A few days ago I was listening to the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast episode on Chinese Peptides, and the first guest mentioned reading articles on LessWrong about retatrutide, and the second guest owns the company I buy peptides for my own research from. This felt like a sign that I should finally write a final update to 30 Days of Retatrutide.

This will be brief since I don't think there's actually much to talk about.

• I stopped trying to lose weight since I hit my target BMI, my weight-related medical issues resolved themselves, and I'm more focused on strength now.
• I need around 1/4th of the dose I was taking to remain weight stable at my target weight.
• Diluting the drug better, only taking it once a week, and taking it in the morning seems to help with swelling.
• I still don't think there's any direct effect on willpower, although not being distracted by snacks is useful.

Weight

Around November 1st, I was at a reasonable BMI (22) and decided to start focusing on strength instead of weight loss. Stopping retatrutide entirely brought my appetite back too strongly, so I started taking quarter doses a week later. I also started working out more and taking creatine, so the 8 lb gain here is largely expected between creatine and glycogen. 

I'm also not particularly worried about small amounts of weight gain as I work on muscle, since it's trivial to lose it again if I want to.

Side-effects

I noted getting injection site redness and swelling in the last article. Changing to a smaller needle doesn't seem to help, although using a replaceable needing and switching it between extracting the drug and injecting it helped with consistency (every once in a while, the needle would be obviously blunt and hard to inject).

Diluting it slightly less (and later using less as I dropped the dose) seems to have helped, and more recently, doing the injection earlier in the day (vs. at night) seems to have also helped. I also only take it once a week now.

I'm not entirely sure what I changed, but I only get minor redness now.

I no longer get any skin sensitivity or heartburn. My resting heart rate and HRV are still elevated even at a lower dose, but this doesn't seem to get in the way of exercise so I'm not worried about it.