Lipotropic MIC + carnitine shots, anyone actually tracking these against scale data?

Question

Got curious after seeing these pop up everywhere on telehealth menus lately. Basically I keep seeing lipo-c and the MIC+carnitine+B12 blends marketed as fat burner add-ons for people on GLP-1s. But I can't find much beyond the marketing page on what they actually do when you stack them alongside something like tirz or sema. Ran my own little thing last month. Added the MIC+carnitine+B12 shot once a week while staying on my usual tirz dose. No change in my average weekly weight loss vs the prior 8 weeks on tirz alone. HRV was flat, sleep was flat, training output was flat. So basically it did nothing for me. But I'm one person, and I wasn't tracking anything specific to fat oxidation since I don't have access to that kind of metabolic data at home. Curious if anyone here has actually paired lipotropic injections with a GLP-1 and tracked more than just the scale? Like body comp or energy markers? Or is this one of those things that just sounds good on paper and the data isn't really there yet 😅

nomad_brandon · Accepted Answer

For what it is worth i looked into these a while back when a buddy at my gym was raving about his lipo-c shots and i could never find anything solid either, just clinic pages and before/after photos. The choline and inositol components have some old hepatic lipid metabolism studies but nothing that really translates to "you'll lose more fat on tirz." carnitine is the one that always gets me because the oral bioavailability is garbage and even injected it still has to get into muscle via that carnitine transporter which saturates pretty quick. Have you considered just tracking waist circumference and maybe getting a dexa before and after if you really wanna see if it shifts body comp independent of scale weight? Cause your flat result could mean it did nothing or it could mean it shifted something the scale doesn't catch. Just my two cents but i kinda think these are telehealth margin boosters more than anything.

weekendnate · Answer

Yeah the carnitine transporter saturation thing is exactly why I stopped taking it seriously as an injectable. Even if it made it past the gut, the muscle uptake ceiling is what kills the use case. And for the hepatic angle, I think you're right that the older choline data is in deficiency states or in alcohol related fatty liver populations, not in people with normal liver function already eating adequate protein. Waist circumference is a fair shout, I'll probably add that to the next block. Right now I'm more curious if anyone is actually seeing a difference on a DEXA, since the scale only tells you so much.

tiredmira · Answer

Yeah the carnitine transporter ceiling is basically the whole reason I gave up on it as a standalone too. If you're already eating decent protein and your liver enzymes look fine, there's just not much room for exogenous carnitine to do anything extra, at least that's how it tracks for me. Waist measurement is a good call honestly, I keep meaning to add it. For DEXA, mine didn't budge in a meaningful way during the run but I only did one scan before and one after, so the noise is probably bigger than whatever change I could attribute to the shots. What did you see on yours if you've got a comparison going?

tiredmira · Answer

The carnitine saturation point is basically what killed my motivation to keep poking at it. Makes sense that even bypassing the GI tract doesn't fix it if the transporter is the bottleneck. Waist circumference is a good call honestly, I have a soft tape somewhere in a drawer. Would've been smarter to grab that from the start instead of just staring at the scale. Might do a 4 week retro with it now just to close the loop, even if the shot's already out of my routine 😅

Lipotropic MIC + carnitine shots, anyone actually tracking these against scale data?

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