How to keep a GLP-1 dose log that stays useful

Most people on a GLP-1 start a log, keep it for three weeks and then drop it. The usual reason is that they tried to record too much. This is the short list that has survived two titration steps without becoming a chore.

Six fields, and no more

1. Date and time of the injection, not just the date. Weekly agonists have a long tail, and if the shot slides from Sunday morning to Wednesday evening over a couple of months you will feel it and have no idea why.
2. Dose in milligrams and the volume you actually drew. These two come apart the moment you switch pens or change a reconstitution. Writing "0.25" on its own is useless six weeks later when you cannot remember whether that meant milligrams or units on the syringe.
3. Injection site, rotated. Abdomen, thigh, upper arm. Absorption is not identical between them, and a site you overuse gets lumpy.
4. Side effects with a number. "Nausea 3 out of 10, hours 4 to 10 after the dose" tells you something next month. "Felt rough" does not.
5. Weight once a week, same day, same conditions. Daily weighing adds noise and nothing else.
6. Missed or late doses, with the gap in days. What you should do about a missed dose depends on how long the gap was, and you will not remember it accurately later.

Where the mistakes actually happen

Reconstitution arithmetic, almost every time. If you are adding bacteriostatic water to a lyophilised vial yourself, the units marked on an insulin syringe do not map onto milligrams until the concentration is fixed, and getting that wrong by a factor of ten is a real and common error. Doing it on paper each time is how the error creeps in. I now run the numbers through the Peptide Tracker & Calculator, which keeps the vial size, the water volume and the resulting units per dose in one place instead of three.

Titration steps

A dose increase is worth a line of its own: the old dose, the new dose, the date, and how the first week on it compared with the last week on the old one. That comparison is the only thing that tells you whether a step up was tolerated or merely survived. The same dose and titration tracker will do the schedule maths, but a notebook works fine as long as all six fields above are in it.

None of this is medical advice. The titration schedule itself should come from whoever prescribed it. The log exists so that when you next talk to them you are describing what happened instead of guessing.