Testing my Overall Health with Forth With Life Health Testing

*This post may contain affiliate links* or products that have been sent to me for review. You can find out more in my Privacy and Cookie Policy*

Disclaimer: I was given a product/service in return for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own and not influenced by the company in anyway.

As a family we are all interested in our health and well-being. I became really interested in diet and fitness around 5 years ago and have written a lot about the short term and long term benefits of changing diet and lifestyle on your overall health. Mario is very into his fitness and diet is a keen runner and cyclist. Since I had Lottie, I have been a bit lax with the whole working out thing but I’m currently in the gym 4 mornings a week so we will see! When I saw that Forth With Life were looking for bloggers to try out their health testing kits, both of us were really interested in learning more about our overall health.

Forth have created a range of useful finger prick home testing kits which give really good indicators and markers about your overall and specific health. We had the opportunity to try out their Baseline test which includes the testing of a host of markers including those we associate with our energy levels. With me being currently pregnant and Mario really interested in how his lifestyle and diet changes are impacting his overall health, we agreed that he would take the test and get the results in.

Ordering your kit:

The ordering process for the kit is really simple, you just input a few details into the online dashboard which can be updated and further personalised at any time, and then we were sent the Baseline testing kit out within a few days. I have to admit when you first open the kit up; it looks very clinical and a bit scary! Once we got everything out, we knew it wasn’t half as bad as it first looked but the blood collection tube did look quite big!

Drawing blood:

The actual process of drawing blood is fairly straight forward. You are sent enough to prick 3 fingers to draw blood from. Mario really struggled to get enough blood out and the pressure of getting into a small tube, he found really tricky so we quickly decided I would instead give it a go. I was able to draw blood fairly easily however it was fiddly to get the blood into the tube without contaminating the blood or the tube. I think the instructions for physically pricking your finger for this process could be better as I used the pads of my finger without knowing or realising that I should have actually pricked the sides of my fingers so even now a few days on, they are a little sore! This was my error however and nothing to do with the kit itself. Once you have collected enough blood (3 fingers were enough to fill the tube), you just seal everything up and send it straight back to Forth that same day.

Your results:

I eagerly awaited the results and was really surprised and excited when I got an email to say my results were in the very next day! No waiting around needed! On your dashboard you can view all of your results in a really simple and quick way. You get an overall result visually for each of the main categories; blood, cardiovascular, kidney, liver, metabolic, muscle, and vitamins & minerals. Then you can click on each category to reveal each bio-marker in more detail. This is where the Baseline kit comes into its own; with really useful results you can get more detailed information on each of the bio-markers and the reasons why they are important. You get a score to show whether you are within the normal range for each bio-marker and if you aren’t, how far away you are from the normal range. You can then use the results to show your GP or in order to make small lifestyle or diet changes and retest yourself again in a few months to see the impact.

The Forth With Life Baseline test is subscription based and is sent out at 3, 4 or 6 month intervals for £59 a kit. This can be paused or cancelled at any time but is a really useful way to see how the small changes to diet and lifestyle you make, can impact your overall health. The tests are fast, accurate and very convenient. You don’t need to even leave the house and the results are extremely useful. Not only can you monitor your overall health, it enables you to take any action that you may need to, to improve your health. It is also a great starting point to see any potential problems with your health and gives you the opportunity to do something about them before any health conditions may arise. We will definitely be keeping our subscription to Forth and I’m really interested in how my body copes with this second pregnancy and the impact birth has had on my overall health.