6th week of Wegovy - hungry/nauseous all the time and gaining weight

[Beth7810]

I’m into my 6th week of Wegovy. Thursday was my 2nd injection of 0.5mg after starting on 0.25mg.

I have felt unwell a lot over the past 5 weeks. Lots of headaches, low level nausea and fatigue. I haven’t experienced any appetite suppression. In fact, I feel hungry all the time! I have the kind of nausea that I experienced in pregnancy. It makes me crave carbs so I feel that I’m eating less well than I was before. I just want to eat pasta all the time whereas before I was eating lots of fish and vegetables. I’m just not really craving the healthy foods I craved before. I’ve gained around a kilo.

I’m aware that appetite suppression may not happen until higher doses but when I look at threads I see other people experiencing appetite suppression almost immediately and seeing results. I’ve signed up to 3 months with Voy so I have another 6 weeks on Wegovy before I can change anyway. I’m wondering whether to switch to Mounjaro or to push through with Wegovy.

I’m keen to hear if anyone has a similar experience to me but achieved appetite suppression and reduced side effects at a higher dose? I have 2 small children so it’s making life quite difficult feeling unwell all the time.

Something I’ve learned in the last year or so, especially after stopping long term omeprazole, was I was eating sometimes when not hungry to relieve reflux, to push down that burning sensation at the back of my throat.

I’ve resolve most of that by recognising it, identifying and avoiding reflux trigger foods and finding something more effective at relieving the burning.

Have you tried speaking to your provider or local pharmacy to see if they can help with the nausea?

@Beth7810 I'm about to go up to 0.5mg but I'm hoping you can help me on Thursday when you do your next injection. I want to calculate a half-way-point dose rather than doubling it all at once, hoping that this will help ease side effects. I know there are risks to click-count microdosing but this is just a one-off, but to do it I have to know how many clicks make a full dose on a 0.5mg wegovy pen. Please could you count the clicks for me when you do the next dose? I know what the click count was on the 0.25mg pen but I can't be sure that the count would be the same for the next dose up. Thank you.

I had the same, after 4 weeks I had put on 5 pounds! I stopped taking it and just calorie counting now and the weight is falling off.

Even on mounjaro I felt hungrier initially all through 2.5mg and until I started 5mg and then when the doses wore off, which they did quickly for me because I was prediabetic. I think its because it lowers blood sugars and/or increases metabolism so you end up craving more food. I still lost but that's because I was strictly calorie counting on myfitnesspal app. Ideally focus on higher protein foods or even shakes and yoghurts if you are nauseous, eating little and often does help. I haven't had pasta for 2 years because I stopped wanting carbs on mj.
I was prediabetic when I started so I needed the higher doses like 10mg and above on mj, so if you have insulin resistance etc you may be the same with needing higher doses.
I tried wegovy for 3 months for maintenance but it was awful, all I did was crave carbs and sugar and i was constipated and inflammtion and IBS returned and gained 3lbs, I didn't get this at all on mj. Mj is the better drug so could be worth switching, I'm now back down to 5mg for maintenance and it's still working strongly, I'm at bmi 22 currently.

@KindlySurfiingPlatypus I use Mounjaro not Wegovy but click counting is very easy to do and not risky at all.

https://bywardfht.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Wegovy-Click-Counting.pdf

Hope this helps?

It's good to know, but without knowing the number of clicks for a full dose on a new pen size, whatever number I count to will just be a guess!!

When I was on wegovy 1.7mg it was 74 clicks. When you get your pen count all the clicks and then you can work it out. You don't really need someone else to tell you, you can do it yourself.

Sorry if I'm being thick but I was assuming I couldn't do it myself because counting all the way up to a full dose would obviously mean charging up more dose than I want - do you mean that you can click all the way up to a full dose and then reverse direction and click backwards and the dose reduces correctly?

Yes you can click back down too before pressing the plunger (you can on a MJ pen anyway so I assume it’s the same).

to the OP I know exactly what you mean and I had the same on Saxenda when I tried that a few years ago. I was nauseous but the kind where I needed to eat carbs and I gained weight.

i thought mounjaro would be the same for me but it wasn’t and I have lost weight albeit slowly and steadily, so am perhaps not a super responder (on average 1/2 lb a week but over time it has added up to a 3.5 stone loss).
so I would recommend trying mounjaro.

Just because you turn the pen doesn't mean you are using it, it doesn't dispense any dose until you push the button down. You can turn it anyway you want for as many times as you want, it's literally just like a dial it doesn't harm the mechanism. Just count clicks all the way upto the full amount then wind back to 0 then work out how much you want with basic maths.
Don't you have a pen already? It will be the same number of clicks on the smaller pens, I think once you are above 1mg it's the bigger style pens so not sure if the clicks vary depending on the size.

@Beth7810 In your shoes, definitely consider swapping to Mounjaro. I had a headache within 12 hours of my first two doses but nothing after that and it’s been a very successful year on MJ now.

That's brilliant to know, I literally had no idea that clicks were reversible like that so thought I was having to work out 75% of an unknown number. I can do the maths, just misunderstood the physical mechanism.

Apologies for hijacking your thread @Beth7810 with my technical incompetence. I hope your symptoms subside soon.