sophie_paris said:

The trials generally allowed a step to be held or reduced and then retried, and people who did that mostly arrived at the same place a few weeks…

PSA for titration users considering the 0.25mg starting dose: this dose is NOT intended for weight loss. It's a titration dose to let your body adjust. Don't be discouraged if you don't lose much in the first month.

The therapeutic dose for weight management starts at 1.7mg (semaglutide) or 5mg (tirzepatide). Be patient with the ramp-up.

Following on from Dr.DermMIA — and this may be the naive question:

What the trials actually did with participants who could not tolerate a step, because that is the situation I am in and the protocol summaries skip it?

BethLabQueen said:

PSA for titration users considering the 0.25mg starting dose: this dose is NOT intended for weight loss.

Dose escalation anxiety for titration: I was terrified to move from 0.5mg to 1.0mg based on horror stories in this forum. But my actual experience? Slightly more appetite suppression, zero additional side effects.

Remember that the people posting about terrible side effects are a biased sample. Most people titrate up without drama — they just don't post about it because it's uneventful.

Reporting back.

I held the step an extra three weeks instead of stepping back down, and it settled. Same dose, same everything, just more time — which is exactly what was suggested upthread.

Dr.RaviCardio said:

Dose escalation anxiety for titration: I was terrified to move from 0.5mg to 1.0mg based on horror stories in this forum.

That is right for the weekly injectables. For the daily agents the interval logic is different and the four-week convention does not transfer.