There's a category of entry that's easy to dismiss because it doesn't feel related to the medication — the exercise note. And the reason to log it is that the two metrics most people watch most closely on the journal — energy and appetite — are also two of the metrics most sensitive to how much you've moved that week, which means without the exercise line in the journal, the dose-related signal and the movement-related signal are tangled together and can't be told apart later. The rule.
One exercise note per week, written into the weekly summary entry. Don't make it a fitness log — make it a movement context line. "Walked 4 days, around 30 minutes each, no formal exercise." "Took the stairs at work all week, weekend was sedentary." "Two gym sessions, mostly desk-bound otherwise." "Recovery week after a cold, very little movement." One sentence. The point is to capture the rough movement volume of the week, not to track minutes or calories, because the rough volume is what correlates with energy and appetite at the weekly scale where the dose-related effects also show up.
Three reasons the exercise note pays back when read across months. One — energy is the most-watched metric in the journal and also the most movement-sensitive. A week of unusually low energy might be a dose-related shift or might be a low-movement week catching up — the exercise note from that week and the prior month makes the distinction legible.
Without it, every energy dip looks like a dose question. With it, half of them resolve into "low-movement week, expected" before the prescriber conversation even starts. Two — appetite tracks loosely with movement volume in ways that surface as a pattern only across multiple weeks.
A single week of increased appetite alongside increased walking might be coincidence; the same pattern across three or four weeks across different months is a working hypothesis. The exercise note is what lets the pattern be readable. Three — the seasonal confound is significant.
Spring and summer typically bring more walking, more outdoor activity, more daylight, and a measurable bump in movement volume versus winter — without the exercise line, the spring/summer energy and appetite changes get attributed to the dose by default, when often a significant share of the change is the season. The mechanics. One — the exercise note goes into the weekly summary entry, not into the daily entries.
Daily exercise logging is too granular and decays as a discipline within weeks. Weekly is the cadence the data is read at and the cadence the discipline survives at. Two — describe the movement in qualitative bands rather than quantitative detail. "Low / moderate / high" movement week as a header word, then one sentence of detail.
One — the exercise note goes into the weekly summary entry, not into the daily entries.
The bands are what reads as a pattern across months; the minute counts don't. Three — include the absence of movement as a deliberate note, not as a blank. A week with no notable movement gets "sedentary week, mostly desk-bound" as the line, not an empty field.
Future-you reading back needs the contrast between movement weeks and sedentary weeks to be explicit; an empty field reads as missed-entry rather than as low-movement signal. Four — the exercise note is never a fitness goal-setting entry. The journal logs what the week contained, not what you intended the week to contain — the gap between intention and reality is data, but only if the entry records reality.
Five — the personal exercise-versus-energy map and the exercise-versus-appetite map are observations to share with the prescriber when patterns emerge, not instructions to self-impose exercise targets. The journal logs what you moved; what to change about how you move is a conversation with the prescriber or a fitness professional, not a journal entry. Organisational note: the exercise note costs about 10 seconds per week and the pay-back is the difference between a clean dose-related signal and a confounded one across the metrics that matter most.
Six months of weekly exercise notes makes the energy and appetite columns in the journal readable in a way they aren't when movement context is absent.