Honestly, it's not surprising there's been no weight loss at such low doses. All the clinical trials started at 2mg, and by the 3-month mark participants were up to 3-4mg with significant weight loss to show for it. Going at a snail's pace with the "start at 0.25mg and go slow" crowd has basically meant 3 months of spinning your wheels with nothing to show for it.

Nine pounds while still enjoying ribs during playoff games is honestly the dream scenario lol!

Honestly I'd push back a little on jumping straight to a higher dose — storage issues are a real possibility like calmelk20 said, but it's also worth remembering that reta and tirz work pretty differently mechanically, so a direct potency comparison isn't always apples to apples. A lot of people find the adaptation period on reta takes longer than expected before appetite suppression really kicks in. In my own experience I noticed things shifted noticeably around weeks 6-8, which I wasn't expecting after coming from tirz. Might be worth giving it more time before assuming the dose needs to go up.

That's really interesting about the cap color difference - is that something people can reliably use as a visual check, or are there normal batch-to-batch variations in cap shade that might make it hard to tell which is which?