Cagrilintide: the complete guide.

The short version.

If you read nothing else, read this. The whole guide in a handful of bullets.

Quick reference.

What is Cagrilintide?

Cagrilintide is a peptide, which simply means a small chain of amino acids, the same building blocks that make up the proteins in your body. It is a synthetic, long-acting copy of a natural hormone called amylin, which your pancreas already releases alongside insulin after you eat.

Amylin is one of the body's fullness signals. It tells the brain you have eaten enough and slows how fast the stomach empties. The problem with natural amylin as a medicine is that it breaks down almost immediately, which is why an older amylin drug had to be injected three times a day. Cagrilintide adds a fatty-acid side chain that lets it circulate for about a week, so a single weekly shot does the job.

The version sold by vendors arrives as a freeze-dried white powder in a small sealed vial. It is not a steroid, not a stimulant, and not a GLP-1 like semaglutide, though it is frequently paired with one. People reach for it for one theme above all: eating less without white-knuckling through hunger.

Worth saying plainly: cagrilintide is not an approved medicine. It is sold strictly for research use only, and most of the human evidence comes from Novo Nordisk's own obesity trials, a lot of it on the CagriSema combination rather than cagrilintide by itself. We get into what that means further down.

How it works in the body.

You do not need a biology degree to follow this. Here is the simple picture, then a little more for the curious.

The core idea is that cagrilintide borrows one of the body's own meal-time satiety signals and stretches it out so it lasts a week. It does this through a few overlapping mechanisms that show up in the research.

• Amylin receptor activation. Cagrilintide binds amylin and calcitonin receptors in the brainstem and hypothalamus, the satiety centers, signaling that the body has eaten enough and reducing how much you want to eat.
• Slower gastric emptying. It slows the rate at which the stomach passes food to the intestine, so a meal feels filling for longer and the urge to keep eating fades sooner.
• A different pathway than GLP-1. Because it acts on amylin rather than GLP-1, it stacks cleanly with semaglutide. The two hit fullness from separate angles, which is the logic behind CagriSema.

How to take it: routes of administration.

Cagrilintide is an injectable peptide. Unlike an oral GLP-1 such as orforglipron, it is not a meaningful oral option, so the route is simply subcutaneous injection. Here is the honest comparison.

Where to inject.

If you go this route, these are the sites people use. Rotate so no single area gets sore.

The easiest spots are the belly (about 2 inches either side of the navel), the love handles, the front of the thigh, and the back of the upper arms. Rotate every injection.

So which should a beginner pick? There is only one real answer: subcutaneous. The needle is tiny, absorption is reliable, and a weekly shot into the belly is all the routine requires. The only decision that actually matters with cagrilintide is the titration schedule, not the route.

Reconstitution: mixing it.

Cagrilintide arrives as a dry powder, so before you can inject it you reconstitute it, which just means adding liquid to turn the powder into something you can draw into a syringe. It sounds technical but takes about a minute.

Once it is mixed, the only real question is how many units to draw. That depends on your vial size, your water amount, and your target dose, and it is easy to get wrong by hand, especially during the low-dose titration weeks.

• Use bacteriostatic water, often called BAC water. The small amount of preservative keeps the mixed vial usable for weeks.
• Add the water slowly, down the inside wall of the vial. A common mix is a 10 mg vial plus 2 mL of BAC water, which gives a concentration of 5 mg/mL.
• Swirl, do not shake. Gently roll the vial until the powder dissolves. Shaking can damage the peptide.
• Store it in the fridge once mixed, and keep it out of direct light.

Open the dosage calculator to turn your vial and dose into an exact number of units. As a worked example: a 10 mg vial mixed with 2 mL of BAC water gives 5 mg/mL, so a 2.4 mg dose is 0.48 mL, which is 48 units on a U-100 insulin syringe, and that vial holds about 4 doses at target. During titration your early doses are a small fraction of that.

Dosing by goal.

