Help! Do severe symptoms stop if you return to previous tolerated dose?

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After horrendous week long side effects, following my first 5mg dose, I'm thinking of either stopping completely, or returning to 2.5mg. I'm scared even to try 3.75mg. As background, this is a second go for me, decided after a long gap to try to lose a further 7lbs, did well on 2.5mg (5lbs over 6 weeks) and upped it last week to 5mg, because I was feeling hungrier and having more food noise (although nothing to bad to manage). It went very badly, I have been unwell all week.

I guess I just want some reassurance before I jab again, based on general experience, is it relatively safe to assume I will be okay on 2.5mg, if I have been previously?

Interestingly, when I was on it a year ago, I went to 5mg with no issues, and stayed on that dose for 5 weeks, before stopping completely.

I was watching a video by a US doctor on YouTube yesterday about why doubling the dose causes side effects. It’s because the half life of the product is 6 days. When you double the usual dose, you still have all the remaining half lives of previous injections in your system (it takes a month for each dose to completely break down and leave your system.

He recommended only going up a dose when you really need to. And only increasing by 0.5mg each time and staying in that new dose for ( weeks until it stabilises. You’re looking for the most effective dose with minimum of side effects.

The doubling of doses is recommended by the manufacturer, but a lot of people don’t need to go up that quickly.

I’ll see if I can find the video again.

Found it. It’s a long video. The bit I’m referring to is at 44 mins in.
I found looking at the graphs really helpful in understanding how much is in your system at 5 weeks.

(He’s talking about retatrutide which isn’t approved yet, but is like Mounjaro (GLP1 and GIP) but with an extra agonist in it). The principle he is explaining about medication half life holds true.

Anyway that’s a long answer to me saying if you want to go up a dose because you feel you are ready, I’d go up to 3 and stay there for a few weeks to stabilise. Theres no need to rush up the doses.

There’s also some good tips in the video about what to do when you get bad side effects later in. Not sure when. Most of the time I was just listening while I was cleaning!

Do you use an app like Shotsy, Dose Diary or similar to log your injections? They will show you an estimate of how much medication is in your system based on the half life as mentioned in the previous posts. It can be useful to enter your injections to date and see where your levels of medication are.

No one can say that you will be fine at a lower dose. Chances are you are likely to be, as the peak amount of medication will be lower than a 5mg injection after 4 weeks of 2.5mg.

Thank you @Shortpoet that's rally helpful actually and makes a lot of sense. I think because the first time I used Mounjaro I have moved up to 5mg seamlessly, I had expected the same. And while 2.5mg had because slightly less effective, it did probably only require a small tweak, it's not like it was completely ineffective. I think I will try 2.5mg tomorrow and if I feel it's not effective enough, I'll go to 3mg as you suggest and take it from there!

Thank you @SilenceInside for your suggestion too, I haven't been using an app but will look into them.

Glad it was helpful.
Also think about what you were eating before and after you doubled your dose. It might be that first time round you were more careful with what you ate.
It’s easy to become complacent about higher fatty food, or slightly bigger portions, or not drinking enough water etc.if you didn’t have side effects the first time. Good luck x

You're absolutely right! I think overall my diet is good, which is why I've mostly maintained for almost a year (just 3-4 pounds had crept on after Christmas, big holidays etc, but I certainly wasn't taking the super careful, highly focused approach I took first time round. Lesson learnt! Just made a big pot of chicken and veg soup, and I plan to maintain a very healthy low fat high protein diet over the coming week.