DebRD_ATL said:

One third of STEP 4 participants held most of their loss without the drug, and nobody has convincingly characterised who they are.

The regain framing needs pushing back on. Two thirds regained means one third did not, and the trial provided no ongoing support to either group. Treating regain as pharmacologically inevitable is as unsupported as treating maintenance as automatic.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. For anyone assembling their own picture: Tmax is one to three days, terminal half-life about 165 to 170 hours, steady state at four to five weeks, and subcutaneous bioavailability near 89%. Those four numbers explain most of the questions people ask about timing.

MikeFit_NJ said:

The regain framing needs pushing back on.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. Albumin binding above 99% is the whole reason weekly dosing works, and it is also why the trough matters more than the peak. People who dose late are not losing a peak, they are letting the trough fall, and the appetite effect tracks the trough.

Happy to go further on any of that.

Following on from PharmHunterJen — and this may be the naive question:

Whether there is a lowest maintenance dose with actual maintenance data behind it, or whether everything published sits at the top of the ladder?

Reporting back.

I went to a lower dose rather than a longer interval on the strength of the trough argument in this thread, and the difference in how even it feels is obvious.