There is no single official dose for cagrilintide, because it is not an approved medicine. What follows is the range used in the trials and echoed by the community. The defining feature of cagrilintide dosing is the slow, stepped titration.

Titration phase

The trials escalated in steps, roughly 0.3 mg, 0.6 mg, 1.2 mg, then 2.4 mg, holding each step for about two weeks before moving up. The slow climb is what keeps nausea and vomiting manageable while the gut adapts to slower emptying.

Target phase

Most people aim for a target near 2.4 mg once weekly, the dose used in the CagriSema trials. Some stop climbing earlier if a lower step controls appetite well enough; chasing the maximum is not the goal.

Stacked as CagriSema

When run with semaglutide, both are typically dosed at 2.4 mg once weekly, titrated up in parallel. The combination is more effective but brings noticeably more gastrointestinal side effects, so the slow climb matters even more.

Cycling and timing.

Cagrilintide is not really cycled the way a recovery peptide is. It is run continuously while you want the appetite effect, dosed once a week, with the only structure being the multi-week titration up to your target.

Why titrate so carefully? Mostly because the side effects are gastrointestinal and dose-dependent. Climbing slowly lets the gut adapt, which is the difference between a manageable run and a miserable one. There is no loading-then-maintenance pattern here, just a careful ramp to a steady weekly dose.

• Hold each titration step for about two weeks before stepping up, so the gut can adapt.
• Do not skip ahead to the target dose. Jumping straight to 2.4 mg is the fastest way to severe nausea.
• Stop the climb early if needed. If a lower step controls appetite well, there is no prize for reaching the maximum. Any concerns are a conversation for a licensed provider.

Stacking Cagrilintide.

Cagrilintide is best known as half of the most talked-about weight pairing in the peptide world.

See full recipes, dosing, and how people run them on the stacks page.

Side effects and safety.

In the trials and reports we see, cagrilintide's side effects are overwhelmingly gastrointestinal, generally mild to moderate, and worst during the climb to a higher dose. The ones people mention most often are:

• Nausea, the single most common complaint, more frequent at higher doses and during dose increases.
• Vomiting or diarrhea, usually early on or after stepping up, easing as the body adapts.
• Constipation, which some people get instead of, or alongside, the looser symptoms.
• Reduced appetite that goes too far, where portions get small enough to need attention to protein and nutrition.

Who should be cautious.

Some people have clear reasons to be extra careful, or to avoid cagrilintide entirely until they have spoken with a licensed provider.

• Pregnant or breastfeeding. There is no safety data here, so this is a hard avoid.
• A history of gastroparesis or serious GI disease. Because cagrilintide slows gastric emptying, anyone with delayed stomach emptying or significant gut disease should be especially cautious. This is a conversation for a doctor.
• Competing athletes. As an unapproved experimental drug, cagrilintide falls under WADA's catch-all ban and would show up as a prohibited substance.
• Anyone on other medications, particularly other GLP-1 or diabetes drugs, since slowed gastric emptying can change how other medicines are absorbed. Talk to your provider first.

And the universal one: whoever you are, talk to a licensed healthcare provider before starting cagrilintide. This guide is educational, not a substitute for personalized medical advice.

Where to buy it safely.

This is where a lot of beginners get burned, because peptide quality varies wildly between vendors and the cheapest vial is not always the real deal. Our honest take: do not shop on price alone, shop on price plus independent lab data.

• Compare vendors side by side. Price ranges are wide, and the difference between the lowest and highest listing can be large for the exact same compound.
• Look for recent third-party lab tests. The gold standard the community looks for is a recent Janoshik certificate of analysis showing purity for the batch you are actually buying.
• Favor recent COAs. An old lab result on a different batch tells you little. The fresher the test, the more it means.
• Be skeptical of suspiciously cheap listings with no testing behind them.

That is exactly the comparison we put together. On our Cagrilintide product page you can compare vendor prices, see which batches have public lab data, and view the grades we assign from that data. From there you can head to the buy page to line up your options.

Questions, answered straight.