I'm 38, a mom of two, and I lost 52 pounds in 24 weeks.

Last summer I was in the dressing room at Winners — the one on Cambie — trying on size 16 jeans because the 14s I'd been pretending still fit hadn't actually buttoned since February. And I cried. Not in a sad way. In an angry way. Like, shaking-hands angry.

I'd spent eight years and honestly probably close to $18,000 trying to lose this weight. Weight Watchers twice. Keto for over a year — I can still smell the bacon grease. Two years on the Peloton. Therapy for a full year where we mostly talked about "my relationship with food," which is a phrase I never want to hear again. And then eight months on Ozempic at $400/month out of pocket because my insurance said no.

None of it worked. I mean, the Ozempic kind of worked. For a while.

The plateau

I lost 18 pounds on Ozempic. Then the scale just... stopped.

My doctor — I love her, she tries — basically shrugged. "Your body adapts. That's normal." She said I could try adding Mounjaro on top, which would be another $500/month and another six months of watching the scale do nothing while I waited to see if it would "work for me." That phrase. I've heard it so many times from so many people about so many things.

My kids are 6 and 8. They think of me as the parent who is always "starting something new on Monday." My daughter asked me last year why I keep getting packages with vitamins in them. I didn't have an answer.

My husband doesn't say anything about it anymore. That's worse than if he did.

Anyway. In November I was up late, again, Googling — I'd started reading actual medical papers at some point, which is not something I ever imagined I'd do with my evenings — and I found a trial result I hadn't seen before.

"Participants receiving retatrutide achieved a mean body weight reduction of 24.2% at 48 weeks."

New England Journal of Medicine, 2023

What I found

I'm going to try to explain this the way I understood it, which might not be exactly right but is close enough.

Ozempic works on one receptor — GLP-1. That's the appetite one. It suppresses hunger. It works, until your body figures out how to work around it. That's the plateau. Mounjaro works on two receptors, which is why it works better. Retatrutide works on three — GLP-1, plus something called GIP that affects how your body metabolizes fat, plus glucagon which apparently speeds up your resting metabolism. The point is your body can't adapt to all three at once. That's why the trial numbers were so much higher than anything before it.

24.2% body weight loss on average. That's 48 pounds if you weigh 200. I weighed 212. So for me that would mean getting to around 160, which I hadn't been since before my first kid.

I should say: this compound is in Eli Lilly's pipeline. Phase 3 trials. It's not approved yet. Not available by prescription. I'll get to how I actually got it.

How I got it

So this is the part where it gets complicated. Retatrutide isn't something you can get from your doctor. It's sold as a research compound, which is legal in Canada — it's not a controlled substance. It's kind of like how you can buy melatonin or NAC, except it's injectable and it's sold by pharmaceutical grade peptide companies instead of supplement stores.

Most of those companies are terrible. I spent two weeks looking. Websites that looked like they were made in 2009. No lab testing. Shipped from China or India with no tracking. I talked to a guy on Reddit who ordered from one and got a vial that was basically empty. Another person said their order got seized at the border.

I almost stopped looking. But I found a thread on r/peptides where maybe six people were talking about a company called Novo+ — a Canadian supplier, Vancouver-based. What made me actually trust them was that they included a batch-specific lab certificate with every order, tested by an independent lab. And they shipped from inside Canada so no customs issues. A nurse in the thread said she'd been ordering from them for four months and verified the COA against the lab's database.

The vial was $89. I'd been paying $400/month for Ozempic that had stopped working.

What happened

Week by week, as honestly as I can remember it.

The package came in a cold pack two days later. A vial, a small bottle of sterile water, a syringe, and a printed guide. I have to be honest — the guide was better than what my Ozempic clinic gave me. Clearer. Step by step with actual diagrams.

I was terrified of the injection. Ozempic is a pen — you just click it. This was a real syringe. Drawing liquid from a vial felt like something a nurse should be doing, not me at my kitchen counter while my kids watched Bluey in the next room. But the needle was smaller than I expected. I did it on a Sunday morning and I genuinely barely felt it.

• Week 1

  My appetite dropped within about two days. Like, noticeably. I forgot to eat lunch twice, which has literally never happened to me. Some nausea the first three days — not terrible, kind of like mild carsickness — then it went away.

• Week 4

  Down 6 pounds. But honestly the weight wasn't the thing I noticed most. The thing I noticed was that I just wasn't thinking about food. Like, the background noise in my head that had been running since high school — what should I eat, did I eat too much, what's for dinner — it just stopped.

• Week 8

  This was a bad week actually. The scale barely moved. I think I lost maybe a pound. I panicked and almost doubled the dose, but the guide said to stay the course. I'm glad I did.

• Week 12

  Down 22 pounds. My best friend asked me what I was doing. I told her, and she gave me a look — the look people give you when they think you're doing something weird. My 8-year-old said, "Mom, you look different." I didn't know how to answer her.

• Week 24

  Down 52 pounds. 160 on the scale. Size 8. My doctor, at my annual, asked if I'd had surgery. When I told her what I'd done she didn't laugh or lecture me. She Googled it on her phone while I was sitting there, read for a minute, and wrote it down in my chart. That was the moment it felt real.

Left: June 2025. Right: January 2026. Photo submitted by Rachel.

The part nobody talks about

Everyone asks about the weight. Obviously. But the thing that changed my life — and I know that sounds dramatic, but I don't know how else to say it — was that the constant thinking about food just stopped.

I'd been thinking about food every waking hour since I was maybe 14. What I should eat, what I shouldn't eat, whether I'd eaten too much at lunch, whether I was going to eat too much at dinner. It was just... always there. Like a radio station you can't turn off. I didn't realize how loud it was until it went quiet.

I don't know if that makes sense unless you've experienced it. But if you have, you know exactly what I mean.

I started going to yoga again. I took my kids to the pool and actually got in. I said yes to a work trip I would have said no to. My husband and I went on an actual weekend trip, the first one since before our second was born.

Side profile. Left: June 2025. Right: February 2026.

I keep thinking about the dressing room at Winners. That version of me — furious, wearing jeans that didn't fit, completely out of ideas.

If I could go back I'd tell her two things. First: the drugs you tried weren't strong enough. That's it. That's the whole answer. Single-receptor GLP-1s plateau. It's a known limitation. It was never about willpower.

Second: there's a compound now that works on three receptors instead of one. It costs less than what you're already paying. It's legal. It's tested. You just haven't heard of it yet.

I don't know if this will work for everyone. I really don't. But it worked for me, and I wish someone had told me about it a year earlier.

This is what I used, and where I got it →

— Rachel