This one has a reasonably settled answer, so here it is. Holding genuinely reduces total burden rather than redistributing it, because the gastric-emptying component adapts. Receptor-level tachyphylaxis to the delayed-emptying effect develops over weeks while the central appetite effect persists, so the same dose is materially more comfortable at week six than at week two. A slower ladder therefore reaches the same dose with less cumulative nausea, not the same nausea spread thinner.

Dr.AddMedPHL said:

Holding genuinely reduces total burden rather than redistributing it, because the gastric-emptying component adapts.

Agreed on adaptation, with a caveat: adaptation applies to gastric emptying and not to everything. If your problem is the aversion rather than the fullness, waiting does less, because the aversion is central and it is the mechanism working as intended.

SleepFixSam said:

Nausea arrived on day two of each dose step, lasted about four days, and disappeared entirely by the second week — until the step where it did not.

Same position here, arrived at the long way round. The line between titrate-through and stop is not severity, it is trajectory and what else is present. Nausea that peaks and improves within a week is the expected pattern. Nausea that is escalating, or that comes with severe upper-abdominal pain radiating to the back, or that prevents fluids for more than a day, is a different conversation and belongs with a clinician the same day.

From the other side of the consultation, briefly. The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either. Those three things can all be true at once, and most arguments here are two people holding different parts of that.