Best-selling fitness author Alexandra Heminsley lost a stone in six week on the Zoe diet

When my package arrived from Zoe Nutrition, it felt — and looked — like something from a fancy cosmetics range, or perhaps the hottest handbag of the season, straight from Selfridges. 

The expensive-looking butter-yellow box was delivered by courier, discreetly embossed with chic Zoe logos. But inside there was no pricey mascara or posh arm candy, rather small bundles of medical equipment: a lancet for testing my blood, a continuous blood glucose monitor to slap on the back of my arm and a small sling for the loo seat (yes, really) to help me collect a stool sample of my own. 

But I couldn’t have been more excited! And I’m not alone, because this particular parcel has a 221,000-strong waiting list. I’d spent the best part of the year edging to the top of the queue, and now it was finally my turn to enrol in the Zoe nutrition programme. 

Pioneered by Tim Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London, the programme is part-diet, part-health programme and partnutritional science study. 

I first came across Tim in the context of the Zoe Health Study, looking at an app downloaded by more than three million of us during the pandemic, tracking Covid-19 symptoms and enabling epidemiological results to be calculated. 

When I realised that the groundbreaking nutritional research of his…