Hi from Sarah, semaglutide and lifting

At 188 lb and 24.8%, 15% is roughly 24 lb of fat if lean mass stays put, and that's a weekly trend thing, not a scale thing.

For reference, 5'11", coming down from 208 — around week 12 the top squat dropped 15 lb when the pace got pushed past ~1.5 lb/week. Backing it off to ~0.8 lb/week kept the 4–6 rep compounds stable. Sleep and food timing seem to matter as much as the training split once calories are at 1,900.

Here's the part that gets glossed over: appetite stuff in the mix, plus 1,900 cals, plus 4x lifting, can make recovery the limiter, not motivation. If your upper/lower split has you squatting and deadlifting hard twice each, you may need one less accessory day or more carbs around training.

DEXA also has error; 24.8% could be a couple points off. Watch waist, top-set reps, and lean mass trends before deciding you need to lose faster. Getting to 15% with your lifts intact beats hitting it flat and weak.

By week 10, my sleep went from 7.5 hours to 5.5 and my HRV dropped 18%, and I blamed the calorie deficit until I looked at stress. I was doing 4 lifts plus two zone 2 rides, tracking every bite, and waking at 3 a.m. thinking about protein. The counterintuitive part: adding ~200 calories at night and dropping one zone 2 session made fat loss faster over the next month. My lifts stopped feeling like wet cardboard, and my waist kept dropping. Sema can make it easy to under-eat, but under-sleeping and under-recovering can stall you just as hard. If your resting heart rate is up 5–7 bpm and you're irritable, that's not 'discipline', it's a recovery hole. I'd rather run a 300-cal deficit with 7.5 hours sleep than 700 cals with 5.5. Your zone 2 sessions might be the first thing to cut if sleep is bad, not the lifting.

Semaglutide quotes are running $987/month, so now everything gets ranked by cost per gram of protein. And cried over.

170g protein at 1,900 cals leaves about 700 cals for fat and carbs, and that's where my 4–6 rep sets died. I started front-loading 40g at breakfast and using 0% Greek yogurt plus whey as a dessert to hit protein without another cooked meal. Weird part: adding 30g carbs pre-lift improved my top sets more than pushing protein past 170. If your January DEXA is the baseline, track waist and rep PRs—slow scale weeks with stable lifts are still progress toward 15%.

Week 12 and my top set squat stayed at 275 while I dropped 20 lb — strength held, but recovery felt like sand.

Logged 63 sessions in Hevy before it dawned on me that 45-minute rests were getting counted as cardio. Apparently that's a whole thing with the GLP-1 crowd — the app can't tell the difference, it just tallies it up like work.

At week 22, my DEXA read 18.6% but I still had visible lower-back fat, so I stopped chasing the number. OP aiming for 15% at 5'10 and 188 is doable, but the last 5% took me twice as long as the first 20 lb. The counterintuitive part: 4x/week lifting is great, but scale weight barely moves when you're recompositioning.

At week 28, my DEXA read 17.4%, but my top squat was still 10 lb under the 275 I held at week 12 — so the scale and the bar really do decouple. The counterintuitive thing from my own log: chasing 15% by keeping 1,900–2,100 every single day actually stalled me. Once I moved about 300 calories to pre/post lower-body days and let weekly loss rdift down to ~0.5 lb, my waist kept shrinking and my lifts came back. I tracked 70 sessions in Hevy before realizing my “volume PRs” were mostly accessories, not compounds. And at 18.6% DEXA I still had that lower-ab/visceral stubbornness, which only started shifting around 17%. So for me, 15% stopped being a pure calorie/protein math problem and became a recovery and waist-circumference project.

Week 31 DEXA for me was 17.1% at 181 lb, but my top squat had fallen from 315x5 to 275x5 — that week 28 strength drop u mentioned is exactly the tradeoff I hit. I kept trying to fix it by cutting calories harder and adding another zone 2 session, which just made every warmup feel like a max attempt and my waist barely moved. What turned it around for me was eating slightly more on lower-body days, not less, and moving zone 2 to after lifting instead of keeping it as a separate day. Protein stayed around 180g, sleep got prioritized, and week 36 DEXA was 16.4% with squat back to 295x5. At 5'10"/188 with 170g protein, your intake looks reasonable on paper; I’d just watch whether the zone 2 is eating into your compound recovery. If DEXA keeps dropping while top sets tank, that’s a signal to adjust something, not just celebrate the scan.

Your week 31 at 17.1% and 181 lb lines up with wheer I got to around week 36: 16.4% at 176 lb. The unexpected part for me was that the leanest DEXA didn’t look or perform best. At ~18% I still had visible lower-ab/hip stuff, but my top squat was 15–20 lb heavier and recovery was night-and-day better. The last two points came with flat bench for almost six weeks and worse sleep. I pulled calories up slightly on lower-body days, weight stayed within 2 lb, and my lifts started climbing again while DEXA held around 16.5%. So I’m not sure 15% is automatically the better endpoint unless the mirror and gym numbers agree.