Zepbound is tirzepatide, given as an injection once a week, and licensed for weight management. The same active ingredient is also sold as Mounjaro. If the name Zepbound is familiar to you from US coverage, check your own patient information leaflet and prescription, because the tirzepatide product available locally may be marketed under a different name.

This is worth sorting out in your first week, before you start searching online for what to expect. Reading advice written for a different brand name and packaging can be confusing when your own leaflet uses different wording. Confirming which product you actually have, early on, makes the rest of your record-keeping more accurate.

The first week of any new medicine is a useful baseline period. You do not yet know how your body will respond, and that is fine. The goal of tracking this week is not to judge whether things are going well, but to create an accurate record that you and a prescriber can refer back to later.

A simple structure for day one

On the day of your first injection, write down the date, the approximate time, and which part of the body you used. Note how you felt beforehand and afterward, even if the answer is simply fine.

It can also help to note anything you were told during the appointment where the injection was prescribed or given, such as what to watch for or when your next contact is expected. Writing this down on the same day, while it is fresh, is more reliable than trying to recall it a week later.

What to note through the week

  • Appetite: whether meals feel different in size or timing than usual
  • Digestion: any nausea, fullness, reflux, or changes in bowel habits, and roughly when they occurred
  • Hydration: whether you are managing to drink normally, especially if appetite or nausea affect fluid intake
  • Sleep and energy: any noticeable change from your usual pattern
  • Injection site: any redness, swelling, or soreness where you injected
  • Questions: anything you want to ask at your next contact with your prescriber or pharmacist

A short daily line is often more useful than a long entry written from memory a few days later. Even one or two sentences per day builds a record with real detail.

Keeping the record simple

You do not need a complicated system for the first week. A notebook page, a note on your phone, or a simple app entry will all work, as long as each entry has a date attached. If you find daily notes hard to keep up with, a single end-of-day summary is still far more useful than trying to reconstruct the whole week from memory before an appointment.

It can also help to note the time of day you write each entry, especially for things like appetite and energy, since these can shift noticeably between morning and evening. If something felt different at a specific time of day, write that down rather than averaging it into a single daily impression.

What this week does not tell you

One week is not enough to say anything meaningful about how treatment is going overall, and it is not a basis for deciding anything about dose or continuation yourself. Those are questions for your prescriber, working from your actual history and your notes.

It is also worth remembering that a first week is just one data point in what may be a much longer record. Try not to draw firm conclusions from it, whether encouraging or discouraging. Its main job is to give you and your prescriber a clear, factual starting point to compare against later weeks.

If you find the first week harder than you expected, or easier, resist the urge to decide what that means for the weeks ahead. Both experiences are simply information for now, worth recording accurately and revisiting with your prescriber rather than interpreting on your own. A calm, factual record from week one is worth more than an early guess about how things will go.

If you experience severe abdominal pain, repeated vomiting, inability to keep fluids down, fainting, or signs of a severe allergic reaction, treat this as something needing prompt medical attention rather than something to write down and mention later.