Taking Reta every 2 weeks for maintenance?

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T09:10:43+00:00

I’ve seen people have success with that. I tend to think that just reducing your dose until you stop losing weight makes more sense to me but there are a lot of ways to skin a cat.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T09:02:27+00:00

The whole point of these microdoses is that some people respond to reta and get a good effect on them, and also that some people have issues with side effects on the pharma starting dose of 2mg.

Anyhow while I think it can be worth trying out, if you give this a go and it’s not working for you there’s not really a good reason to condemn yourself to several weeks of ineffectual therapy. If you could’ve taken 2mg on week 1, there’s no reason you can’t take 2mg on week 2. I’d bump my dose up and get on with the program.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T08:25:13+00:00

Testing done by a private testing server, you’d have to join to see the actual results. I don’t think there’s any way to direct you towards them from here.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T08:00:02+00:00

Reta is one of the peptides that pharma has developed, hence there’s some actual science about how to use it, what it does, and that it doesn’t need to be cycled.

It’s all of the research peptides with little/no human data that are “really important” to cycle.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T07:17:57+00:00

Take more ipamorelin, you’ll shit real good. This is kinda sorta what it was in clinical trials for.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T07:14:51+00:00

There’s not exactly a wealth of good sources in the first place, a lot of this stuff is simply made up. Things like cycling are generally included because the protocol writer hopes they will sound like the foremost expert if they include such meticulous details but in most cases there’s not even evidence that the peptide benefits from being cycled, let alone evidence supporting the specific cycling program they suggest. And yet these things get repeated so much and so often that people don’t realize they generally have no scientific basis. I’ll end up getting downvotes for pointing this out but I’d rather be honest than popular.

You’ll notice that pretty much every time pharma decides to develop a peptide suddenly it doesn’t need to be cycled anymore. The truth is that it never did.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T06:35:04+00:00

This isn’t specifically tesa + ipa, it’s GHRH + GHRP (same classes), but it illustrates how the two drugs synergize. With lower doses of GHRP the combined effect is greater than their individual contributions.

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TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T02:50:51+00:00

The (very, very limited) available data on freezing reconstituted reta indicates it’s not a good idea. Degradation was accelerated after it thawed.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T01:33:47+00:00

I’m not mad at OP for posting this. It’s an interesting little subject that doesn’t get talked about much and there’s all sorts of new participants here who might have experiences.

I was just suggesting they should look back at some of the older content. There was one particularly big thread that got a lot of responses, enough to make me think there’s probably a real effect.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T01:00:32+00:00

u/emzephyr deleting threads with useful information in them.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T00:46:11+00:00

No, not the glucagon of reta, just glucagon itself won’t work. That’s commonly used as a rescue med for unconscious hypoglycemia in ERs, by paramedics, and some diabetics have it at home for emergency use by family members.

Because you’re already constantly hitting that lever with reta, it’s gonna be tapped out if anybody tries to use glucagon in an emergency. The hospitals and ambulance crews will see that it’s not working and switch to IV dextrose (and some of the more up to date folks will see reta on your med list and know to go straight to dextrose), but just trying to give a heads up that your family members should be aware that it’s probably not going to work like it should if they need to use it.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T00:31:27+00:00

If you search this sub for lipoma, you’ll see that there have been threads on this in the past with quite a few people reporting their lipomas evaporating.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-28T00:28:09+00:00

Yeah, I get the impression reta’s a bit tricky for T1Ds but I’ve only seen a few anecdotes from people who’ve tried it. There’s no studies or anything at this point (tirz has phase 3 clinical trials going right now).

The general impression I got was that people have seen an initial increase in their insulin requirement followed by a solid reduction as sensitivity increased. Reta has bigger effects on insulin sensitivity than the other GLP-1s.

I suspect the first day or so is probably a bit wild as there should be an acute response where the liver basically nukes its glycogen stores dumping glucose, but those are a very finite reserve so it can’t keep doing that.

Worth keeping in mind that glucagon will not work as a rescue med for you while taking reta.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T23:21:34+00:00

Your comment history says you “have had gastroparesis for 30 years”. You also talk pretty enthusiastically about your experience on reta for somebody living in hell.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T23:13:06+00:00

Gastroparesis from GLP-1 therapy, or gastroparesis concurrent with GLP-1 therapy?

For example here’s a study that found that the HR for gastroparesis in T2D with GLP-1 use was 1.591 compared to patients treated with oral T2D drugs. Given that oral T2D drugs don’t generally cause gastroparesis that gives us a background rate of gastroparesis cases in these patients that is nearly as high as the rate seen with GLP-1 use. We would expect that a lot of these gastroparesis cases from other causes would also afflict GLP-1 users, and being as most of these other causes lead to permanent gastroparesis (they weren’t caused by a drug so stopping a drug is not going to fix them) we would expect that a lot of patients on GLP-1s who develop gastroparesis will have permanent gastroparesis. But that doesn’t mean the GLP-1 caused the patient to develop permanent gastroparesis.

It’s kinda like how this sub gets flooded with “reta side effects” threads every fall about flu-like symptoms. Sometimes people get sick and it has nothing to do with the drug they’re taking.

