Week 1. The starter dose pen arrives on Tuesday. I inject Sunday evening at 8pm — picked the time deliberately so any side effects peak during the work-free hours. The injection itself is anticlimactic: a brief sting, two clicks, and a small bead of plasma at the site. I rotate to my left abdomen, two inches from my navel.
Week 2. The nausea everyone warned me about lands at hour 36. It's not the food-poisoning kind — more like the second-trimester pregnancy kind. Greasy food turns my stomach the moment I think about it. I switch to plain yogurt, crackers, plain rice for two days and the wave passes.
Week 3. The thing nobody warned me about: the food noise stops. I've spent thirty years with a low-level background hum in my head — what's for dinner, is there ice cream left, can I justify the chips. By Tuesday morning of week 3 the hum is gone. I sit down to lunch, eat half my sandwich, and notice I'm not interested in the other half. It feels almost like a personality change. I'm not exaggerating when I say it took two more weeks to get used to the quiet.
Week 4. Dose step-up to 0.5 mg this Sunday. Side-effect window resets briefly — same playbook as weeks 1-2: hydration, smaller meals, fiber. By Friday I am back to baseline. Scale shows down 7 lb at the end of week 4, mostly water + reduced volume. Real fat loss starts next month.
Quantified diary data. Week 1: 0.25 mg dose, weight 224 lb (101.6 kg). Week 4: 0.5 mg dose, weight 217 lb (98.4 kg). Total month 1: −7 lb (−3.2 kg). Side effects: mild nausea (peaked weeks 2-3), one episode of reflux at week 3. No vomiting, no constipation past two days.