NCT04184622 Week 72: 2539 people, no raw outcomes?

Week 72 is the cleanest frame for me. The 2539 enrollment is what makes it worth reading.

I care less about arm labels and more about whether people could stay on 5 vs 15. Discontinuation data would tell more than scale.

Same, though the energy part seems to show before anything actually moves on the lab sheet. Weird lag.

The arms are placebo, 5, 10, 15 over Week 0-72, but without outcome numbers it's just architecture. I'd want the dropout curve by arm first, then whether appetite noise returned before labs shifted. That boring middle is where most personal logs fall apart. Before/after photos don't show the month where sleep got bad or waist stalled. If 2539 people were enrolled, the aggregate timeline should be the most useful thing, even if it's less clickable than before/after. I'd also want to know how many stayed on their assigned arm, because that changes how I read any arm comparison.

Sleep and RHR are underrated. My appetite noise dropped before my waist changed.

Discontinuation by arm is the missing piece for me too. That's the real-world question.

2539 is a big trial. Still no raw outcomes?

That's what bugs me. Enrollment isn't a result.

OP, are you comparing Week 72 trial frame to your own week count? I do that and it messes with my head.

I stopped cmoparing my week count to the trial. Different food, sleep, stress.

The boring middle is exactly why I lurk here. A dropout curve by arm would be more useful to me than another appetite-noise poll. If someone stalled mid-period and still finished to Week 72, that tells a different story than someone who stopped early. I also like the energy-before-labs point, because my own logs looked like that. Sleep first, then waist, then bloodwork. The hard part is that none of us can see the unblinded aggregate timeline yet, so we're stitching together anecdotes around 2539 enrolled people and four arms. That's a weird way to read a trial.

Week 9 I ditched daily weigh-ins and used one pair of 34-waist jeans as the scoreboard: couldn't button them at the start, neded a belt by around week 20. The scale only dropped 19 lbs across that stretch, so the tape told me more than the chart did. Weird part is my sloppiest tracking weeks were my best waist weeks. Anyone else get that mismatch?

Week one I dropped 6 lbs overnight and felt like a genius, then found out it was water and disappointment.

Honestly the arm numbers never told me anything useful. Wheher I walked after dinner did.

Twelve weekends of loging taught me the ambush isn't Sunday, it's Saturday around 7pm at a restaurant table. Weekdays I averaged maybe 1,750 calories; Saturdays ran closer to 2,900, and the food wasn't even the main driver, it was standing around the kitchen with a glass in my hand for two hours before we left. Moved the big meal to Saturday lunch, kept dinner to soup and a salad, and the weekend gap shrank to roughly 400 calories. The reversal: Friday nights were always fine. Everyone warns about "the weekend" in general, but mine was one specific two-hour window, and once I could see it in the log it stopped feeling like a willpower problem and started feeling like a scheduling problem.

My belt hit a notch at week 9, then stalled for a month; waist tape moved before scale did.

Sleep tanked during a work deadline and my appetite noise went full stadium; five bad nights undid two good weeks.

Added 20-minute post-dinner walks, no gym; the scale stayed flat but my resting heart rate dropped 7 bpm.

I stopped tracking weight daily and tracked protein per meal plus cooked-at-home dinners instead. Weeks 4 to 20 I lost 19 lbs, then weeks 21-34 only 4 lbs while inches kept dropping—pants went 38 to 34. The weird part was fasting glucose and triglycerides improving before my weight graph looked impressive. What mattered most was energy at 3 p.m. and not white-knuckling the pantry at 9 p.m.

Hooking onto something nobody mentions: my rings and shoes loosened before my jeans did. By week 14 my wedding band spun freely, and I went down half a shoe size in wide-width sneakers, which sounds fake but the laces were suddenly doing nothing. Jeans took until week 26. Where you lose first is not where you want to lose first, and that mismatch made the early weeks feel like nothing was happening.

Weekends are the only thing I track carefully now. Five months of logs, and the pattern is boringly consistent: Friday dinner out plus a salty Saturday and my Monday waist tape is up 1.5 inches and the scale jumps 3-4 lb, then it's gone by Wednesday breakfast without me changing a thing. The reversal, though, is that my two-restaurant weekends turned out to be my best ones. Sitting at a table with a fixed plate killed the all-afternoon pantry grazing, and I drank way more water than I do at home. So now I judge a weekend by how many times I opened the fridge door, not by Sunday's number.

