Week 72 trial curves: did anyone else see a mid-trial stall?

I followed the Week 0-72 design pretty closely. The 5 mg and 15 mg arms aren't really separate stories—people drop out, dose changes happen, so the curves get messy.

Messy is right. I stopped comparing my own midway point to the trial average because those averages hide the flat stretches.

The flat stretches are the whole puzzle for me. Did yours break on its own or after a dose change?

Worth knowing before comparing the arms: 10 mg is the middle dose, and it's the one that gets skipped over. Everyone fixates on 5 vs 15, but common surprise — the middle dose might be what actually explains the stepwise look in the data.

NCT04184622 had 2539 participants. That's large, but dropouts still make the later weeks feel like a different study.

Exactly—by Week 72 the people still logging are not a random slice. That's why I take the tail end with salt.

I keep a simple note each week: appetite, side effects, sleep, scale. The scale is the least useful column lately.

Sleep? That's a new one for me. My sleep got weird around the same time my appetite changed, but I never connected them.

Been reading the Week 0-72 results as a shape, not a promise. The 5 mg, 10 mg, and 15 mg groups all have their own early responders and slow starters.

That framing carries over to the tracking side: plotting weight in fixed blocks instead of weekly. Weekly noise makes a flat stretch look like a stall. The block view showed a drop, a plateau, then another drop. It doesn't tell anyone what happens next, but it stops the whole chasing-every-blip thing.

Block pltoting is smart. Daily made me obsessive.

Did anyone else see appetite come back before the scale moved? That gap is what I can't figure out.

Mine went flat weeks 19–28, then dropped 4 lbs in nine days. Weirdly, the stall ended when I stopped chasing the scale after salty dinners and started weighing every morning but only trusting a 7-day average. I also upped water and walked 20 minutes after lunch. My curve looked stepwise, not linear.

Did your appetite shift line up with those flat stretches, or was it more random?

I didn't follow the trial arms closely, but my own 72-week-ish pattern was definitely stepwise. Weeks 1-16: down 21 lbs. Weeks 17-33: scale bounced within 2 lbs, sometimes up 1.5 after a weekend. I almost quit tracking.

The surprise was my waist tape kept moving: lost 1.5 inches and a belt notch during that flat scale stretch. Weeks 34-52: another 18 lbs down, then another plateau around weeks 60-67.

What helped me see it was logging sodium, sleep, and stress next to my weight instead of just the number. High-stress weeks plus bad sleep meant flat scale but looser clothes.

Low-stress weeks meant whoosh. If you only have scale data, the middle can look like a stall when stuff is still changing.

Did you take waist or progress pics during your flat stretch?

Common surprise: five solid days on plan can get erased by the weekend, and the stall shows up mid-stretch. Two taco nights, and the scale stays flat till Wednesday — worth knowing before comparing anything else.

Adding 30g protein at breakfast broke my flat stretch more than any calorie tweak.

I quit the dily scale around week 30 and started a Sunday tape measure instead, and it told a totally different story: waist down 4.5 inches by week 40, then the scale sat dead flat for six weeks while the tape still gave up 0.75 inch. That gap is what convinced me the middle stretch wasn't a real stall, just my body reorganizing while the number sulked.

@core_nadia said:

waist down 4.5 inches by week 40, then the scale sat dead flat

Mine wasn't tape vs scale so much as sleep vs scale. My flat stretch lined up almost perfectly with about eight weeks of five-hour nights and a brutal work deadline.

Weird reversal though: the one week I slept nine hours on vacation I dropped 3 lbs without changing anything else. Anyone else notice their stall tracking sleep more than food?

I log sleep hours now next to my weight and the pattern is honestly embarrassing.

Mild disagree with chasing the curve shape. My daily weights showed over 40 flat days across 72 weeks, but when I averaged in 4-week blocks, only two blocks were actually flat.

The rest was just noise from salt, hormones, and a heavy dinner the night before. Monthly averages saved my sanity and stopped me from quitting around week 35.

Flew to a wedding around week 48, ate normally-ish but restaurant food for four days, and the scale jumped 5 lbs. Took 12 days to come back down, then it dropped past where I'd been. So my mid-journey plateau was partly just travel sodium.

I started weighing the morning after a normal home dinner instead of post-trip, way less panic.