Join me as I experiment on my self -with the guidance of the Zoe programme

This might be fun. Join me dear reader, in my journey of exploration into what food does to my body.  At great personal expense and effort I'm using the Zoe programme to undertake a series of tests and experiments and learning courses to understand how food affects me. Not you or anybody else, but me. Only me because it seems that because of the make up of the microbiome in our guts we're all different in how we digest our food and this affects what we should be eating and how and when. 

Nevertheless, you might find it interesting if you care about the food you eat. Or you might have heard of the Zoe programme and be interested in how it works and whether it might be something you are considering for yourself.

Zoe calls itself 

The personalized nutrition program from the world's largest nutrition-science study

Why am I doing this?  Well readers of my Herbie boating blog will know that I'm partial to a bit of data and generally interested in science.  I'm also fairly interested in my own health - aren't we all? I try to eat reasonably well, but with all the myths and wotnot about diet and foods that float about the place, how do you know what to believe? Wouldn't it be good to eat some stuff and then test what it does for you personally?  

Let me say right here that this is not a diet programme.  Nobody is telling me what to eat. This blog will be a diary of scientific experiments based on what I choose to eat and share results I get along the way.   What Zoe does is give you an insight into your own reaction to different foods so that you can learn to optimise your diet and eating habits.  It's not a cheap or trivial exercise and it's base on real science supported by a number of leading universities and scientists. You'll see how thorough it is as we go along.

If you follow these posts I'll share with you the tests and experiments and results I get and you can see what the programme involves and judge for yourself if it is any good.

You'll get to know how Zoe works as I go through the process, but maybe you ought first to take a look at their web site to get the broad hang of it.  Go to Zoe.com/

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So here's how I got started and what happened over the first few days.  I'll then try to keep the diary going so you can see what I have to do and how it turns out.

I decide to join Zoe a couple of months ago.  There's a waiting list, so I didn't get going until this week, the beginning of October.

My Zoe test kit arrived in the post on the appointed day.  It's quite a bundle and very professionally packaged and documented. Inside a big box were four separate boxes as follows.

A blood sugar monitor

Two packets of special cookies

A blood test kit

A poo test kit

I also had to download two phone apps - one for the Zoe programme and one for the blood sugar monitor - you'll see why later.

Day 0 - getting ready

First I had to apply the blood sugar monitor, which sticks to the back of one of your upper arms, the triceps area basically.  They give you a special gubbins which sort of fires the monitor onto your arm.  Amazingly it worked well.  You feel a slight pin prick as it attaches.  Its about the size of a wrist watch and weighs very little. The monitor works for 14 days.  It's not uncomfortable. The monitor phone app takes reading s from the monitor and plots them on a graph for you.  More of that later.

Day 1 the tests begin.

After fasting overnight (easy) the first job was to check that the monitor works.  You hold your phone next to the monitor and after a couple of buzzing noises, you phone shows your blood sugar reading.  Mine worked straight away.

Next I collected a pea sized poo sample (the kit they supply makes this non messy and easy) and stored it in the supplied bottle which also had some liquid in it.  They give you a prepaid box to send it off to the lab.

Then I had to eat the first two supplied breakfast cookies, quite large ones.  These have exact measured amounts of fat and sugar in them.  They were rather sweet and contained white chocolate amongst other things.  I wouldn't eat them for pleasure, but they were ok.  I had to log the time I ate them.

Next I had to wait for four hours eating nothing else and drinking only water or black tea or coffee.

After four hours I downloaded the blood sugar readings from the monitor which showed how much my blood sugar rose and then fell across the morning.

After the four hours I had to eat two lunch cookies.  These were different from the breakfast ones and were blue!  Two hours later I had to use a finger prick test to put drops of blood onto a card.  Again they supply lancet thingies to prick the finger.  Ouch!  After allowing the car to dry, it goes in a little bag then inside another prepaid box.  I posted this and the poo box in a normal post box.  Again I got he blood sugar reading.  

The blood sugar readings are registered by your Zoe code so that the people at Zoe get them as well as you seeing them..  This si so that Zoe can analyse the results for you personal report.

That completed the compulsory day 1 exercises, but fro now on I can continue to monitor my blood sugar against my normal meals as I like.  By recording what and when I eat, the data goes into the programme.  

So for dinner I cooked up a coq au vin (my own recipe) with some mashed spuds and broccoli, recording the ingredients and amounts onto the app.  The app contains a vast database of the fats and sugars and wotnot of practically every food you can think of from individual ingredients to packaged food, ready meals and so on.  It took about 5 minutes to log the ingredients and I can save the whole recipe for future occasions.  Every couple of hours I looked at the blood sugar readings.

Then it was time to read through a few of the short lessons the app provides.  These tell you about carbs, sugars, fats and all that stuff.  The lessons are easy and interesting.

So that was day 1 folks.  Quite a busy one.  Reading forward there are some really intriguing experiments to try.  Stay tuned to see what they are.

If you have any questions, put them in the comments and I'll try to answer.