"Perseverance and perspective until victory."
- Lincoln Diaz-Balart
You’ve conquered your first step: you put your Viome recommendations into action and you felt real changes in return. When you put in the work, you can often be surprised by the results – and that’s a beautiful thing.
So you might be thinking, what’s next to tackle? What more can you do? Feeling healthy and good is contagious and it can spark motivation to make bigger and bolder changes. Fortunately, there is always room for improvement. Your health is not constant line - but a wave, with peaks and drops in both motivation and discipline.
By now you know, making changes for better health takes time and is a lifelong effort. Your gut microbiome is constantly changing. When you retest, you build on the progress you’ve started and help us show you where to go next.
Through retesting, you will see how following your recommendations have transformed your gut microbiome and then you can get new recommendations to reflect the current state of your gut. This new insight can help you improve your gut even further. Even if you are already feeling great after your first round of Viome recommendations, a retest can help ride the wave and work with your microbiome as it changes.
Your gut microbiome shifts based on many factors and what you feed it is a huge contributor to its changes. The best way to track your results is to:
Stick to your recommendations
Keep a close watch on your symptoms
Track any changes you notice
Don’t beat yourself up when you slip, pick yourself back up and keep going!
It’s so important to not only follow your Viome recommendations but to check in when you need to with a retest. With each retest, you build momentum towards a better microbiome. Your gut microbiome is like a muscle that gets stronger, the more you work at it. Everyone starts in a different place and while for some it may take a few rounds to level things out - for others it’s different. We have customers who prefer to check in every four months and others who check in twice a year. You are your own best baseline so your testing schedule is up to you.
In a Viome study, we followed participants for three weeks as they tracked what they would typically eat. We sampled them initially and again three weeks later, we were able to distinguish each participant’s identity based on their core microbial community. Pretty cool, huh?
Overall, your gut microbiome is very malleable and changes to reflect what it is being fed. So feed it the right stuff.
Even if you haven’t completely stuck to your Viome recommendations – don’t give up yet! Your gut microbiome and body rely on the food you consume to function optimally. They are the key to a better you.
You can make drastic changes through consistency over time, but we know that it can be difficult to channel that commitment alone. If you need motivation, check out our site to learn how Viome’s recommendations improved the lives of others – or find a friend to join you with Viome and build accountability to improve your health together! By buddying up, you might get more than just moral support, you might even watch your wellness and the wellness of your companion improve right before your eyes. Now that’s a way to get motivated!
When You Get a Viome Retest, You Are Leveling Up!
If you’ve been following your recommendations, retesting with an additional Viome kit gives you a chance to build upon your progress and see how things have changed.
Here are some instances when you should might consider another test with Viome:
1. If it’s been more than six months since your last test – Whether or not you followed your Viome recommendations (we hope you did!), your gut microbiome today isn’t the same as it was five, four, or even three months ago. There’s only one way to find out how it has been affected: it’s time for a retest!
2. If you took antibiotics – Sometimes taking antibiotics is necessary, but it wrecks your gut microbiome. When this happens, you should wait until you’ve completed your course and order a Viome retest. This gives your gut the best chance to restore diversity and richness after your bugs have experienced a major disruption.
3. If you’re trying to get pregnant or become pregnant – This is an exciting time, and your health should be of top priority. When you give birth, it is not only your genes that get passed onto your baby but your gut microbiome too. Your microbes begin to colonize your baby while still in the womb. After birth, they begin the development of their own gut microbiome. We already know that the organisms living in our digestive tract impact our health. If you start the transfer with an already established healthy gut microbiome, your dose of beneficial microbes to your newborn could be a great way to give them a healthy edge.
4. If you’ve traveled out of the country – Traveling out of the country exposes you to all sorts of new bacteria and viruses. While this could be great for your overall diversity, it could also introduce harmful or opportunistic organisms. These are microbes that usually are harmless, but if the conditions are right, can take advantage of a host, colonize your microbiome, and throw off the balance in your gut ecosystem. When you get your results, Viome’s recommendations can help you bring your microbiome back to baseline.
We’ve even had customers avoid traveler’s gastrointestinal issues, which is common when new microbes are introduced to the gut ecosystem while abroad.
5. If you’re under a lot of stress – Major life changes like divorce, death in the family, or job stress can cause dysbiosis in the gut. The effects of stress on your gut microbiome can prevent it from doing its job well, which can lead to a cascade of health problems!
Get ahead of the problem and retest with Viome during these tough times. We know that trying to eat healthy during difficult phases in your life might seem like a real challenge, but with Viome you’ll get specific food recommendations to fuel your gut microbiome which plays an extensive role in mediating your response to stress.
Get More Out of Your Microbes with Each Viome Retest
The best way to restore balance to your gut is to increase microbial diversity and richness of its microbiota. With each Viome retest, you build on the progress you’ve made and continue to shift the ecosystem in your gut for the better.
Viome’s revolutionary metatranscriptomic sequencing technology and Artificial Intelligence can give you insight into your gut microbiome. Your Viome results and recommendations will show you which foods are best for you and your gut microbiome, so you can take your health to the next level no matter where you are. It’s time to get back on the wave and ride it to wellness!
