Blue Monday

Blue Monday 💙

Test day with ZOE and the famous blue cookies. 

Testing day helps you to discover how your body responds to food with comprehensive at-home tests. First up are the white breakfast cookies containing white chocolate, as well as other essential ingredients and nutrients designed by scientists to test biological responses. The cookies challenge your metabolism with high doses of fat and sugar over 6 hours. The breakfast cookies are actually delicious, the problem I found was with the quantity, to eat two was quite hard going and you need plenty of water 💧

After fasting for four hours, you are then treated to the blue ‘lunch’ cookies, and again, there are two of these to eat within 20 minutes. These contain a blend of flour, including chickpea as well as brown sugar and the blue colour, which is to help track your gut transition. I found the blue cookies hard going, but that is because they are quite ‘claggy’ and stick to your mouth a fair bit, again, you’ll need to wash these down with lots of water.  Once eaten, it’s another fasting period, this time for two hours and then your blood test 🩸

Like a lot of people, I was a little worried about the blood test, I was expecting a finger-prick, but you actually collect a decent sample of blood for sending off and testing. The kit looks quite completed, but the in-App videos are a great guide and make the process simple – and it really doesn’t hurt, I didn’t feel a thing.  Blood collected you bag it up and pop it in a pre-paid box ready for posting the SAME day 📦

The gut health test should be done the same day if possible once you have a bowel movement and again, the collecting kit is very simple and hygienic. Once you have collected the sample, you also pop this in a bag and a separate pre-paid box and send this off to the lab.  All tests done, you can eat normally for the rest of the day. 

My test results should be ready in approximately 6 weeks and these will tell me my dietary inflammation profile, food scores, personalised food insights and details about the microbes from my gut health sample. 

Now, I start logging food/drink and scan my responses … so the testing and learning continues.