BariatricNurseD said:

The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. The dose-response is real but shallow at the top. Across STEP 1 and STEP 4 the gap between 1.7mg and 2.4mg is a couple of percentage points of body weight on average, and the average is carrying a wide spread — plenty of people at 1.7mg sit above the 2.4mg mean. If a dose is working and tolerable, "working" is the relevant variable, not "maximal".

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. Keep the original post as written when you update it, and add the correction underneath. An edited-away mistake is invisible to the next person who makes it.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

Following on from BariatricNurseD — and this may be the naive question:

How would you tell the difference between that and the alternative explanation?

lisa_labSD said:

Keep the original post as written when you update it, and add the correction underneath.

Worth saying that the confident version of this is more useful to the person writing it than to the person reading it.

Worth separating that from semaglutide, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.

lisa_labSD said:

Keep the original post as written when you update it, and add the correction underneath.

That holds where the measurement is reliable. Where it is noisy — and a lot of what gets tracked here is noisy — the same reasoning produces confident nonsense.

Worth separating that from semaglutide, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.