The endpoint that surprised me wasn't weight or waist, it was resting heart rate. The watch had it at 68-70 around week 4 of actually keeping a log, and 60-62 by week 30, and that moved well before the tape measure did much of anything. Fasted panel at week 8 and again at week 44; the second one is the first time anyone in my family's history of these appointments said the word normal out loud. Day to day, the thing I noticed at week 30 was not needing the 3pm nap, and that came back around week 48 when work got heavy, which told me more than any single number.

I'll push back a bit, because the boring endpoints are what changed my conversations with my doctor, not the photos. That said, measuring waist is a skill nobody teaches you. I measured at my navel for the first three months and got numbers 2 inches bigger than my narrowest point, which made me think nothing was moving. Now it's same spot, morning, before coffee, three reads, take the middle one. The fail: my lowest tape number ever came during a stomach bug when I was dehydrated and felt like death, which killed any urge to chase a personal best on a tape measure.

Boring marker that ended up mattering more than the scale: belt notches. Third notch to sixth, somewhere between week 10 and week 38 of tracking, and it lined up way closer to how I actually felt than the scale ever did. Weird part is weeks 40 through 48, nothing moved. Same food, same training. Turned out to be a sleep thing, not food or training. Lights-out at 10:30 and the belt started moving again.

Honestly, I’m in month 14 and the scale has been flat since March, so I started tracking “kitchen time” after dinner: how many minutes I linger near the pantry before I actually leave. It went from 20-ish minutes of mental tug-of-war to maybe 3. Weirdly specific, but it predicted my week better than weight did. My grocery cart changed too—fewer emergency snack runs, more Greek yogurt and froen shrimp. Trial averages don’t capture that

The marker I wish trials reported: strength retention per kg lost. In my own log, top-set squat/bench at the same reps is what tells me recomp vs just shrinking. Scale can stall 3 weeks while waist and lifts improve, and appetite noise ging quiet just makes hitting 180g protein less of a chore. Did anyone else have a lift number hold flat while measurements moved? That’s the data I’d actually want from 2539 people.

Tbh I appreciate you pulling the trial apart like this. The number that ended up mattering most to me was a weekly average of “afternoon energy,” scored 1–5 at 3 p.m. It moved before my weight did, and it predicted whether I would cook or graze at night. I also tracked how many evenings I needed a second cup of coffee, which was surprisingly informative. I am curious whether anyone else saw sleep quality shift first, or did that lag behind appetite changes? I try to keep my own log simple, so I only review it on Sunday mornings. The enrollment data can feel abstract, but those small weekly averages made the endpoints feel human.

What changed for me wasn't a number on the trial sheet—it was my grocery cart. Used to be chips and a 12-pack; now it's cottage cheese, frozen green beans, eggs, and those little tuna pouches. My wife clocked it before I did. My sleep tracker also shows fewer 2 a.m. wake-ups, and I can stand at the counter all afternoon without my feet barking. None of that shows up in the raw arm data, but it's what kept me going. For folks further along: did your non-scale stuff show up before the scale budged, or after?

For me the number that translated was waist-to-height ratio, not weight. I kept a soft tape by the hall closet and checked monthly. Once I got under 0.5, tying shoes and weeding the back bed got easier. My after-dinner walk also stretched from 15 minutes to 40 without huffing, which I never saw on a trial sheet. What day-to-day marker do you wish you’d tracked from day one—stairs, sleep, or how you feel after dinner?

For me the useful metric was the campus stair test: can I haul my laundry up three flights without pausing? Wek 1 I was a wheezing accordion; now I only sound mildly betrayed. Also a cheap-protein check: how many dorm meals I can build around eggs/tuna/beans instead of late-night vending. The trial endpoints feel abstract when my real win is not needing a nap after a 2 p.m. lecture. Did anyone else track something dumb-but-specific like that instead of labs?

