tapering: the version I wish someone had shown me in week 1
Update, and the title has the headline: tapering: the version I wish someone had shown me in week 1.
Stopped for cost reasons. Appetite came back at about week 5, well before the scale moved, exactly as this board said it would.
There is very little published guidance on stopping specifically, which is exactly why board consensus here should carry less weight than usual and a clinician conversation should carry more.
Research-use-only material is not approved for human use and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to use it.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Interval stretching lowers the trough concentration while keeping the dose; dose reduction lowers the level while keeping the rhythm. They are different interventions with different subjective profiles.
Wrote down where I was before changing anything. That single page made the following six months interpretable.
Disagree with the framing. Regain is the documented outcome after discontinuation; calling it a personal failure is both wrong and corrosive.
Have you had the conversation with a clinician yet?
That is a pause rather than a stop, and the plans for the two are not the same.
Appetite is the proximal effect and weight is the lagging integrated outcome, which is why watching appetite gives you an earlier and more honest signal.
Yes — have the conversation before rather than after. That is the one piece of process advice this board can give.
watch appetite, not the scale, for the first month
Removed the taper schedule written for another member. Describe your own experience instead.
the withdrawal data is unambiguous and it is not about willpower
Regained most of it over a year and spent that year assuming it was my fault. It was not; it is what the literature describes.
decide what you are watching for before you stop
Correction: that study measured regain after discontinuation, not loss of effect during treatment. Very different findings.
Cosigning that cost and supply are legitimate reasons. Most of the stopping threads here are one of those two.