the discontinuation thing finally clicked for me and I want to write it down
the discontinuation thing finally clicked for me and I want to write it down. I have gone back and forth on this for months.
Appetite is the proximal effect and weight is the lagging integrated outcome, which is why watching appetite gives you an earlier and more honest signal.
Withdrawal studies across this class consistently show substantial regain after discontinuation, with appetite typically returning before weight changes. That is a description of the pharmacology of a chronic condition.
With a week-long half-life, exposure declines over several weeks after the last dose rather than stopping with it. The lag is why the first fortnight is uninformative.
Please do not ask me what dose you should be on. I genuinely do not know and neither does anyone else here.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Left up. It is honest about the reason for stopping and about the timeline.
Agreed. Appetite is the leading indicator and the scale is the lagging one. Watch the first, not the second.
Same. A quiet fortnight after stopping tells you very little; the interesting part starts later.
A written baseline — dose, date, weight, waist, and how appetite feels — taken before any change is what makes the following months interpretable rather than a series of impressions.
What are you planning to watch for, and over what period?
Correction: that study measured regain after discontinuation, not loss of effect during treatment. Very different findings.
Do you have a written baseline from before you started changing anything?
This. Decide in advance what you are watching for. Deciding in the middle of it is much harder.
Interval stretching lowers the trough concentration while keeping the dose; dose reduction lowers the level while keeping the rhythm. They are different interventions with different subjective profiles.
That is a pause rather than a stop, and the plans for the two are not the same.
That is a pause rather than a stop, and the plans for the two are not the same.
Disagreeing with this bit: stretching and reducing are different things and the post treats them as one.
That reads as advice to stop, which is not something anyone here should be offering.
have the conversation with a clinician before, not after
Stopped abruptly once and gradually once. The gradual one was easier to interpret because I could see what was changing.
regain is the expected outcome and framing it as failure helps nobody
There is very little published guidance on stopping specifically, which is exactly why board consensus here should carry less weight than usual and a clinician conversation should carry more.
Agreed that returning later is common and it is treated here as ordinary rather than as a defeat.
Nothing on this board is a taper schedule, and no member can write one for another. What can be shared is what people watched and what they observed.
Stopped for cost reasons. Appetite came back at about week 2, well before the scale moved, exactly as this board said it would.
cost and supply are the two most common reasons and both are legitimate