"I started the shot in July 2015 and ended in January 2017. Initially, I had pretty bad headaches, hot flashes, hair loss (nothing that anyone but me noticed), and quite a bit of bleeding (about 3 weeks after my first shot). After, about a month, the side affects started to wane - I stopped bleeding almost entirely (yasss!) and stopped losing hair. That said, while I did not have initial weight gain, I have gained about 15 pounds in the last year (I have never gained this much weight in this amount of time). As a result of the weight gain alone, I am discontinuing with this method of birth control."