You Are Not Fat Enough For Retatrutide
The Lukas Experience
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You Are Not Fat Enough For Retatrutide<br>(Probably)
Lukas<br>Aug 19, 2026
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Last Christmas, I force-gifted fat people I knew the most powerful weightloss peptide humans know about. I wrote an article about how it went, and at the end I speculated that it might be too strong.<br>Six months later, I’m revisiting that intuition. It turned out to be very correct.<br>Don’t get me wrong - none of the people I drugged died or anything, they’re all very happy.<br>But it’s become clear this thing is just overkill. It’s like dropping an atomic bomb on your neighbor over a dispute about grass length.
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Retatrutide, unlike the other common GLPs (Semaglutide/Ozempic and Tirzepatide/Mounjaro), is a glucagon agonist.<br>Functionally, this means it speeds up your metabolism instead of just decreasing your cravings for food. That’s very cool - it lets you burn fat faster. In studies, people on retatrutide lost 24% of their total bodyweight in the same amount of time as people on tirzepatide lost 18%. Some of the people I know reported losing weight even while eating the exact same amount that was previously making them fat.<br>That metabolic increase comes at a cost, though. Glucagon agonism seems to manifest as a constant mild stimulatory effect, and it comes with all the expected stimulant side effects:<br>Heart rate increase
HRV decrease
Sleep issues
Anxiety (if you’re prone - some people are just juggernauts here and can tolerate infinite stims without going crazy, others have a psychotic break after consuming half a cup of green tea)
These are particularly bad to me because they’re all things that murk cardiac health - and if you’re fat enough to be injecting weightloss drugs, you should probably consider avoiding stuff that screws with your heart.<br>There are a couple of other common weird ones, too:<br>Skin sensitivity. Feels like a sunburn, but without the skin coloration.
Anhedonia. Massive nuking of your ability to give a fuck.
Depression. People who noticed this said it tended to be worst the day of the injection.
Unless you’re truly in some very-far-gone ogre territory and you NEED to get the weight off ASAP to prevent your wife from leaving you in the next 14 days or something, I really can’t imagine why you’d tolerate these side effects instead of just using Tirzepatide. It’s like a fivefold increase in misery for 25% faster weightloss. Horrible ROI<br>The only situation where I’d maybe change my mind is in people with liver disorders. The glucagon agonism MELTS liver fat, and if your liver function tests or lipid panels are bad, this appears to be one of the best options available.<br>Beyond that though, I think Tirzepatide just makes much more sense. You can also just get it prescribed in the US instead of dealing with the wacky Chinese bathtub-drug circus.<br>Another sneak-benefit I think tirzepatide has - remember when I said this?<br>Some of the people I know reported losing weight even while eating the exact same amount that was previously making them fat.
I think that’s bad, actually.<br>The point of these things is to unfat yourself, stop using them and then quit the drugs and keep the weight off using the habits you used while on them.<br>If the drug speeds your metabolism up so much you can keep eating exactly the same while losing weight, it seems less likely you’ll change any habits around eating because you don’t have to.<br>"But lukas, why do I need to change anything? If I don’t get side effects from the drug, can’t I just stay on it forever??"<br>I think that’s probably dumb. Hunger has been very evolutionarily selected for - if you don’t eat, you die. As a result, hunger is linked to almost everything else that can happen to a person:<br>Have a coffee? Hunger down.
Sleep badly? Hunger up.
Get scared? Hunger down.
Libido up? Hunger up.
etc
For any given person the relationship might go the opposite way, I’m just illustrating that basically everything impacts the hormones that control hunger. Presumably, this works in reverse too - simulating hunger hormones with drugs likely changes a lot of other stuff, too.<br>“But are there studies demonstrating that this is the case?”<br>Measuring things like ‘anhedonia’ in a clinical trial is very difficult - it requires a bunch of average people to accurately self-report changes to their emotional state over many months. The average person doesn’t even realize when they’re mad.
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The best we can hope for is accurate introspection from 2+ SD autists/neurotics on the internet - and they have some strong thoughts
This aligns with my general intuition, which is that you don’t want to be on some new pharmaceutical for the rest of your life if you can help it. In general, I lean towards the holistic health nutter side of things - I only buck the trend here because being fat is such a massive wrecking ball to your quality of life that it’s almost impossible for any medically-induced side effect to...