Will I regain weight if I stop my GLP-1?

The numbers deserve to be stated plainly because planning around them beats discovering them: - STEP 1 extension: one year after stopping semaglutide 2.4 mg, participants had regained about two-thirds of lost weight; cardiometabolic improvements largely reverted too. - SURMOUNT-4: after a 36-week tirzepatide lead-in, those switched to placebo regained ≈14% of body weight in a year while continuers kept losing — a ≈20-point swing between arms. Why it isn’t a willpower story: the drug substitutes for satiety signaling your body under-produces relative to its weight-defending biology. Stop, and the hormone environment of the old weight reasserts itself — appetite up, food noise back — while your now-smaller body burns fewer calories than it did at the start. Hungrier, on a smaller budget: that’s the regain machine described in two clauses. Obesity medicine increasingly frames this like hypertension — a chronic condition managed, not cured, by its medication. The honest menu: 1. Stay on, lighter. Continuation preserves results (STEP 4 proved it), and many people hold weight on reduced maintenance dosing — lower dose or stretched intervals — which also cuts cost. The increasingly default answer. 2. Taper, with a fortress. Stopping deliberately works sometimes — realistic odds improve with a slow taper, locked-in resistance training and protein habits, fast-response rules (regain >5% → resume), and treating it as an experiment rather than a graduation. 3. Partial-regain realism. Even with regain, many ex-users hold meaningfully below their start weight, and treatment can resume — restarting after a gap typically means re-titrating from a lower step. What predictably fails: stopping abruptly at goal with no plan, no habits, and no follow-up — the configuration the extension studies effectively tested.