I went up on my GLP-1 dose and felt like trash.
- A comfortable dose can quietly turn into a stuck dose.
- The day after a dose increase can be rough, and it often passes fast.
- These meds build up in your body over a few weeks, which is part of why a new dose can hit harder than you expect.
- Going up isn't the only answer. Talk it through with your provider.
I sat on the same dose for months. Longer than I want to admit.
Not because it was getting me anywhere. Because it was comfortable. No headaches. No cancelled workouts. No dragging myself through the afternoon at school. After everything my body went through getting used to this medication, comfortable felt like something worth protecting.
But comfortable also meant the scale wasn't moving.
If you're sitting on a dose right now that feels safe but isn't doing much, and you're scared to change anything because you remember how bad the side effects were last time, this one's for you.
The dose that felt safe but kept me stuck
I wasn't gaining. I was just sitting there. Up two, down two, up one, down one. Every Sunday I'd end up right where I started the week before.
I had a story for every single week. It's inflammation. It's muscle. It's my cycle. Some of those were probably true some of the time. But if I'm honest, the stories were also a way to not make a decision I was scared to make.
What finally moved me wasn't a terrible weigh-in. It was a quiet, honest moment where I asked myself if I was actually okay with this pace. And the answer was no.
So I talked myself into it, gave myself a little pep talk, and took the higher dose before I could talk myself back out.
If you're not sure whether you're stuck or just in a slow stretch, read you're not stalled, you're standing too close to the scale first. Sometimes zooming out answers the question for you.
What a stall does to your head
I want to stay here for a minute, because nobody really talks about this part.
A stall isn't just annoying. It's exhausting in a way that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't lived it. You're still doing the things. Taking the shot. Making the choices. Going to the gym. And the scale just doesn't care.
After enough weeks of that, you start questioning everything:
- Was it that dinner? Was it the weekend? Was it the one night I had pizza?
- Is it my hormones? My sleep? My stress?
- Am I eating too little? Too much? Moving too little? Too much?
You run that checklist so many times it stops meaning anything. And under all of it sits the real fear. Maybe this is just where my body decided to stop. Maybe this is my number now, and I didn't even get to pick it.
That fear is heavy. I carried it for weeks without naming it.
Here's what I know now. A stall in the middle of a long journey is not the end of the journey. It's not a verdict. It's information about your body right now, not your body forever. But knowing that in your brain and feeling it at 6am on a scale that hasn't moved in three weeks are two very different things.
The day after I went up
"Side effects" doesn't really cover it, so here's exactly how it went.
The next morning my stomach was off. Not sick, just wrong. That gross taste in your mouth that won't go away. I was five minutes late to work, which sounds like nothing, but I'm always five minutes early. I felt every one of those ten minutes.
Teaching helped for a bit. Then around 10:30 the headache hit. The pounding kind that sits right behind your eyes and doesn't move no matter what you do. It stayed until about 5pm.
I cancelled my training session. Fell asleep on the couch at 4:15. Was in bed before 9. Ordered pizza for dinner because it was the only decision I had left in me.
And here's the part I keep coming back to. I'm a teacher. I have a room full of kids who need me present every single day. I can't call in foggy. So when someone says "just push through the dose increase," I need them to understand that for a lot of us, the cost doesn't stay inside our own body. It lands on other people too.
That's not an excuse to stay stuck forever. It's just the real math I have to do every time I think about going up.
The next day? I felt completely normal. Which almost made it worse, because then I stood there wondering if one bad day was really that big a deal. I still don't have a clean answer.
If your side effects are more than a rough day (you can't keep fluids down, the pain is severe, or something just feels wrong), call your provider. Don't wait it out to be tough.
Why a new dose can hit harder than you expect
This is the part that changed how I think about all of it.
GLP-1 medications don't fully clear out of your body between shots. Each weekly dose stacks on top of what's still in your system. It takes several weeks on a new dose before the level in your body evens out.
So when you go up, you're not just feeling the new number on the pen. You're feeling the new dose landing on top of the old one, and it keeps building for a few weeks before it settles.
That explained so much for me. It's part of why some dose increases feel fine at first and then hit hard in week two or three. And it's why going up isn't always the only move. Some people work with their provider on smaller steps, spacing, or staying put a little longer. I wrote about my own experience with that in why I didn't keep increasing my dose and what split dosing actually means.
For me, the experiment now is finding the spot where the medication is working without costing me a whole day of my life every week. That's a conversation I'm having with my provider, and it should be yours too. Please don't change your dose or schedule based on a blog post. Mine included.
Real food, no apologies
That same week I did our usual Sunday grocery run, and I want to be honest about what was in the cart.
Boneless wings from the deli. A frozen pizza. Little salami and pepperoni sandwiches. Taco shells and ground beef. Caesar salad kits. Chicken skewers. Stuff for my kids I'm not going to pretend isn't in my house.
No big produce haul. No color coded meal prep containers. No $11 green juice.
I've done the aesthetic grocery runs. I've watched the produce rot. Real life doesn't work like that in my house. So now I buy the food we'll actually eat. Food easy enough that I'll make it on a Tuesday after a full day of teaching and volleyball practice.
And I've lost over 75 pounds on a GLP-1 eating like this.
Not because the food is perfect. Because the medication turned down the noise. That constant hum of thinking about food, planning food, regretting food. It didn't hand me a meal plan. It gave me enough quiet to make choices I can actually live with. If that sounds like you, read I've bought every meal plan on the internet.
Learning to read your own hunger
On the days after the increase, I barely ate. Not because I was restricting. I genuinely wasn't hungry and forcing food in felt wrong. A few days later, when the suppression backed off a little, I ate more.
I used to feel so guilty about the low days. Now I look at the whole week instead of one day. What I focus on is not bottoming out: getting protein in, even when it's a shake or a cold chicken skewer. If that's hard for you right now, protein when you're not hungry walks through what I do.
This isn't advice. It's just what three years of paying attention has taught me. Some days my body needs more. Some days it doesn't. Learning to tell the difference has been one of the quieter wins of this whole thing.
And then the scale finally moved
At the end of that week, I was down 2.8 pounds. After weeks of nothing.
I know one week isn't everything. Water is real. All the caveats are real. But my scale app showed a rate of loss for the first time in weeks, with a little confetti on my screen, and I stared at it way longer than I should have.
It also showed my total. And somehow, in the middle of a stall and a week where I felt terrible, I'd completely forgotten how far I've already come. I do that a lot. I get so locked into the next pound that I walk right past the ones I already lost.
Where I landed
I don't have a clean answer on whether going up was worth it. That's the most honest thing I can tell you.
The old dose kept me comfortable and kept me stuck. The new dose was a lot, at least right out of the gate. The right spot for me is probably somewhere in between, and finding it is going to take patience I don't always have.
But something moved. And that mattered more than I expected.
We're all just doing the math in real time, making the next best decision with what we know right now. That's all this is.
You don't have to figure out the next step alone
- Sunday weigh-ins where I share the real numbers, stalls included.
- Daily threads with women who get the dose day dread.
- Picky Girl HQ and the GLP-1 Hub included with yearly, so your shot day and your food are planned for you.
Yearly members also get Picky Girl HQ and the GLP-1 Hub included.
So tell me: are you sitting on a comfortable dose right now, or did you go up and regret it? Come tell me over on Girl Code Daily.
Quick note: I'm not a doctor. This is my personal experience, not medical advice. Talk to your provider before changing your dose, your schedule, or anything about your medication.
Do the math for your life.
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