Lean ProtocolAn Ardenholt programARDENHOLT · EST. 2026

§ IX — The practice

How Lean Protocol works.

A lab notebook for a GLP-1: the injection, what it did afterwards, the food that disagreed, and the weight read as a trend rather than a mood.

Log the injection

Date, drug, dose, and which site you used, so the rotation is a record rather than a guess made on a Sunday evening. Semaglutide or tirzepatide, brand or compounded — the notebook takes the figures you were given and does not editorialise about them.

Rate what showed up, nought to four

Nausea, constipation, fatigue, the sulfur burps that arrive around week three. One number a day per symptom is enough to tell a titration step that is settling from one that is getting worse — which is a difference nobody can reconstruct from memory a month later.

A four prompts the notebook to say: ring your prescriber. That is the entire extent of its opinion, and it is deliberate.

Let the food map build itself

Tag what you ate before something went wrong. After a few weeks the recent list is your own tolerance map, not somebody else's forum post — and it changes again every time the dose steps up, which is exactly why a fixed list was never going to work.

Protein against a target, and whether you lifted

Fast loss takes lean mass with the fat unless protein and resistance training hold the line. The notebook scores the day's protein against a weight-based target and asks the training question, beside the dose — the two entries that decide what the weight you lost was actually made of.

The protein calculator sets the target, and it is free.

Weight as a trend

Daily weigh-ins are mostly noise. The notebook charts the trend and sets the last fortnight against the fortnight before it, so a flat two weeks reads as a possible stall to ask about rather than one bad morning reading as failure.

Hand it back

One tap exports the whole log as a plain CSV. The appointment is eleven minutes long; the four you would have spent reconstructing the month are the four that matter.

It is not medical advice, and it is not trying to be. The notebook records; the prescriber decides.

Why we made it

A GLP-1 arrives with a pen, a leaflet, and a pharmacist who has seen six other people that hour. Everything after that is you, a needle, and a search box at one in the morning. The notes and the guide cover the questions; this is where the answers about you get written down.

The Lean Protocol home screen: the current dose, the next one due, and the week's figures
The notebook
The Lean Protocol membership screen showing the monthly and annual prices
The membership

The web notebook runs today, free, with no account: open it, or print the paper tracker for the fridge. The iOS app — Sign in with Apple, on-device storage, a daily reminder, a Siri shortcut for logging a dose, CSV export, and a seven-day chart — is not yet released. The register opens first.