GLP-1 · Side Effects
A side effect log with what you ate before it, which is the missing half
Side effects are the main reason people stop these medications, and they get described at appointments in the vaguest possible terms because that's all memory offers three weeks later. "It's been bad" is the honest answer and a useless one. Written down as it happens — how bad, how long, what you'd eaten, where in the week it fell — the same experience becomes a pattern, and patterns are actionable in a way that impressions never are. Quite often the pattern is also reassuring: it's easing, and you couldn't tell.
For anyone tracking nausea and the rest of it, to bring to their next review.
Where this fits
What this sits alongside
What to do about side effects — whether to wait them out, whether anything needs to change — is a conversation with your prescriber. What a log does is make that conversation specific: how often, how bad, how long, and what was happening around it.
Why this is hard to keep track of
- By the appointment it has all blurred into "it's been bad", which nobody can act on
- The trigger is usually the meal before, and the meal before is never recorded
- Improvement is gradual enough to be invisible without something to compare against
- Bad days get remembered and ordinary days don't, so memory reports the worst week
Worth recording
- What it was, how bad, and roughly how long
- What you'd eaten in the hours before — often the most informative field here
- Where you are in the week, since some of this is rhythmic
- Whether it stopped you eating or drinking, which is the part that escalates
Cadence
When something happens. Ten seconds, at the time
In practice
Say it once, or photograph it
The entries most worth having are the ones made at the exact moment nobody wants to fill in a form. A sentence — typed, dictated, or replaced entirely by a photo of the plate — is a much lower bar, and it carries the context a calorie field would have thrown away.
Called 4 tools
log_symptom(type: "nausea", severity: 3, duration_hours: 3, at: "13:45")log_meal(items: ["creamy pasta"], meal: "lunch", preceded_symptom: true)log_meal(meal: "dinner", happened: false, reason: "nausea")find_pattern(metric: "nausea", group_by: "meal_type")
Every figure here was counted from entries you made. The model chose which tools to call — it doesn't score the meal, estimate calories from a photo, or decide what any of it says about you.
And then ask
The question the log can answer
Months of entries hold real answers to the things you've been guessing at, and reading them properly has always meant a spreadsheet and a free evening — which is exactly what nobody has.
Ask in plain language. The answers come back with the counts behind them, including when those counts are too thin to mean anything yet — which is the more useful answer far more often than people expect.
Called 3 tools
get_history(topic: "side-effects", window: "6m")find_pattern(group_by: "context")compare_periods(metric: "entries")
Counts and averages over your own entries, nothing more. Where the data is confounded or too thin, the answer says so instead of rounding it into a conclusion.
What it does
Set up around side effects
The same mechanics as everything else here, pointed at what actually matters for this one.
An entry survives a bad week
A sentence, or a tick that a meal happened at all. On the weeks when eating is genuinely hard, the log has to cost less than the meal did — otherwise the record stops exactly when it gets interesting.
Photos, for the thing descriptions miss
Portion sense recalibrates within weeks and nobody can see it happening. Two photographs eight weeks apart settle it instantly.
Mark the date something changed
Your prescriber decides what changes; the log just notes when, so the fortnight either side can be counted against each other instead of recalled.
Side effects with the meal before them
Nausea on its own is a complaint. Nausea with what you'd eaten, how long it lasted and where it fell in the week is something a clinician can work with.
Watching for eating too little
The risk here is rarely eating too much. Missed meals and meals without a protein source are counted and shown to you, because appetite has stopped being the thing that would have told you.
Formatted for the review
Export the window you were asked about, photos included, and take it in. It's the answer to the first question at every appointment.
The reason a lot of people start
Something to actually bring to the appointment
You get fifteen minutes, and the first question is always some version of "so what does a normal week look like?" — which nobody on earth can answer accurately from memory.
What this gives you: Frequency, severity and timing over weeks, which turns "the nausea's been bad" into a description your prescriber can actually respond to.
- Export the date range you were asked about, as a file you can print
- Photos alongside the entries, which say more than any description
- Counts and timings rather than an impression of the worst week
- Nothing shared anywhere unless you choose to share it
What it won't do
- Score a meal, or sort food into good and bad
- Estimate calories from a photo and present the guess as a number
- Set you a calorie target, a macro target, or a weight
- Run a streak you can break, or tell you that you've fallen behind
- Comment on your body. The photos here are of food
- Diagnose anything, or suggest that a pattern is a diagnosis
It's a notebook that can do arithmetic and answer questions about itself. Deciding what any of it means is a job for you and the people advising you.
Early access
Start with what you're already trying to hold in your head
Tell us what you've been trying to keep track of and we'll set it up with you — recording the thing that's actually useful, at a cadence that survives a bad week.
- Founding accounts lock their price for life
- No card, no trial clock, no notification designed to make you feel behind
- Export everything you've logged, photos included, whenever you want
Also here
The rest of the picture
These overlap constantly, which is the point — the answer to a question about one of them is very often sitting in another one's data.
Food Diary
A line per meal when you can. A tick when you can't
Protein
A sentence a meal. No weighing, no packets
Portion Changes
A photo when it's a proper plate of food. Not every sip of soup
Titration Weeks
Mark the date, then carry on logging as normal
Coming Off
Much lighter than while you were on it. A few entries a week is plenty
Keep the record without it becoming another job
Founding pricing is locked for accounts opened during early access.
Founding accounts lock their price for life. No card required.