Dr.PeteFamMed said:

If two explanations both fit, the useful question is which one predicts something the other does not.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. The mental-health dimension is under-measured in the trial literature and the reports here are consistent enough to take seriously. On the positive side: reduced anxiety around food, better self-image, more confidence. On the difficult side: grief for the years lost, identity disruption, relationships built around eating, and the loss of food as a coping mechanism with nothing put in its place. Rarer but real: anhedonia and emotional flatness. Regulators have started asking for validated patient-reported outcomes in this class; the existing data gap is not evidence of absence.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. Worth stating the units and the reference range whenever you post a number here. A large fraction of the apparent disagreement in these threads is two people using different units and both being right.

Following on from Dr.PeteFamMed — and this may be the naive question:

How people separated a drug effect from the ordinary consequences of a large deficit and disrupted sleep, because I cannot?

DataDave said:

Worth stating the units and the reference range whenever you post a number here.

Pushing back on DataDave here. Pushing back on the anecdote-stacking. Twenty people reporting the same thing is twenty samples from the same self-selected pool, not twenty independent confirmations.

DataDave said:

Worth stating the units and the reference range whenever you post a number here.

That is right, and it stops being right at the edges. The general case is well behaved; the interesting cases in this thread are all at the boundary where the general case breaks.

Correct me if the detail matters more than I have assumed.