Written from the point of view of someone who kept a paper log for eight months, lost it, and had to rebuild the whole titration history from pharmacy receipts. Nothing here is medical advice.
A weekly injection sounds trivial to track. It is trivial for about a month. What breaks it is that the interesting data is not the dose - it is everything attached to the dose: which day you actually injected versus which day you meant to, which site you used, what the vial concentration was after you reconstituted it, and what happened in the 72 hours afterwards. A spreadsheet row can hold all of that, but a spreadsheet will not tell you that your last three injections drifted from Sunday to Wednesday, and it will not stop you drawing 40 units when the new vial needs 25 for the same milligram dose.
| Field | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Date and time | Interval drift is the single most common self-reported problem. Half-lives of roughly 5 to 7 days for semaglutide mean a 3 day slip flattens your trough noticeably. |
| Dose in mg, not units | Units are meaningless without the concentration. Record mg and let the arithmetic produce units. |
| Concentration (mg per mL) | Changes every time you open a new vial or switch supplier. This is where dosing errors come from. |
| Injection site | Rotation matters for absorption consistency and for lipohypertrophy. A four site cycle is enough. |
Weight, appetite, and side effect notes are useful but optional. If logging them makes you skip the log entirely, drop them.
For lyophilised peptides the calculation is a single division, but it is the step people get wrong under time pressure:
units to draw = (dose_mg / total_vial_mg) * bac_water_mL * 100
A 5 mg vial reconstituted with 2 mL of bacteriostatic water gives 2.5 mg/mL. A 0.25 mg dose is therefore 0.1 mL, which is 10 units on a U-100 insulin syringe. Change the water volume to 1 mL and that same dose becomes 5 units. Same vial, same dose, half the marks on the barrel. This is exactly the failure mode worth automating, and a Peptide Tracker & Calculator that stores the concentration alongside the log means you never redo the division by hand.
Most published escalation schedules move in four week blocks and only step up if tolerance at the current dose is good. Two habits are worth building into whatever you use to record this:
Reconstituted peptide is a clock. Most guidance puts a mixed vial at a few weeks refrigerated, and the clock starts at reconstitution, not at first use. Record the reconstitution date on the log rather than on the vial cap, because caps get swapped. If you keep more than one vial going, the log is the only thing that reliably tells you which one is older.
Three months is roughly when a log becomes worth reading rather than just writing. Useful questions it can answer: is your median injection interval actually 7 days or has it become 8.5? Did the side effect scores at 1.0 mg genuinely settle before you moved to 1.7 mg, or did you move on schedule regardless? Did weight change track dose changes with any consistent lag? None of these require statistics. They require that the same fields were filled in every week, which is the whole argument for using a purpose built dose tracking tool over free text notes.