I've increased the doses as recommended and have now been on 15mg since May 2025, never had any side effects at all. Not even a rogue sulphur burp!
I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the 1990s, and had to learn to stab my fingertips with the old lancets, calculate carb content in everything I was going to put in my mouth, work out the corresponding insulin dose and inject before every meal.
Insulin is a life saving medication with some really dangerous side effects, it will kill you if you get careless, or if you are taken into hospital and the person in charge of dispensing gets careless. The insulin units to carb ratio changes if you are a bit under the weather, or do more exercise than planned. Sometimes you do everything right and still wake in the middle of the night shaking and sweating with dangerously low glucose levels, and have to guzzle dextrose tablets if you want to be able to wake up the next morning, because you are coming down with a cold or your hormones are playing silly buggers. Because of course insulin resistance and PCOS go hand in hand.
Insulin causes weight gain, which is why it used to be prescribed to the dangerously underweight to "build them up". Being forced to take it (or risk blindness and having extremities amputated) makes every day a struggle for type 2 diabetics. The diabetes doctor would say "you MUST lose weight or you are going to go blind and have your feet amputated" which you'd think would be pretty motivating, but with a wolf gnawing at your insides every minute of the day it's inevitable that you'll sometimes give up and toss down a load of food to quiet it.
So each year I'd gain more weight, and the doctor would give me that sad, disappointed look, while increasing my doses of various (dangerous) medicines. Right up until some clever bastard worked out that an enzyme in the Gila monster's toxic spit enabled it to survive on a few meals/year and started looking into it, resulting in the development of Exenatide.
Once I started taking that instead of insulin the annual weight gain ground to a halt, and when Liraglutide came out to replace it I lost 10kg the first year without any effort.
I was on liraglutide for diabetes from 2017 until it became unavailable in September 2023 and I had to start using insulin again. From losing an average of 3kg/month without feeling hungry (by changing what and when I ate under the influence of Zoe food science podcasts) it suddenly took all my willpower to stick to the exact same amount of calories as before. So when I weighed myself at the end of that very difficult month I was bitterly disappointed to only have lost 400g instead of the usual 3kg.
When people witter on about calories in and calories out they flaunt their ignorance. I have 3 years and 10 months of weight loss data, along with Myfitnesspal records for every single morsel eaten on every single day. I'm disabled and can barely walk so my activity levels don't vary, but weight loss and calorie intake do not correspond. Once I was no longer obese my weight loss slowed down from 3 to 1kg/month. Until I made Sunday a "refeed day" where I allow myself up to 2000 calories instead of the 1400 I aim for the rest of the week. Adding more calories has boosted my weight loss back to 3kg/month after it had slowed to around 1kg. Individual metabolism turns out to be a lot more complicated than calories in/calories out.
I was delighted when Wegovy became available on private prescription and took that (also without any side effects) from January 2024, before changing to Mounjaro at the end of June that year after seeing it available on Voy.
These weight loss injection threads are fascinating. Especially for an old diabetic who was forced to weigh and calculate the carb content of everything in a meal, then calculate, draw up and inject the corresponding insulin dose. Going from injecting up to 6 times a day, and losing the battle against insulin induced weight gain, (as well as having to take a load of other diabetes drugs with their serious side effects, 2 blood pressure medications and a statin) I'm in heaven with my weekly jab of Mounjaro, it's miraculous.
I realise that it is different motivating yourself to inject when you aren't battling an immediately life limiting health condition, and that health anxiety is real and debilitating, but I think it would be a terrible shame if you allowed a shooting pain in your back an hour after your first injection after a dose increase to put you off.
I saw a scientific paper that showed that 4% of the people given the placebo in a controlled GLP-1 trial had such bad side effects that they were unable to continue. Health anxiety is very real, but I wonder if those 4% would have been able to continue with the trial if they'd been given techniques to help them squish those anxious thoughts before they built up till they were strong enough to trigger diarrhea, constant nausea and other very real physical side effects?
Previously someone else said they felt a pain in their throat after their first injection and wanted to know if that was the first sign of thyroid cancer. GLP-1 injections do cause an increase in a rare form of thyroid cancer in rodents, but there is no evidence of it happening in humans. www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/endocrinology/news/glp-1ra-and-thyroid-cancer-new-study-suggests-detection-bias-not-causation/mac-20587812
When I was a veterinary student we were taught that aspirin would never have been approved if it hadn't become popular before we started testing drugs on animals, because most initial tests are done on rats and mix, and aspirin causes internal bleeding, kidney damage and death in rodents. Just like paracetamol is lethal to cats and not safe for dogs, but the safest pain killer for humans. So although we do still test on animals the results do not necessarily correspond with how the medication will affect a large monkey/human. I expect that more testing will be done by AI and on human cell cultures in the future, not for the benefit of the test animals, but because it gives better and more transferable results.
I've lost 14.5 stones since spring 2022, BMI down from 59.5 to 25.3. I'd lived with morbidly obesity since the 1980's. Through the decades I've managed (by superhuman effort) to repeatedly shed between 5 and 8 stones, but after hitting my goals (or as close to the goal as I could get) I always regained the lost weight, along with an extra 5-10kg within 2 years. I'd given up and resigned myself to the prospect of being buried in a double wide coffin, but now I'm only 1kg away from normal BMI, and down from a size 36 to a 12.
Best of all I have no concerns about regaining the weight, because the 5mg prescription I get from the diabetes consultant (topped up with his approval by another 10mg bought privately for weight loss) will be enough to keep my blood glucose and satiety responses working in the same way they do for normal people who have a functioning thyroid gland and who don't have insulin resistance.
I'm just a sad these drugs didn't arrive 40 years ago, because my life would have been very different. Which may be part of the reason I feel quite evangelical about them.
Sorry to blather on, I shall now sidle off without even trying to raise a rousing chorus of hallelujahs.