This is me a month into retatrutide

Five pounds down and you can't see one of them.

That photo is week four of a retatrutide run.

By the time I took it I was already on the drug, already walking ten thousand steps a day, already eating a gram of protein for every pound I weighed. The scale had moved. The mirror hadn't.

August 11, Tampa, 11:49 in the morning. I left the timestamp on the screenshot so you can check it.

Every retatrutide photo you've seen is week twelve or later. Nobody posts week four, because week four is the part that makes you quit.

180 pounds when I started in mid-July. 175 the morning that photo was taken. 165 this week.

Fifteen pounds in about fourteen weeks, and the rate barely moved the whole time. Five pounds in the first four weeks, ten in the ten after that. Call it a pound a week, start to finish.

The weight came off in a straight line. The way I looked didn't. It did nothing for a month, then it moved all at once.

That's worth understanding, because it's the whole reason people quit on this. Fat doesn't come off one spot at a time. It comes off everywhere in a thin layer, and nothing changes visually until enough of those layers are gone that the shape underneath starts showing through. It's a line you cross. Until you cross it, the mirror tells you nothing true, and it keeps telling you nothing true while the scale does exactly what it's supposed to.

So weigh yourself and believe that number. For me the mirror caught up somewhere around week eight.

Here's what the first month actually looked like from the inside.

I started in mid-July at .5mg once a week. Low on purpose, because the whole point of titrating is finding out what the drug does to you before you find out what 3mg does to you.

Four weeks later I was still at the low end of the titration. 180 at the start, 175 the morning of that photo. Appetite was down, the scale was moving exactly how it should, and not one pound of it showed up in the mirror.

That gap is where most people quit, and I get why. You paid for the vial, you did the shots, you did the walking, and the guy on Instagram got abs in six weeks. So you decide you got bunk product, or that you're the one person it doesn't work on, and you stop.

I didn't have a better reason to keep going than stubbornness and the fact that I'd already bought the rest of the run. Then, the same week I took that photo, I changed something else.

Same week I took that picture, I started running tesa.

250mcg, five nights a week, on the nights I trained, three hours fasted, right before bed. I run it fasted and before bed because that's the window where I'm not fighting my own insulin or my own natural pulse.

Everything you see in the second photo happened after that. Ten weeks of reta climbing from the low end up to 3mg, with tesa running underneath it the whole time.

Why 250 and not 300? No reason. It's a 1ml syringe and 50mcg is about a hair's width on the barrel, so I land somewhere in that range depending on how the draw goes that night.

I'm telling you that because every protocol you read online is written to the microgram, and almost none of them are actually dosed that way. The guy posting a 287mcg protocol is eyeballing the same syringe you are.

Here's the whole stack, including the line people are going to argue about.

Re-Lyte electrolytes every day and digestive enzymes with meals. The electrolytes aren't optional on a GLP. You eat less, you drink more water, and you flush sodium, potassium and magnesium faster than you replace them. That's where most of the fatigue people blame on the drug actually comes from.

The test number is the one people are going to argue about, so here it is where you can see it. 200mg a week is a replacement dose. No cycle, no blast, and it's the same number in the first photo and the second one.

Which is exactly what makes it interesting.

Body fat isn't inert. Fat tissue makes aromatase, the enzyme that turns testosterone into estradiol, and it makes more of it the more fat there is. In a 2025 JCEM paper, aromatase gene expression in subcutaneous fat tracked body fat percentage at rho 0.689 across 77 men.

So the 200mg never moved. The body it was landing in did.

The European Society of Endocrinology guideline on endocrine work-up in obesity says the same thing from the clinical side. Weight loss first, to restore eugonadism. Testosterone considered only if weight loss cannot be achieved and the hypogonadism sticks around. Their words: the sole presence of obesity is not enough reason to start testosterone.

That's my actual opinion on this, and it's the opposite of what most clinics will tell you. If you're carrying real fat and you're thinking about TRT, the fat is the first lever. Test works. It works better in a leaner body, and a clinic that puts you on it at 28% body fat sold you a subscription instead of a fix.

Two things I'm not going to claim. That aromatase paper measured expression in tissue, and it found no link between that expression and estradiol in the blood. And I have no labs, so I can't show you my own estrogen going anywhere. The mechanism is solid. My version of it is a hypothesis with a photo attached.

