Anyone starting semaglutide, liraglutide or tirzepatide quickly discovers that the medication is the easy part. The hard part is the record-keeping. A typical titration runs four to six months, stepping the dose up every four weeks, and at each step your appetite, your gut and your weight all move at once. Four weeks later, at the review appointment, almost nobody can reconstruct what actually happened.
The information worth capturing is smaller than people expect. Four things carry most of the signal: the date and dose of each injection, the injection site you used, your weight and waist measurement on a fixed day of the week, and a one-to-five severity score for nausea, reflux and constipation. That is it. A phone note works. A spreadsheet works better because it charts. A purpose-built log works best because it puts the dose history and the weight curve on the same axis, which is the comparison that actually answers the question you care about.
Two patterns only show up once you have eight or ten weeks of entries side by side. The first is the stall that is not a stall: weight flat for three weeks while waist circumference keeps falling, which is body composition changing rather than progress stopping. The second is the side-effect window - for most people nausea spikes in the three or four days after a dose increase and settles, so a bad week straight after a step up means something different from a bad week at a steady dose.
Rotate injection sites and write down which one you used. Abdomen, thigh and upper arm absorb at slightly different rates, and if you are getting local reactions, the log is the only way you will spot that they cluster in one place.
If you would rather not build the spreadsheet yourself, the GLP1 App does this in the browser - weekly doses, sites, weight, waist and side-effect severity, charted together, with a separate peptide tracker for people logging reconstituted vials.
None of this replaces your prescriber. It just means that when you sit down with them you are describing what happened rather than trying to remember it.
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