How I lost 17lbs and supercharged my energy levels at 54, by ELEANOR MILLS… and no, I’m NOT taking Ozempic

In the brave new world of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, here’s a radical thought: I’m a midlife woman who doesn’t want to lose weight.

At the age of 54, I’ve made peace with the odd bulge, the odd ripple of flesh. I’ve had two kids and I love eating, particularly pasta. I embrace the feeling of being solidly planted on the earth – stout – rather than reed-thin and fragile.

I don’t want to lose anything. What I want – no, what I need – is more energy.

Assailed on all sides by big life changes – teenage children leaving home, elderly parents needing care, a major career reinvention – we midlife women (though I prefer the term ‘Queenager’) need all the oomph we can get. And yet it’s also at this point that our menopausal metabolisms can slow us down.

Earlier this year I realised I was running on fumes. I own and run two businesses and was just about to publish a book. My youngest daughter was flying the nest, but only to university, and my wonderful mother-in-law’s health was in steep decline.

My own wasn’t that brilliant either. I’ve always had boundless energy but I was feeling tired all the time, my ankles were puffy and some days I had to drag myself up to bed.

To keep the balls in the air, and to support everyone else, what I needed was an energy reset.

At the age of 54, I’ve made peace with the odd bulge, the odd ripple of flesh. I don’t want to lose anything. What I want I need is more energy, writes Eleanor Mills

You’ll have heard of the Zoe app – the high-tech health plan that uses clinical-grade blood sugar, blood fat and gut health tests, performed at home, to create the optimum diet for each user.

Created by scientists at King’s College London, it issues advice based on the user’s ‘unique biology’ and promises to improve long-term health through a series of small, smart dietary changes.

Zoe, it’s claimed, is a kind of magic key – by telling you more about your body and how it reacts to different foods, you get to unlock reserves of good health and energy you might never otherwise have discovered.

Now a re-booted version of the original – Zoe 2.0 – reckons it creates this personalised eating plan even more efficiently.

At what feels like a crossroads in my life, but with just as much on my plate as ever, could Zoe give me the energy boost I desperately need?

The starter kit arrives in luminous, voluminous yellow boxes. My husband looks at me suspiciously. ‘What have you been buying?’ he asks. And one early caveat is that ‘doing Zoe’ doesn’t come cheap. The package I choose costs £799 for a year plus £24.99 per month for an app subscription.

Perhaps this is why it takes me a while to get started. Ironically given Zoe’s promises around energy, I keep putting it off because I am just too stressed and knackered.

What’s more, the app is really insistent about the initial testing process requiring a whole free day, and for lots of us that’s hard to find.

When I do, I have to rope in my husband to help – installing the blood sugar sensor under the skin (a milk bottle top-sized disc which you hide under a yellow Zoe plaster) is definitely a two-person job. Ouch.

Next, I have to eat a huge, sugary white cookie for breakfast, and then another vivid blue one exactly three hours later for lunch. (TMI: It’s blue because you’re also timing how long it takes to come out the other end). I’m not allowed anything with it but water or black coffee. This bit is compulsory, and used to measure how fast and effectively your body processes all that yucky fat and sugar. Predictably, my blood sugar shoots through the roof (though interestingly it’s still within the ‘normal’ range for FreeLibre, the second app you have to install and the one used by Type 1 diabetics to keep their sugar levels normal).

Zoe issues advice based on the user’s ‘unique biology’ and promises to improve long-term health through a series of small, smart dietary changes

You also have to collect blood and several stool samples. I’m not squeamish on either count, but by now I’ve gone off to work, so have to jab my own arm for the blood, using my make-up mirror held in the other hand to see what I’m doing. My best advice here: make sure you’ve got Sellotape on hand – the trickiest bit of test day was getting all the samples into the requisite bags and sealing up the cardboard boxes.

Dear reader, at this point I definitely wasn’t ‘Feeling better living the ZOE way!’ as all their marketing claims. It was a painful faff – as is the logging of every meal I must now do via the app.

