I Lost the Weight. Now What? The GLP-1 Maintenance Questions Nobody Prepared Me For

“I've lost the weight. Can I stop the medication?”

There is no universal yes or no.

And I think that's exactly why this question deserves a better conversation.

The research gives us an important reason to be cautious about assuming that stopping treatment will automatically preserve the result.

In the STEP 1 trial extension, adults who had received semaglutide for 68 weeks and then stopped treatment regained an average of 11.6 percentage points of body weight over the following year. The researchers reported that this represented about two thirds of the weight they had previously lost. The extension included 327 participants and its analyses were exploratory.

That finding does not mean every person who stops semaglutide will regain two thirds of their weight loss.

It does mean that substantial regain after treatment withdrawal has been documented.

And it changes how I think about the phrase “maintenance.”

Maintenance may involve continuing treatment.

For some people, it may involve another treatment approach.

For others, circumstances may lead to a different plan.

The important part is that the decision should be made deliberately with the clinician managing the treatment, rather than by abruptly changing prescription use on your own.