You can start the Second Nature programme the day you sign up. All you’d need to do is take our health quiz so we can understand you better and your motivations for signing up; then, you’re set to start.
You download the app, meet your health coach online, and say hello to your group.
Second Nature has a £9.99 trial period for 14 days, where you can try the programme and see if it works for you. If not, you can cancel the programme at any time in these 14 days.
Afterwards, there are three subscription plan lengths for the non-medication programme:
For Second Nature’s Wegovy and Mounjaro weight-loss programmes, these start at £229 per month and are a monthly subscription.
When you sign up for Zoe, you join a waiting list (typically around 1-2 months wait as of March 2024), and when you do start, you spend six weeks tracking and weighing your food.
At the same time, you send Zoe a sample of your faeces, so they can measure the bacteria in your gut microbiome.
You also wear a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), which measures your physiological responses to food to produce a personalised report on what foods you should eat or limit.
After this initial 6-week period, you officially start the Zoe programme, where you can access your health coach and the educational materials to support your health journey.
This initial 6-weeks of tracking, weighing, and data collection also comes at a cost.
The ongoing Zoe subscription is £59.99 a month, but you get a discount if you pay for four or twelve months upfront. You also need to pay £299.99 for the test kits in the first 6-weeks.
You must pay for at least 1 month of membership, so the minimum commitment is £299.99 + £59.99 = £359.98
2) Tracking and weighing food
Second Nature
On Second Nature, you don’t track, weigh, or have a traffic light system to guide your food choices.
However, you can opt to use our food diary and journaling tool. This feature has been designed to teach you how to respond to different meals and foods.
From this information, you can learn what drives you to eat; how different foods make you feel in body and mind to inform future habits.
Research investigating the factors that determine weight loss maintenance has shown that tracking dietary intake, to some extent, can positively impact our ability to maintain weight loss in the long term.
On Second Nature, this doesn’t mean tracking calories or weighing your food.
You can enter your meal, take a picture, and then log how you feel alongside this meal to learn about your responses to the different foods, which can inform you about future decisions.
However, this isn’t a requirement. Some people will find it helpful, others won’t – and that’s entirely up to you.
Zoe
On Zoe, you need to weigh and track everything you eat, and this isn’t only during the first six weeks; it’s a requirement for the entire time you’re a member of Zoe.
Your meals are then analysed against your responses to those foods, and you receive a score at the end of the day on how well you did from 0-100.
This score is based on the foods Zoe’s determined to be good or bad for you based on your blood sugar, blood fat, and gut microbiome response to those foods.
These foods are colour coded from red (bad) to green (good). So, you’ll score highly if your meals are full of green foods. You’ll receive a low score if they’re full of red foods.
Does the use of a traffic light system pose a risk?
Overly obsessing over food and extreme attention to detail with dieting have been linked to the development of disordered eating patterns.
Interestingly, disordered eating patterns have also been linked to poorer diet quality (increased intake of ultra-processed foods) and weight gain.
Individuals susceptible to developing or having pre-existing patterns of disordered eating – or may have spent their entire lives yo-yo dieting where these behaviours are encouraged – may not respond positively to a traffic light system identifying foods as good or bad.
While the Zoe programme doesn’t specifically identify these foods as good or bad, given that our society has shaped us to identify green as ‘good’ and red as ‘bad’, it’s not a big jump to suggest some people may view it this way.
When we associate foods as good or bad, that often triggers an emotional response to consuming the food; when we eat foods that are ‘good’, we feel we’ve behaved well; when we eat foods we’ve identified as ‘bad’, we feel that we are a failure and become guilty and ashamed of our choices.
Key points:
- You don’t need to track or weigh any food with Second Nature.
- If you choose to, you can use our food diary and journal tool to learn how you feel and respond to different meals.
- Research has shown that tracking dietary habits in some shape or form can support weight loss maintenance in the long term.
- On the Zoe programme, you must weigh and track every food and meal.
- The Zoe app then produces a daily score based on your choices from 0-100. This score is based on your list of foods Zoe thinks you should eat or avoid.
- The app uses a traffic light system assigned to these foods to highlight what’s good or bad for you.
