Starting a GLP-1 medication such as semaglutide or tirzepatide introduces more moving parts than most people expect. A dose that steps up on a schedule, injection sites that need rotating, and — for anyone reconstituting lyophilized peptide — arithmetic that has to be right every single time. This guide covers the system that keeps those parts straight.
Most GLP-1 protocols raise the dose every four weeks, and the increments are not always intuitive. Miss a step-up week, or accidentally repeat a dose because you lost track, and you either stall progress or invite a rough patch of nausea. Rather than counting weeks on a calendar, it helps to let a dedicated app hold the schedule. I keep every injection in a free GLP-1 dose tracker that maintains the running titration plan, so the next dose is never a guess.
Rotating between the abdomen, thigh, and upper arm reduces local irritation and lowers the risk of lipohypertrophy — the firm lumps that form when the same spot is used repeatedly. The hard part is remembering where the last few shots went. Logging the site every time turns "I think it was the left side last week" into an actual record you can trust.
If you reconstitute lyophilized peptide yourself, the final concentration depends entirely on how much bacteriostatic water you add to the vial. Get the ratio wrong and every dose afterward is off. Instead of redoing the arithmetic by hand each time, a purpose-built peptide reconstitution calculator takes the vial strength and water volume and returns the exact units to draw, removing the one category of error worth worrying about most.
A few months in, the record becomes genuinely useful: dose history, which sites are overused, and how the titration has actually gone. If you are on a GLP-1 and still tracking it in your head or a scattered notes file, a dedicated log is worth the switch. The tool I settled on, glp1.app, covers dose logging, injection-site rotation, half-life modeling, and reconstitution in one place, and it runs in the browser with nothing to install.