Gut instinct

Why it really helps to know your sh*t and get matey with your microbes. What it's been like getting into gut health and joining the Zoe programme. Bon appetit

Food of the gods?

If we are what we eat, then until recently, I would have been a steaming hot plate of lovely fluffy, buttery mashed potato topped with cheese. Or crunchy roast potatoes. Or big fat, triple-cooked chips.

I loved potatoes so much, that had I been a guest on Desert Island Discs, my luxury item would have been an endless supply of potatoes in all forms. But weirdly, since I started getting into gut health all that’s changed and these days I’d be more likely to ask for my bed.  

I never thought I’d say this but I no longer crave mash and yet I once thought it was the food of the gods. My microbes and taste buds have clearly changed and I realised why last summer, when I finally managed to get on the Zoe programme. 

It was one of those Road to Damascus moments which confirmed everything I instinctively felt about food and health - that it’s personal.

How it all started

I’ve always been fascinated by biology, health and human behaviour and realised, like most of us, that until we get older or things start going wrong, we tend to take our health for granted. 

If you’re lucky and blessed with boundless energy, it’s all too easy to ignore the warning signs of prolonged and devastating stress.  For me, a single mother of three working nightshifts in the BBC newsroom, I was like a Duracell Bunny who kept on going. I needed the money so felt I didn’t have a choice. It was all work and no play.

At night when everyone else was safely tucked up in their beds, we worked a 12 hour shift pausing briefly to eat frankly terrible canteen food or some carb-laden something from ‘The Filling Station’: a snack bar known to all at the BBC, affectionately but with a certain dread, as ‘The Killing Station.’

Do you want beans with that? Pic by Callum May via @KillingStation on Twitter

My body had been trying to warn me that something was wrong but I put up, shut up and kept on soldiering on until the cracks started to show. Aside from being perpetually exhausted by nightshifts, my guts started to complain.

My bowels weren’t just irritable, they were fucking furious. And that could be acutely painful so I knew what stress felt like, but now my body decided to show me what it looked like. 

I developed unsightly ‘splodges’ on my elbows and ankles which for years I was told must be ringworm or something that needed industrial quantities of drugs and creams. But it wasn’t.  A biopsy finally diagnosed an auto-immune condition called Granuloma Annulare which affects tens of thousands - mostly women - each desperately looking for a miracle cure but there isn’t one. And for most of us, it doesn’t go away quickly, if at all.

So, my insides hurt, my outsides looked like hell and as if that wasn’t warning enough, half my hair fell out. Great big clumps of it.  Nice.

I finally realised I needed to make radical changes to my work/life balance and to prioritise my health before it was too late.

The first step was to remove the source of the stress, so I left the BBC and set myself up as a social media consultant and trainer.  Now I could work when, and for whom, I wanted. No more Killing Station. I finally had a life and time to walk, talk and indulge my passion for cookbooks and courses.  

In 2011 a birthday weekend to Grayshott Hall, a former health spa well known for its acclaimed gut health programme, was the key to a whole new way of being. This was the start of my journey.

I heard the story of Deliciously Ella eating her way back to health and thought maybe I could do that too.  

I started devouring all the books I could find on gut health and healthy ageing (see list below)

I followed nutritionists and dieticians on Instagram (see below)

I started taking Symprove, a liquid probiotic, and even went to see the founder to learn more about it. I heard about people whose lives were transformed by taking it, and within weeks could feel a transformation in my own guts. I felt better. Much better and strangely lighter of spirit.  My mood lifted.

I went on fermenting courses and learned to make my own kefir and kombucha, sometimes with explosive results.

Home made water kefir. Beware the blueberry version. Most of that ended up all over the kitchen after bubbling rather too enthusiasically

Slowly my ‘splodges’ started to disappear. Today they’ve almost all gone, just one small patch on my right ankle and I swear it was the attention to healing the gut that helped.

So, when I first read about the Zoe project before lockdown I couldn’t wait to get on it.  

Professor Tim Spector’s research with identical twins showed that even though there were genetically identical, their microbiomes were totally different. This could explain why one twin might, for example, carry more weight than another, or one got cancer and the other didn’t. He realised he was onto something. Personalised nutrition had to be the way forward because each of us is unique and we all react differently to different foods. 

The brilliant thing with Zoe is that absolutely nothing is off the menu.  You could eat what you like but don’t because you can see what the impact is. This empowers you to make healthier choices.  For life.   So personally speaking, sugars and starches make me feel like crap with huge glucose spikes, but amazingly cheese and wine are ok. Thank god.

The overall aim is to eat a much more diverse range of fruits and vegetables - 30 different types a week - which sounds a lot but is amazingly easy because coffee, nuts, herbs and spices all count.   You learn what works for you and eat accordingly.  I’m no longer permanently hungry, I don’t have to sleep in the afternoons, I’m more inventive in the kitchen and have more energy. 

So I guess the lesson from this post is:  if we are what we eat and we eat shit, then it’s no wonder we feel like it. But since I’ve made it my business to know my shit - quite literally - and eat gut friendly foods I feel so much better. Inside and out.

Me and my microbes are smiling.

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How Zoe works

After getting on the programme - which can take a while - you start with an at home test which involves attaching a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) to your arm for two weeks. This provides real-time data on your blood sugar responses and you can see these on your phone.   

Meanwhile you have the unenviable task of harvesting a poo sample and posting that off for analysis of your gut microbiome. This goes off together with a finger prick-test to check your blood fats.

Next you have to eat some specially-formulated muffins to monitor your response to sugars and fats. This might sound like fun but it’s actually the most challenging part of the tests, they were pretty revolting.  Meanwhile your CGM monitors your responses to the muffins and compares them to the tens of thousands of others who’ve taken the test.

Six weeks later you get a report identifying your unique blood sugar and fat responses and the health - or not - of your guts.  It also clearly shows which foods are best suited to you and which are likely to cause issues with sugars or fats.  Every day you log into the app and record what you eat and you’re given a score - the higher the score the better. 

Sign up for the UK waitlist

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Food for thought

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