Short answer first, then the reasoning. Steady state is faster than people expect: half-life about five days, so you are at plateau in roughly three to four weeks rather than five. That matters when you are deciding whether a dose step has finished expressing itself.

mike_nyc said:

Steady state is faster than people expect: half-life about five days, so you are at plateau in roughly three to four weeks rather than five.

True, though the ladder is longer and that is not a neutral detail — six dose steps means six opportunities to stall on the way up, and plenty of people never reach the dose the headline number came from.

tane_welly said:

I moved from semaglutide to tirzepatide after a long stall and the first eight weeks looked like starting over — which I gather is the usual pattern…

This matches mine closely enough to be worth saying so. SURMOUNT-1 landed around 20.9% mean weight loss at 15mg over 72 weeks, against roughly 15% for semaglutide 2.4mg in STEP 1. Different trials, different populations, so the comparison is indicative rather than decisive — but SURPASS-2 was a genuine head-to-head and it pointed the same way.

From the other side of the consultation, briefly.

Dose-response modeling for tirzepatide: Emax model fitting to the STEP/SURMOUNT dose-finding data shows:

Semaglutide: ED50 ≈ 0.6mg, Emax ≈ -18%, Hill coefficient ≈ 1.3
Tirzepatide: ED50 ≈ 6mg, Emax ≈ -25%, Hill coefficient ≈ 1.5

Clinical implication: most patients achieve >80% of maximal response by the mid-range dose (1.7mg sema, 10mg tirz). Going to the maximum dose provides diminishing returns — possibly not worth the additional side effect burden for some patients. Individualize dosing based on response vs tolerability.