- Research has shown that extreme attention to detail with food and dieting can lead to disordered patterns of eating, which are linked to weight gain and lower dietary quality.
3) Flexibility with nutritional guidelines
Second Nature
Second Nature provides extensive nutritional guidelines based on the latest scientific evidence to support weight loss, manage blood sugar levels, and improve overall health and well-being.
The NHS has commissioned Second Nature since 2017, delivering programmes in weight management and type 2 diabetes.
Members of Second Nature lose on average 5.67kg/12.5lbs after three months. A recent paper published in the BMJ showed that people lost 6.2kg/13.6lbs on average after 12 months.
Members of Zoe lose an average of 4kg/9lbs after three months. Long-term data is yet to be published as it’s still a new programme.
This is lower than the average weight loss observed with Second Nature, but not all individuals joining Zoe are necessarily motivated by weight loss.
Depending on their preferences, cultural background, and goals, our nutritional guidelines are personalised using the support of the health coach and our nutrition toolbox.
The guidelines have flexibility; they merely act as a foundation for the individual to adapt to suit them with the support of a registered dietitian or nutritionist.
No foods are banned, and we don’t label foods as good or bad. Everything can be included as part of a healthy diet.
The most important part of the Second Nature programme is that people choose to eat a diet based on whole foods because they learn how it nourishes their body and mind.
But they can also indulge in desserts and sweets now and again if they want to.
Let’s say a birthday comes along, and you want to enjoy a piece of cake; go for it. There’s no judgement from us, and there’s no ranking system to tell you whether that was a good or bad choice.
If that’s what you’ve chosen to do, then it’s the right thing. People on the Second Nature programme learn to understand the balance of how different foods impact them and make them feel.
Zoe
On the Zoe programme, you effectively have the freedom to eat how you like. However, the programme’s goal is to score highly on your daily meals – so if you eat foods outside of what Zoe thinks you should be eating, your scores will decrease.
So, it depends on how you want to approach the Zoe programme. If you want to achieve high scores on your daily meals, you might feel relatively restricted in what you can eat.
If you’re happy having lower scores and higher flexibility, you might find it’s the right approach.
The Zoe nutritional recommendations are based almost entirely on your physiological responses to individual foods and meals.
It doesn’t consider your internal values, culture, preferences, or psychological relationship with food. Although, you can discuss these with your health coach.
Being told that those foods are bad or potentially unavailable to you could play into the ‘forbidden fruit’ effect.
Research has shown that when something is forbidden or unavailable, we crave it more.
The mechanisms of this are still being discovered, but it’s suggested that things made unavailable to us become entrenched in our memory more than what is available.
There’s also a theory known as the ‘white bear effect’, which suggests that the attempted suppression of thoughts (i.e., this food is bad, don’t think about that food) increases the accessibility of those thoughts in our mind. This effect sounds counterintuitive, but human psychology is complex.
So, if you actively try to avoid specific foods because the Zoe programme has given them a low score and colour-coded them red, you might consume them more.
Key points:
- Second Nature provides extensively-researched nutritional guidelines that have the flexibility to ensure the individual is eating in a way that aligns to their culture, values, and preferences.
- The Zoe programme recommends a diet based purely on your physiological responses to food without considering other elements, such as your values and psychology.
- The labelling of foods with high and low scores on Zoe might play into the forbidden fruit effect and lead to increased cravings for the foods the app recommends you avoid.
Take home message
We live in a paradoxical time where we have more options than ever to help us lose weight and achieve a healthy lifestyle. At the same time, obesity and chronic disease rates across the Western world continue to rise.
There’s a lot we don’t know about treating obesity and chronic disease, but we do know there’s not going to be a global solution for everyone.
Suppose you’re an individual who wants to learn about your physiological responses to food and commit time and energy to track and weigh your food to reach a level of dietary ‘perfection’ in tune with your body.
In that case, Zoe could be an option for you.
However, suppose you’ve spent most of your life jumping from one diet to the next, constantly being given strict rules about what you can and can’t eat, counting calories and weighing your food, and you feel you need something different.
In that case, Second Nature might be a better solution.
