GHK-Cu + Semaglutide experience — Anneli K

I’m 41 and work as a marketing director. I started semaglutide after gaining 12 kg over about a year and a half during early perimenopause. My vasomotor symptoms started when I was 39, and even though I’d been a competitive runner in my twenties, this was the first time I felt like my body had changed in a way I couldn’t just train or diet my way out of.

The frustrating part was that I was already doing the “right” things. I wasn’t inactive, and I wasn’t eating badly. I was eating a Mediterranean-style diet, lifting heavy three times a week, keeping protein around 1.6 g/kg, and walking at least 8,000 steps most days. That helped me lose about 4 kg at first, but then my weight just stopped moving for six months. Not slowly. Not inconsistently. Just nothing.

Around the same time, my skin started becoming a separate issue. I’d used tretinoin every night for three years, and for a long time it had worked well for me. Then it didn’t. My skin started looking and feeling more fragile, especially around my eyes, and I was getting redness and irritation I hadn’t dealt with in my mid-thirties. I kept telling myself it was just part of using tret, but looking back, I think I had been pushing through it for too long.

I wanted to keep the whole process fairly simple, mostly so I could tell what was actually making a difference. So I didn’t add any “GLP-1 stack” or extra peptides for body composition. I started Wegovy through my family doctor and titrated from 0.25 mg to 0.5 mg, then to 1.0 mg weekly.

The first month was honestly pretty uneventful. I had mild constipation, but no real appetite change and no weight loss. Around week six, on 0.5 mg, the food noise finally switched off. I know that phrase gets repeated constantly, but that really is what it felt like. Food just stopped taking up so much mental space. By week eight, I was down 3 kg.

From weeks nine to sixteen, on 1.0 mg, the weight loss became steadier, although not perfectly linear. I stalled around week twelve, which was annoying, and then lost another 4 kg by week sixteen. The main side effect for me was reflux, especially if I ate too late. Sleeping on a wedge helped, but if I were starting again, I’d be more proactive from the beginning: earlier dinners, electrolytes, and an actual reflux plan instead of figuring it out in real time.

I added a GHK-Cu topical serum around week six and used it morning and night on my face and neck. It was from a cosmeceutical brand, not a compounded product. Around the same time, I cut tretinoin back from every night to three nights a week. By week ten, I had stopped tretinoin completely.

That was probably the biggest surprise of the whole thing. By week fourteen, my skin texture looked better than it ever had on retinoids. The redness had calmed down, my tone looked more even, and I wasn’t dealing with irritation anymore. I wish I’d tried GHK-Cu earlier, but I also think stopping nightly tretinoin gave my skin a chance to recover. “Retinoid fatigue” is the phrase I now use for it, even if that’s not a formal diagnosis. At the time, I just thought I was supposed to keep tolerating it.

By month five, I was down 9 kg and holding steady, with a maintenance plan in place. I do think I may have lost around 1.5 kg of lean mass, but that’s only a guess. If I could go back, I’d get a DXA scan at baseline so I wasn’t trying to estimate it after the fact.

One thing I didn’t expect was how opinionated people would be about a GLP-1 prescription. I’m much more private about it now. Not because I’m ashamed of using it, but because I don’t want every conversation about my health to turn into a debate.

Overall, this has been a very positive experience, but definitely not a magic button. Semaglutide helped me get past a plateau that felt very tied to perimenopause, but the basics still mattered: lifting, protein, walking, sleep, and managing side effects properly. GHK-Cu ended up being important in a different way. Alongside stopping nightly tretinoin, it seemed to help my skin recover from an issue I had been normalizing for way too long.

I also wish there were more honest, specific stories from perimenopausal women using GLP-1s. Most of what I found was either very generic or buried in Reddit threads, and the body composition side of it barely gets discussed. Same with GHK-Cu for people whose skin feels like it has simply had enough of retinoids. In both cases, the most useful information came from other people’s lived experience, not from the usual medical or skincare content.