Dosing
Titration schedules, missed doses, and timing.
Every medicine in this class starts below its working dose and climbs on a timetable. That is not caution for its own sake — it follows from how long each drug takes to reach a stable level in your blood, which is four to five weeks for semaglutide and around 25 days for tirzepatide.
Understanding the schedule answers most of the questions people have in their first months: why the starting dose does so little, why a bad week follows every increase, how late a dose can be, and why the top of the ladder is a ceiling rather than a target. Each product has its own schedule, and the differences between them are larger than they look.
Dose schedules, drug by drug
Every GLP-1 medicine climbs a ladder of doses on a fixed timetable. Here is every schedule in one place, and the reasoning behind the pace.
You missed a dose. Now what?
The rules differ by product, and they hinge on how many days have passed. Here is the decision for each medicine, in the order you actually need it.