What a GLP-1 Dose Log Should Actually Record
Most people starting semaglutide or tirzepatide begin a log the same way: a date, a dose, and a weight. Three months later the log is useless, because the questions that come up in a prescriber appointment are almost never about weight.
The questions that come up are these. When did the nausea start relative to the injection? Did it get worse after the last titration step, or was it already trending that way? How many days after the shot does appetite suppression fade? Are you actually hitting your protein target, or only on the days you feel fine? A weight column answers none of them.
Log the injection, not just the day
Record the exact date and time of the injection, the dose in milligrams, and the site. Site rotation matters more than most people expect: injecting repeatedly into the same area of the abdomen can change absorption and produce a week that feels inexplicably different at an unchanged dose. If you can only keep one extra column beyond dose, make it injection time, because every symptom you record afterward is only interpretable as an offset from it.
Symptoms need a scale and a clock
"Felt sick" is not data. A 0 to 3 severity score, dated, is. The typical GLP-1 nausea curve peaks somewhere between 24 and 72 hours after the dose and then decays, so a symptom entry without a timestamp cannot be separated from ordinary bad days. Once you have a month of timestamped scores you can see your own curve, and you can tell the difference between a dose you are not tolerating and a dose you are tolerating badly for the first two days of every cycle.
Constipation and reflux deserve their own rows rather than being folded into a general "GI" note. They respond to different interventions, they appear at different points in titration, and clinicians treat them separately.
Protein and fluid are the two intake numbers worth the effort
Calorie logging on a GLP-1 tends to collapse within a few weeks, because appetite suppression makes the number both small and boring. Protein grams and fluid volume are worth keeping. Lean mass loss is the main quality-of-outcome risk on these drugs, and low intake plus dehydration is the most common cause of the fatigue people attribute to the medication itself.
Mark the titration steps in a way you can find later
Every dose change should be a visible boundary in the log, not just a different number in a column. When you go back to answer whether things were better before the increase, you want to see the step. A log where week 9 and week 10 look identical except for a 0.25 mg difference buried mid-row will not survive being read three months later.
Any of this works on paper. It also works in a spreadsheet with six columns, which is where most people end up. The reason purpose-built tools exist is timestamp arithmetic: computing hours since the last injection by hand for every symptom entry is the step that kills the habit. A tracker such as GLP1 App handles the injection-relative timing and the titration boundaries automatically, and other trackers do the same job. Pick one and stop starting over. Bring it to an appointment. If your prescriber can look at it and answer whether to hold, increase, or manage a side effect without asking you to reconstruct the last month from memory, the log is doing its job. If the only thing on the page is a weight trend, you have recorded the outcome and none of the inputs. The template I use is the dose and side-effect log at glp1.app, but the columns above matter more than the tool. 
