Anyone who has spent a few months on a GLP-1 medication learns the same lesson twice: the dose is only half the story, and memory is a terrible record keeper.

The typical titration schedule looks simple written down. Four weeks at a starting dose, step up, four weeks again, step up. In practice the calendar slips. A pharmacy is out of stock for nine days. A holiday moves an injection from Sunday to Wednesday. Someone stays at a lower dose an extra fortnight because the nausea has not settled. By month five the actual history bears very little resemblance to the plan, and when the prescriber asks "how long were you on 1.0?" the honest answer is a shrug.

That gap matters more than it sounds. Side effect patterns are the main evidence a clinician has for whether to hold, step up, or step back down. Nausea in the seventy-two hours after an escalation is a very different signal from nausea appearing steadily at a dose you have tolerated for six weeks. Without dates attached, both get reported as "some nausea" and the useful distinction disappears.

A log worth keeping is smaller than most people expect. Four fields carry almost all the value: the date of the injection, the dose in milligrams, the injection site, and a short free-text note. Weight belongs on its own weekly line rather than tangled into the dose entries, because daily weight noise obscures the trend that actually matters. Everything else, appetite scores, mood ratings, elaborate symptom scales, tends to get abandoned by week three, and an abandoned log is worse than a sparse one.

The site field earns its place quietly. Rotation is standard advice that nobody follows reliably from memory, and a visible history of the last several sites makes the next choice obvious rather than a guess.

Two habits make the difference between a log that survives and one that does not. Record at the moment of injection, not at the end of the day, because retrospective entries drift by a day and drifted dates are what make the record useless. And write the note in plain language rather than shorthand you will not recognise in November.

I keep mine in GLP-1 Dose Log, a small free web app built for exactly this: injections, doses, sites, weights, nothing else bolted on. A paper notebook works equally well. What does not work is trying to reconstruct four months of titration in a waiting room, which is where most of us start.