And yet quickly I get my first proper ‘wow’ moment. The spaghetti bolognese I eat for supper at 9pm that night has a much worse effect on my blood sugar than the cookies. For me, with my particular metabolism, white pasta eaten late-ish is a disaster. Damn.

And yes, Zoe also shows that when we eat is as important as what – and how necessary it is to leave 14 hours between supper and breakfast, if possible, to give the body a break. Large blood sugar spikes are bad for all sorts of reasons, but have a particular impact on heart health and the risk of diabetes. On the plus side, my other big lesson from the sensor was how much swimming outdoors in cold water (which I do every day) makes my blood sugar plunge.

Not long into my Zoe experiment, I go to a conference in Belfast and encounter my first major problem.

The Zoe App hates bacon (based on your at-home tests you get personalised food scores, where 0 is positively damaging and 100 the best it can be: for me bacon scores 0, mushrooms 100, avocados 96 and so on). It also hates white bread, and since bacon and toast are essential components of the Northern Irish hotel breakfast, I am a bit stuffed. I load up on the saintly mushrooms instead.

Ironically, the white bread might have been better with the bacon on it. Zoe really hates what it calls ‘naked carbs’, which is carbohydrate eaten without fibre or protein. The app makes you experiment, first eating a rice cake on its own and then with peanut butter, for example (the latter is much better for you because the protein and fat lessens that blood sugar spike and then crash).

But there is good news too: when I take a brisk walk, my blood sugar swiftly lowers, even after eating sticky toffee pudding. Maybe my granny – who insisted on a constitutional after Sunday lunch – was on to something.

I can’t say I’m feeling much more energetic, however.. until my personalised eating plan arrives. It takes the Zoe scientists four weeks to work out this bespoke diet from your blood tests, stool sample and blood fat levels, plus the feedback from your sensor and your meal data.

But at this point, I get a shock. The Zoe report card says my blood sugar control is ‘poor’ (scoring 33 out of 100 even though I stayed within the diabetic ‘normal range’) and my blood fat control is ‘bad’ (10 – eek. Although they later say this is because I moved around too much on the test day). The score for my microbiome – the range and variety of good bacteria in my gut – is a satisfying ‘good’ at 70, which I attribute to the wide range of fruit and veg I eat. Yet my overall diet is ‘poor’ with a score of only 45. I am horrified by that – I thought I ate well.

And this is ‘wow’ moment number two, for the Zoe process not only shows me how poor my diet is, but how wrong I’ve got the very notion of what constitutes a good and healthy diet.

It is also, to be honest, a little crushing.

For instance, a good score for a meal on Zoe is more than 70. Something like a lunch of homemade hummus (a can of chick peas whizzed with a spoonful of tahini, half a lemon and garlic) with carrot sticks, cucumber sticks, red pepper and radishes gives a score of 96. Excellent. But if you add in even a small slice of wholemeal bread, the score plummets to below 60. In other words, you have to eat really healthily all the time to make the grade.

I think I’m eating the classic good-for-you ‘Mediterranean diet’ because I eat up to 30 portions of fruit and veg a week. But I’m not. The fact is my diet, although it has lots of fibre, contains far too much white carbohydrate – bread, pasta, rice – and unhealthy fat (butter, cheese, cream, fried things, biscuits).

One morning my husband goes out to get croissants from the local bakery, but they score a miserly three and mess up my tally for the whole day. Lesson: no croissants!

For me, the only way to make my biscuit and pastry intake ‘healthy’ is to have those things once in a blue moon. Literally, almost never.

Now I eat Fage Greek yogurt, almonds, raspberries, blueberries and a nectarine for breakfast. I feel more alert and far less hungry as the morning goes on

The Zoe App also gives personalised scores for what you should eat. I was told: more cherries, mushrooms, bean sprouts, red peppers, almonds and pistachios.

