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Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

It’s miracle drug, I’ve been on it for a few years now, it would have been sooner but usage data wasn’t available at the scale I needed before the ozempic craze. I have hEDS and part of that is ME/CFS and uncontrollable weight gain, so naturally I was looking for help with weight loss with the understanding that drugs that help with weight loss could be treating an underlying mechanisms that was causing the weight gain. Low Dose Naltrexone is another drug that also helps with weight loss and hEDS, so I was looking for more of the same. I still don’t know the underlying mechanisms but my autoimmune conditions have largely been resolved. Like cheap solar electricity, I see GLP1s as basically an absolute win. Of course people shouldn’t abuse the drug and they should also change their habits.

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GLP-1s seem to induce/mimic gastroparesis, which also can occur with hEDS. Has that been an issue? Also, do you have MCAS?

(Also have hEDS.)

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I waited for usage data is that I was pretty sure people with hEDS would have an overly strong reaction, and that did happen in my case and appears to have happened with other with hEDS. I started at 0.025mg (1/20th the 0.5mg starting dose at the time) and still got temporary gastroparesis which was indeed very uncomfortable. I had done long term fasting prior to semaglutide so I had to just stop eating for a long time while the effects started to wear off. Over the first year I ramped up linearly to 1mg and I've been at that dose since.

Wow. Glad it panned out for you.

Thanks, highly recommended. I forgot to answer, I don’t have MCAS but I do get PEM which I do believe is another form of allergic reaction. I do like to eat histamine inducing foods and I wonder if has kept MCAS desensitized.

I discovered I had PEM this year from working out. Found a trainer that is teaching me to stay in a non hyper mobile range + pacing and that is generally more manageable.

Good luck with the GLP-1. Hit me up via email if you’d like to chat more: HN username at gmail.

Does having uncontrollable weight gain help you get jacked? Being jacked and fat is tons of fun, better than being skinny.

No, it's the worst, just fat but also because I was dieting so much I couldn't tell if I was tired from not eating enough or if I had ME/CFS. After I gained the weight people would blame my fatigue on me being fat, ignoring that I was fatigued before gaining the weight.

In the same way that CICO (calories in, calories out) is a hard metabolic rule of weight gain, eating lot of complete protein and lifting heavy things is a hard physiological rule of "getting jacked" .

It's conceivable that future drug discoveries could safely reduce the amount of lifting required. But the protein requirements will always remain.

Not really, CICO is overly simplified to complete pointlessness. It's all hormonal, if you want to gain mass you can take a myostatin inhibitor which is a class of drugs that have already been discovered. You can also eat protein and lift heavy but that's just another way of managing your hormones.

> myostatin inhibitor

These are very new and untested in large populations, but from everything I've heard so far it seems they still won't magically make you gain muscle without lifting heavy things and eating protein. They'll just take the limiter off when you do that so you can gain even more muscle than you would otherwise.

There is conservation of energy, you're not going to gain mass without eating, but if you change nothing else and take a myostatin inhibitor or any other medication that inhibits myostatin (like growth hormones) it is guaranteed you will gain muscle.

There are many people and animals who have dysfunctional myostatin so we already know what happens when myostation is inhibited.

Growth hormones inhibit myostatin so any regular GH or GHRP will help build muscle and retain it and the effect of these have been extensively studied.

You obviously need some amount of protein as building material, but people eat much more than that because having a big excess encourages more muscle growth.

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