One more, because somebody will catch it otherwise. That guideline is about men recovering their own production. I'm on exogenous test, so my own production is suppressed either way. What can improve for me is how much of that 200mg stays testosterone instead of becoming estradiol. Different mechanism, same direction.

And none of that touches the boring half, which did more work than anything in the table.

Four to six sessions a week. Twenty to thirty minutes each. That's the whole thing.

I'm not in a gym for ninety minutes. I run time under tension and add weight or reps over time, and that's the entire programming philosophy. Short sessions I'll actually do beat a perfect split I skip four weeks out of eight.

Ten thousand steps a day on average. Walking is the only cardio in this.

Protein between .8 and 1 gram per pound of bodyweight, every day, no exceptions. Macros tracked loosely, calories cycled against training and activity, and most of the food is fruit, potatoes and meat.

Here's the part that matters if you're running a business and not a bodybuilding career. None of that is hard. It's twenty minutes, a walk, and hitting your protein. It works because it's boring enough to repeat for fourteen weeks, and fourteen weeks is the actual unit of measurement.

Look at the two photos and it seems obvious. Arms are bigger, the chest is harder, the shoulders actually have a shape to them now.

I'm not going to tell you that, and neither should anyone else posting these. Fat sits on top of muscle. Take ten pounds off and what was underneath shows up looking like it grew, when all that happened is you stopped covering it. No photo can separate those two. Mine is lit from above in a dark gym and the August one is flat daylight in a bathroom, so the lighting is doing some of the work before the training does any.

To say I built muscle I'd need a DEXA scan or my lift numbers from July. I have neither, because I didn't think to get either one.

I went from 180 to 165 and I can see more of myself than I could in August. That's the whole claim, and it's still a good one.

I changed two things at the same time.

I added tesamorelin the same week the reta dose started climbing. Both ran together for ten weeks, and the second photo is the result of both. I can't hand you a clean answer on which one did more, and anybody who says they can from their own n of 1 is guessing in front of you.

The test is the one thing I can rule out. It ran at the same 200mg a week through both photos, so the dose isn't what moved. What changed is how much of it survived as testosterone, which is the whole point of the section above. So if your plan after reading this is to raise your test, you read the wrong article.

And I have no bloodwork across this run. None. I'm pulling a panel before the taper is done, and I'll publish whatever comes back, including if it's ugly. Until then you're looking at a mirror and a scale, which is exactly as much evidence as every other transformation post you've ever read, and I'd rather say that out loud than let the photo do the arguing.

Here's exactly what's on the panel.

I'm using Nick Trigili's marker framework for the cardiometabolic half of this. He's a former IFBB pro turned performance coach, and his argument is that LDL is about 20% of the story, so he tracks six markers instead. I think he's right, and his six are the top block below. The rest are the ones my specific stack calls for.

Here's the part I have to own. I have no baseline. I didn't pull labs in July before any of this started, so whatever comes back is a mid-run snapshot with nothing behind it to compare against.

So I'm pulling it twice. Once now, before the taper finishes, and again after I come off and things settle. That gives me on-run against off-run, which is the second best version of this. The best version was pulling it in July, and I didn't.

If you're earlier in your run than I am, go get the panel this week. You can still have the thing I can't.

The usual wall is getting a doctor to order half this list. A standard panel won't show you fasting insulin or a full thyroid, and those are two of the numbers that actually explain a stall.

I'm pulling both of mine through Superpower, and it's what we point people to. It's a blood testing membership that covers over 100 biomarkers, including fasting insulin, the full thyroid panel and hormones, and it trends them over time instead of handing you a page of numbers. The trending is the part that matters here. One panel is a snapshot. Two is the start of an answer, which is the whole lesson of me not pulling labs in July.

Full disclosure: that's an affiliate link.

I took my last 3mg shot today. Next week I start stepping the dose down instead of stopping cold, and everything I'm holding runs out in four to five weeks, so the taper and the supply land in roughly the same place. Then we find out what holds.

That's the part nobody documents either. Everybody posts the peak. Almost nobody posts month three after they stopped, which is the only number that tells you whether you built something or rented it. I'll post it.

If you're mid-run right now, reply and tell me what week you're in and what you're seeing. I read every one of these, and the people writing back to me are a better dataset on what week the change actually shows up than anything I can find published.

And if you're at week four staring at a photo that looks like nothing happened, that's what week four looks like. Keep going.