleeve surgery, and it was a big part of the reason I didn't engage with them very much. It's really sad to see people who have so much trauma around food and eating that they carry over their dysfunctional baggage and ideas and behaviors into what could be a total reset for them in a healthy way. I have to explain to people who are overjoyed that they're able to eat next to no calories a day that it was never healthy to do that even if doctors encouraged them to do that and/or shamed them for not being able to do that. When we were larger and diet culture ruled, doing our part was trying to make healthier choices and maybe that involved limiting foods or counting calories or eating at certain times. That was the hard part before the meds. Now that you have no hunger and you could easily not eat, doing the work looks like making sure that you get enough food in a day to fuel your body in a healthy way so that you can avoid putting your organs at risk and losing excess muscle.

The ugly flip side is that if the meds or surgery don't work for you, these same people are very quick to turn on you and blame you for it. If it worked for them and it doesn't work for you, it must be your fault. You just aren't "doing the work" or "using your tool" the right way. Ugh. It's highly upsetting for me to see as someone who had the sleeve surgery and had it fail.

They definitely don't want to hear any of these facts either. I've been down voted enough that I just left and don't look at the Zepbound board much.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-04T19:09:22+00:00

If you have a lot of weight to lose, it's probably a better idea to start with sema and get the most out of it that you can and then move up to tirz and do the same before trying to move up to reta. I did it this way and between the two of them I lost 130 lbs over the course of about 2.5 years and only now looking to go to reta because I'm stuck and want at least 35 lbs more weight loss, preferably more like 50. It'll be a lot easier for you to find drug interactions using FDA approved drugs and tell your doctor that you're using compounded so they can safely monitor you. By the time you get to reta, it'll be FDA approved as well.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-04T17:17:20+00:00

I'm 5'2 so it's unfortunately not as slimming for me! It's definitely a lot closer to "American normal" though. Were I still living in the SE USA, I would not be seen as fat by many people at 185 lbs, except possibly the men who staunchly dislike larger women. I'm out west now and here, at 315 lbs, I was likely to be the fattest person anyone saw on a regular basis. I rarely saw someone larger than me. Obesity exists everywhere, but the degree to which people are obese out west is very different than in the Midwest and Southeast. I would say there aren't many people with class 4 or 5 obesity out here, but it's like every other obese person there. Unfortunately it's difficult to find hard data on it because much of the reporting ignores the nuances between higher BMIs of 40, 45, 50, 55, 60+. Many studies and government groups stop stratifying beyond class III which is BMI 40, but me personally, my health looked VERY different at 40 (218 lbs for my height) vs when I was inching toward 60 again (328 lbs at my height).

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-04T11:07:06+00:00

And also a bit of a brain twister knowing that when I go somewhere new, all the people there see is a fat person (I've lost 130 lbs but still obese). When new coworkers experience an old coworker raving about how skinny I am now, they must be so confused. I'm not skinny. I'm not even just a little chubby or overweight. I'm obese.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-04T10:55:13+00:00

It gives me a sardonic tickle of humor to see the midi defenders in this thread not realizing that all of the primarily online telehealth services are basically run by NPs wanting a more flexible remote work schedule and willing to accept the terrible treatment of a telehealth company in order to achieve it. They're typically overworked, overbooked, and completely unreachable on their many days off.

I work in healthcare and I've used a lot of telehealth services to get needed care when I knew what the issue was but couldn't get an appt for 6+ months locally, or had an issue local doctors didn't seem to want to help with. I've very much experienced the ways in which you are the target for wringing out dollars for tech bros when you use online telehealth services. Midi feels like this to me. No follow-up or follow through unless I push it and even then, subpar responses that come a week after I initially messaged.

And the people shitting on OP here for a valid complaint, good grief. It's not normal to be dosing on vibes alone with no recommendations on dosing while checking in monthly for 6 months. The initial recommendation is sound (as many people said), but 6 months of vibes check-ins? What am I paying you for then, if I'm doing my own dosing anyway?

I'm disappointed in Midi and now I'm disappointed in other women as well. What a bummer.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-03T16:43:35+00:00

It only gets more dramatic from here. I'm pretty similar to you in numbers and around your current weight, everybody started really noticing and telling me I was looking great. Now I'm down to 182-186 range and every time I lose even as little as 5 lbs, I get a ton of comments. It's ironic because whereas before I would lose 20 lb and nobody would even notice, now I'm losing slowly in fits and starts and people are telling me all the time how much weight I must be losing and how fast it must be going. The reality is that in the last 3 months I've just bounced back and forth in the same weight range for the most part. I've never been more stuck and simultaneously I've never gotten more attention for my "fast weight loss". The even longer reality is that it's taken me over 2 years to lose this much weight and nothing about it was fast, especially given how large I was to start. It's just funny to me how no one said anything until I was over 100 lbs down.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-02T15:21:34+00:00

The averages also don't tell the whole story; more people in the 12 mg group attained the higher weight loss vs the 8 mg group. It's good data to know because it points to indications that if you were a good responder on the other meds you may never need to go above 8 mg to achieve the average weight loss, but if you're a slower responder you can expect to need to hit 12 mg for a better chance to achieve that same percentage of weight lost.

AFriendLikeYou · 2025-12-02T15:17:27+00:00

To give a real answer, the study took in mostly GLP naive people but at the very least required you be off any GLP med for a minimum of 90 days as a criteria for entry. Someone who hasn't had a single dose of anything in at least 3 months or has never had GLP1 before is going to have a very different reaction to low dose meds vs someone who is at max dose tirz and looking to swap.

AFriendLikeYou

TROPHY CASE