How many clicks and should I move up?

[LifeOnMarsss]

Sorry I know this has probably been asked thousands of times.

I have a 12.5 mg pen in my fridge. Currently on 10mg and I’m losing weight each week and feeling full a lot quicker still. However food noise remains bad, constant cravings and no suppression. This has been the case the past couple of weeks hence why I ordered the 12.5mg. But if I’m still losing weight surely I should stay on the 10mg?

Please correct me if I’m wrong, if I did this, it would be 48 clicks and I could technically get 6 doses out of the 12.5mg pen if I used all of the medication? Or if I stuck to the “4” doses, I could get 5 doses by doing the 48 clicks.

If I do this and manage to get 6 doses, this would be over the 30 day mark (36 days). Is this safe? Has anyone done this?

You are correct that it would be 48 clicks to do 10mg from a 12.5mg pen, as 10 is 80% of 12.5, so you need 80% of the 60 clicks which is 48.

You are also right that you could do 5 lots of 48 clicks from the pen, and then use a syringe to do another 10mg dose from the remaining liquid. You would need 0.48ml from what’s left to get 10mg from a 12.5mg pen.

And yes, 6 doses would put you over the 30 day point, by 6 days. It’s not that it’s either safe or not safe. The manufacturer cannot guarantee the effectiveness of the medication past that point, either the active ingredient or the effectiveness of the preservative. So the risk is that it’s less effective and that you risk contamination and bacterial growth. That can be mitigated to some degree by keeping it in the fridge and being scrupulous with hygiene. So you need to decide whether you personally are ok with that risk. It doesn’t matter what other people have done or not, really.

You’ll get people saying they’ve gone for many days past the 30 days and never had a problem, and people saying they wouldn’t ever go past the 30 days. Neither helps you make a decision.

Yes, 48 clicks is 10mg out of a 12.5mg pen.

48 clicks x 5 = 240. Add 2 clicks for each prime = 250. So you should get 5 doses out on days 0,7,14,21,28 before the pen locks.

You could get a 6th dose of 10mg / 0.48ml on day 35. It is 5 days beyond the 30 day instruction. No one knows for sure if it is safe or not so you need to risk assess it for yourself. I do it with my 5mg pen as I think 5 days is on the lower end of risk, but I wouldn't go further than that and I consider myself risk adverse.

Regarding still feeling full but food noise remaining bad, I listened to something yesterday about an experiment they did on rats (around 22m 20s) and how modern food encourages food noise and cravings. It is certainly something I noticed over Christmas when I was out of my routine and eating more special occasion type food, the more I ate the more the volume on craving starting turning up again. Do you think any of that relates to you?

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Thanks, you could have a point. I wake up thinking about Starbucks, then it just doesn’t end until I go to sleep at night. I rarely cave in and eat/drink the cravings. But when I do eat, I’m full quick, so it does work, just a shame not to the same effect it had previously.

It might be worth reading Ultra Processed People by one of the Van Tulleken doctors - basically, upfs are designed to make you want to eat them, even if you are not hungry or don’t like them! I’m certainly like that with things like Doritos, Percy Pigs etc. so staying away from upfs and eating “clean” foods might get you back on track

Hmmm, I have actually moved up when the food noise comes back even though I was still losing at a very reasonable rate. I just can’t bear the battle with my head!

Not sure about clicks as I always just use syringes but I have pushed a pen to 35 days without a problem before. It’s about as far as I am personally comfortable to go though 😁