I’ve been keeping a simple weekly average of an appetite-noise score (0–10) and afternoon energy (1–5). It sounds soft, but the weekly line was more useful than any single day because sleep and stress swung things around. Around month

ngl the metric that mattered for me was “minutes until my 8am lecture backpack felt heavy,” which is deeply unscientific. I tracked steps to class, resting HR on a cheap band, and sleep interruptions. Weight barely budged some weeks, but I stopped needing a mid-afternoon vending machine raid. Budget protein hack: tuna pouch or chickpeas mixed with dining hall Greek yogurt and hot sauce in a contraband Tupperware. Sharp follow-up: did anyone else’s energy and labs lag way behind the scale/appetite stuff, or was that just me romanticizing my spreadsheet?

honestly the trial data rabbit hole made me obsessive. What finally helped: I stopped weighing daily and logged a Monday “capacity” score — flights of stairs before puffing, hours of energy after lunch, and how long it took me to fall asleep. The scale didn’t move for weeks, but those three crept up. My husband noticed I stopped crashing on the couch at 8pm before I noticed anything on the tape. What’s your “can’t fake it” metric when the plateau has you doubting?

Yeah, the registry page is basically the box score without the box score. If results aren’t posted, the actual Week 72 numbers usually hide in the supplement/appendix, not the summary. For me the sleeper metric was resting HR plus how often I woke at 3am; both shifted before my waist did. Did you end up finding the between-group CIs, or are you mostly trying to translate trial endpoints into daily-life stuff?

For me the metric that cut through the trial noise was a 0–10 “food noise” score I logged at 8pm: 0 = didn’t think about food, 10 = white-knuckling. It dropped from 8 to 3 before my labs or weight budged. I also tracked whether I could walk the dog up the hill without stopping. The scale moved last. Did anyone else notice energy or sleep shift first, or was it the opposite?

I know what you mean—I quit trying to read the raw trial numbers like a box score and started logging two dumb things: minutes walked after dinner and whether I actually sat down to eat instead of grazing at the counter. Weirdly, the sit-down dinners moved first, weeks before the scale or waistband. Labs and energy followed slowly, but the 8pm kitchen wander was the daily endpoint that kept me honest. Did anyone else find their real signal was a behavior, not a number?

late-night gamer here. the only tracker that stuck was kitchen trips during loading screens / between matches. sounds dumb but it caught the boredom-hand-mouth loop better than an appetite score, and it dropped before my waist or labs moved. soda swap helped too: i logged cans poured vs finished, and that ratio shifted first. sharp q: when you open the results section on the registry, are you looking at the outcome measure table or just participant flow? if it’s only flow/enrollment, that’s why no numbers. for me the useful stuff was sleep latency and how often i actually finished a 2L, not the trial endpoints.

Cafe owner here—trial endpoints never matched my real scoreboard: whether I could box the day’s unsold pastries without eating one, and if my apron strings tied the same at 6am vs close. I stopped logging every bite and just marked days as “tasted for quality” vs “grazed.” That plus 3pm energy separated actual progress from scale noise. Curious: did anyone else find a work-environment trigger—free food, customer leftovers—was the real Week 72 outcome, not the registry numbers?

Hi all — brand new here (day 5), sorry if this is a silly question. This thread is already helping me chill out. The one non-scale thing I’m tracking is: can I walk the two flights at work without pretending to check my phone halfway up? Also whether I finish my water bottle by 5pm. Very low-tech, but less obsessive than the trial numbers. For those further along, did everyday stuff like stairs or wanting to cook again

I couldn’t map trial endpoints to my life either. What helped was picking three boring proxies: 10-day weight trend (daily weigh, ignore the dots), waist-to-height once a month, and a 1–5 “after-dinner walk energy” note. Labs stay annual-ish, not weekly. If the scale freezes for two weeks but my waist and energy notes hold, I count that as signal. Sharp question: what’s your one non-scale metric that would still matter if the weight trend went flat for a month?

I stopped chasing the arm-level numbers too. What helped me was a monthly waist-to-height ratio (same tape spot, morning, no sucking in) plus a 5-minute walk test: can I talk the whole time, do I need the handrail on the stairs? Labs only twice a year. Weirdly, my energy and stairs improved around week 5, but waist didn’t budge until week 10. That lag almost made me quit. Did anyone else see a gap like that between feeling better and the tape moving? Curious what order it happened for you.