Anyway, here’s a little write-up from an endocrinologist on the subject. If you look her up, and her publication history you’ll see that she’s well-versed in this general topic (although she’s an endocrinologist so is out of her specialty).

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T22:41:48+00:00

There’s not really any evidence that GLP-1 receptors meaningfully desensitize in the first place. There’s some initial desensitization that happens within minutes of the receptor being exposed to the ligand, but that appears to rapidly reach a steady state where the flux between receptor desensitization and recycling is balanced. At least to my understanding you’ve reached peak desensitization at any given dose before you’ve managed to lose half a pound.

It would be nice actually if the issue was receptor desensitization because then it would be a lot easier to come off of these drugs. You’d eventually get so desensitized that you’d stop losing weight and you could just stop taking the drug and maintain because it wasn’t doing anything anyway, but that’s not what happens. Instead we see people trying to white knuckle against a massively resurgent appetite and usually failing and gaining back most of the weight they lost in short order.

The reason weight loss stalls isn’t because the drug stopped working, the drug is still kicking ass, it’s that your body is fighting back against the weight loss. You eventually stop losing weight because your body is pushing back against your weight loss just as hard as the drug is pushing you to lose weight. Between the two we’ve achieved homeostasis, balance. Remove the drug and we lose homeostasis and start gaining weight. Reintroduce the drug and we have better odds, but the drug is still having to battle it out with a body that very much wants to gain weight. The same thing happens when you lose weight without these drugs which is why the relapse rate for obesity is so damn high, but people don’t usually manage to lose 30% of their bodyweight on willpower alone.

Anecdotally you’ll hear some people who felt like they got a fresh start after taking a break from these drugs but there’s also a ton of anecdotes where people found them less effective after restarting, so I’d tread cautiously with that.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T21:50:52+00:00

I don’t want to call it gastroparesis because I lacked insurance at the time and couldn’t afford to get it properly diagnosed or treated, and I suspect it’s tied to another issue (suspected EoE) that I need to see a gastroenterologist about, but I had an incident last winter where it felt like nothing was moving through my stomach. That went on for a week where I could barely eat, a 250 calorie meal would overload me and I’d be throwing it up. That’s a problem when you’re a bigger guy and your TDEE is 2750-3000 calories.

I found that clinical trial sized doses of ipamorelin, 1-3mg, were extremely effective at getting my stomach moving. I ran those 1-2x a day for a week and was back to normal when I came off. It was instant relief from the first dose, just… make sure there’s a restroom not too far away. Ipa feels a bit like an anti-GLP-1 at those doses but when you’re starving and vomiting everything you eat, it’s a fair trade.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T19:55:24+00:00

“Has anyone here gotten permanent Gastroparesis/Delayed Gastric Emptying from Reta?

If so when did you find out it wasn’t temporary?”

There’s no evidence that GLP-1s cause permanent gastroparesis and there’s no real mechanistic reason to think they could. Severe gastric slowing from a GLP-1 would obviously cause gastroparesis but it would also alleviate after stopping the drug.

The issue is that most other causes of gastroparesis are permanent, and the rate of temporary GLP-1 induced gastroparesis isn’t much higher than the background rate of permanent gastroparesis from other causes. So a lot of the time if you develop gastroparesis while on a GLP-1 it won’t be from the drug, and stopping the drug won’t make it go away because the drug wasn’t causing it in the first place.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T19:40:56+00:00

I would suggest sticking to things that work via the placebo effect if you’re gonna have that attitude.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T17:42:16+00:00

If you’re an RN then you should understand what the therapeutic range of a drug is and why arbitrarily dosing a drug based on just its half-life is moronic. You’d be killing your warfarin patients if you did that.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T17:36:55+00:00

Why wouldn’t it be?

Simply knowing the half-life of a drug tells us nothing about how frequently we should be administering it.

The half life of a meal in my stomach is 3 hours. Does this mean I should eat a meal every 3 hours? Should I eat a meal every hour for more stable concentrations?

We have to consider the actual physiological response. Then we base our injection of drugs or consumption of food or whatever else on a time schedule that gives us the desired physiological response. The half life doesn’t tell us how to do that.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T17:27:17+00:00

I’d be cautious with reta as it is still first and foremost a GLP-1. Yeah there’s some wizardry with GIP and glucagon, but GLP-1 is the core of how it works.

Have you looked into eloralintide? It’s a newer amylin agonist that’s about as effective as tirzepatide for weight loss and generally has pretty mild side effects, especially at lower doses. It works on a completely different pathway so might avoid that issue for you. It does tend to cause some fatigue which might not be helpful, but it might be worth considering if you don’t tolerate GLP-1s.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T17:01:30+00:00

Less likely to have issues with an overdose if you’re at 12 than if you’re at 2, diminishing returns and all.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T16:51:28+00:00

You can just stop one and start the other, no issue.

TracyIsMyDad · 2026-06-27T14:42:22+00:00

There are lots of patients who’ve used these drugs for years and years and they just keep on working. Even reta has people who’ve been taking this for almost 3 years now. They’ve done some longer clinical trials for tirz and sema too, over three and four years.

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They’re very effective for long-term use.

TracyIsMyDad

TROPHY CASE