Dr.NateNeph 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…

I disagree that the ladder is purely tolerability. The maintenance and regain data cluster at the top doses, so a ladder abandoned halfway leaves you outside the evidence base for the part that matters most — keeping it off.

sean_dublin said:

I titrated faster than the label because I felt fine, hit a wall at the third step, and had to come back down — which I now think was the predictable…

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.

pete_manc_UK said:

I disagree that the ladder is purely tolerability.

Coming at pete_manc_UK’s question from a different direction. The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions. Agreeing that something happens says nothing about whether it happens enough to act on.

One thing that is still open after steve_okc’s answer:

Why the interval is four weeks rather than two, and whether a slower ladder gets to the same place?

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.