Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

I used retatrutide for weight loss and went from 199.3 lbs to just under 175 lbs. I kept daily notes through the process. Here's a quick AI one-paragraph summary if you're curious: https://pastebin.com/XACNYKvs

Overall I'm quite pleased with the effects and many of the properties of this treatment that people dislike are actually properties I was looking for. Essentially, for pharmacological interventions I want impermanent effects with a clear dose-response relationship and ideally minimal or no adaptation.

So the fact that people gain weight when they go off it and then lose weight again when they go on it was good. That meant it's fairly easily undoable. The fact that the more you take the more you lose also was pretty good to know though for the majority of the time I took less than any tested dose (and the effects were quite strong on those).

I did experience quite a bit of adaptation so I needed to up the dose until I was in the range tested by the end. I've been off it for a month now and been pretty much flat, but we've been traveling since I stopped and so a lot has changed (no more lifting, lots more eating, lots more walking).

Rough cost for the retatrutide is $1.25/mg.

When people talk about peptides, they typically mean either (1) GLP compounds like Reta that have successful phase 3 trial data and will be approved or (2) stuff like 157 which has no evidence or plausible mechanism to work.

Was cost the reason you went for it over tirzepitide? I feel like retatrutide is still way too early to mess with, it's giving me real "vioxx" vibes of messing with too much at once.

No, I had access to free tirzepatide. I chose retatrutide because early results seemed promising and safe and since I was going to run a short-term self-trial I wanted the most effective peptide.

Hey, fair enough! To each their own.

> Rough cost for the retatrutide is $1.25/mg.

Even with free healthcare that seems like a foolish place to save money when very widely used alternatives exist in the regulated market.

>when very widely used alternatives exist in the regulated market.

Which ones? Semiglutide costs orders of magnitude more.

op:

> had access to free tirzepatide

Ozempic in the US just had its price reduced to $499 for a pen with a few 2mg doses...

Please be careful here, as Retatritude is not actually commercially available in most of the world, outside of research labs. And is not FDA approved to buy or use in the US (where most of HN readers are).

I fear this kind of post will encourage gullible people to go chasing reta on the grey market, where they might as well be getting a placebo, as there's no mechanism for your typical person to verify that they're getting what they think they're getting.

And given it's an injectable, and bacterial growth, or a variety of other toxins that can remain in poorly manufactured pharmaceuticals, can do a great deal of harm.

> there's no mechanism for your typical person to verify that they're getting what they think they're getting.

Think what would happen if there was one.

In the spirit of selling shovels in a gold rush, the first company to commercialize a tricorder is going to make bank off all the fitness fads and off-label/DIY medicine markets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com