The coming-off dataset: 4,014 posts from people stopping a GLP-1

Several Leanos guides quote numbers from people coming off a GLP-1: when the hunger came back, what people holding their weight say they do, who is posting. Those numbers come from one dataset, built in October 2026. This page explains how it was built, so you can judge how much weight to give it.

What's in it

The dataset covers October 2025 to October 2026. It includes:

• every post in r/GLPGrad (1,585 posts), r/GLPGradUK, r/ozempicmaintenance and r/GLP1AfterCare, the communities where people talk about stopping
• posts from r/Zepbound_Maintenance and r/GLP1microdosing that mention stopping, tapering or maintenance
• 45 days of posts from six subreddits for people on the drug (Zepbound, Mounjaro, Semaglutide, Ozempic, WegovyWeightLoss and mounjarouk), kept only when they mention stopping, tapering or regain
• 2,400 comments sampled from 23,645 in the coming-off communities
• 1,181 first-person YouTube comments on 15 videos about coming off

About 7,000 items were read. 4,014 were relevant, meaning the writer described their own experience of stopping, tapering, planning to stop, or holding their weight on less of the drug or none.

How each post was coded

Each relevant item was coded against a written codebook: which hurdles the writer described (20 codes, from the appetite coming back to cost and side effects), how intense it was, their stage (planning to stop, tapering, stopped for under two months, two to twelve months, a year or more, back on, or on a maintenance dose), whether they were forced off, what they said they did, what they asked for, and any age, sex or weight they stated. An AI model did the coding, following the codebook item by item.

The hunger timeline

The guide on when the hunger comes back needed more than the first pass captured, so on 7 October 2026 we went back to the full text. We re-fetched all 3,622 Reddit items from a public Reddit archive and pulled out every one where a hunger word (hunger, appetite, cravings, food noise and a few more) sat next to a length of time. That gave 487 candidates. Each was coded again against a second codebook that records only first-person timing: weeks from the last dose to the hunger coming back, to it easing, or a statement that it never came back. That pass coded 207 items. After dropping duplicates, posts that looked promotional, and people on drugs that aren't approved for weight loss, 144 people had stopped altogether, and 119 of them gave a usable time. Every number records the exact words it came from.

How it was checked

• Every coded item maps back to a real source item, and the timeline pass records the exact words each number came from.
• 2,659 of the 4,014 quotes match the source word for word. Only those are ever quoted.
• A hand check of 22 random items found about 75 to 80% coded correctly. Treat the percentages as directional, not precise.
• In the timeline pass, a hand check of 24 random timings found 21 coded correctly. All three misses were removed.

Who is posting

Where people state it, 259 of 305 are women (85%). The median stated age is 45 (316 people), and the median stated loss is 54 lb (857 people).

What it can't tell you

• People who post skew toward the engaged and the struggling. People doing fine post less.
• Everything is self-reported, and nobody's weight or appetite was measured.
• When people holding their weight mention a habit more often than people regaining, that describes what they say, not what caused what.
• The share of people tapering or on a maintenance dose is inflated by r/GLP1microdosing and r/Zepbound_Maintenance.
• No interviews, yet. It's desk research on public posts.

Where a guide makes a claim about what works, it backs it with a clinical source, and it labels anything from this dataset as what people report.

How we quote people

Quotes are short, copied word for word, and linked to the thread they came from. We never print usernames, and we skip any post that asks not to be shared.

Corrections

If you think a number here is wrong, email support@leanos.me. The editorial standards explain how corrections are handled.