Answering the narrow version, because the broad one does not have a single answer. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.

That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.

VendorMark said:

Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then…

That is correct as far as it goes, and here is where it stops going. The phase 2 numbers were about 24% mean weight loss at 48 weeks on the top dose, with the curve still descending at the end of the study. A curve that has not flattened is a real finding, but it also means the true plateau is unknown, and phase 2 populations are small and selected.

SaraMom3 said:

Reading the retatrutide phase 2 data properly rather than the headline, and the 24% figure is doing a lot of work that the confidence interval does…

Same pattern here, and in the same order.

Clinical perspective, offered as context rather than as advice. The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions. Agreeing that something happens says nothing about whether it happens enough to act on.