At its insistence, I also replace carbs with lentils, beans, chickpeas and other legumes and end up eating a portion with most meals. I discover that lashings of the delicious Zoe 30 seed mix improves the score of a dish like rye bread with scrambled eggs, so bread isn’t totally off the menu. I swap out pasta for occasional rice noodles and lots more vegetables and tofu. I eat more fish (I live with a family of vegetarians so don’t eat much meat anyway).

Breakfast is the biggest challenge. I used to kick off the day with porridge or a couple of slices of sourdough with butter and jam. But those choices make my Zoe App go berserk. My blood sugar soars higher after what I think is a healthy breakfast of porridge with sultanas and a bit of honey than it does on those pesky cookies (later, when I asked why, the Zoe doctor said there was ‘a high level of sugar in that meal’). I also learn from my personalised diet advice that eating white sourdough (nil points) with butter (nil points) and jam (nil points) first thing is about the worst thing I can do for my body.

So now I eat Fage Greek yogurt, almonds, raspberries, blueberries and a nectarine and black coffee for breakfast (score of 88).

And…it works. I feel more alert and far less hungry as the morning goes on because I am eating more protein (yogurt and nuts), plus my blood sugar is way more stable so I don’t find myself wandering into the kitchen for elevenses.

I also look at cheese differently now, which is a shame. Even a small cheddar cheese and tomato sandwich breaches my fat levels for the day, so now cheese is a rare treat (although a bit of parmesan is surprisingly allowed). Instead I eat more avocado and oily fish and I only cook with olive oil (never vegetable oils which are full of saturated fat).

I might not like all of these changes, but I do feel better.

And that I suppose is the point. The Zoe way is really exactly what any doctor or diet site will tell you to do, but what the app does is show you in real time what good actually looks like. Zoe forces us to think harder about what we are putting in our body – and if you obey and feel better, that direct correlation between food and health becomes crystal clear.

Is sacrificing a daily chunk of cheese or butter too big a price to pay? No. But my biggest gripe does relate to cost. Zoe wants me to eat dishes like wild salmon fillet, beluga lentils, spring greens and sesame oil (that lunch would score an excellent 81). It wants me to snack on nuts and seeds and berries. Which is all very well if you can afford it…

I do have more energy, and that’s a welcome result. It’s great to be back in my favourite clothes

A video on the App says chocolate is essentially bad unless it is ‘artisan’ or ‘craft’ chocolate made primarily of cocoa, not sugar. The kind that costs ten times more than a bar of Dairy Milk. Or take Fage Greek yoghurt. Zoe loves it because of its high protein content, but it’s twice as expensive as supermarket own-brand.

Zoe has its devotees, of course. Davina McCall is an ambassador for Zoe, and tells me it has ‘changed her life’. She loves being able to scan bar codes via the app and be told which is least bad for her, and I like this feature too.

I’ve always been partial for instance to a Pret chicken and parmesan salad, these days I eat the falafel one as its Zoe score is about three times better. These small changes really add up.

In the community of midlife women I founded – noon.org.uk – many of my members have tried Zoe. Some love it and credit it with solving their weight and menopausal health issues; others say it told them what they knew already. Quite a few said it was hard to cancel and others that they began well but relapsed into old patterns. Alcohol was the big bogeyman. It is basically sugar, so Zoe says ‘No’. One woman told me she uses the App but just doesn’t log her white wine habit…. Hmm.

As for me, I do have more energy, and that’s a welcome result. The purpose of my Zoe experiment wasn’t to lose weight and I never usually weigh myself – but for this piece I did step on the scales before and after five months. To my surprise I’d lost 17lbs and two inches off my waist – despite eating loads more nuts, olive oil and avocados which I’ve always viewed as ‘fattening’. It’s great to be back in my favourite clothes and I do feel much better- despite a hectic schedule, I’m feeling good.

So yes, Zoe works – but only if you follow it to the carb-denying letter.

• Eleanor Mills is the founder of noon.org.uk and the author of Much More to Come: Lessons on the Mayhem and Magnificence of Midlife published by HarperCollins

• Zoe.com – packages start at £299. Eleanor tried the annual package with all tests (£799 plus £25 a month)

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