Alice Dunbar

To be honest, I think my journey to becoming ‘wedding ready’ as a bridesmaid began way before any of the couples even got engaged, let alone asked me to be in the wedding party! Basically, back in 2018, I decided to ditch diet culture for good after two years on the Slimming World plan as it completely ruined my relationship with food. I’d lost weight, but I wasn’t happy – in fact, I was more anxious and depressed than I’d ever been, and I knew something needed to change.

I. INTRODUCTION The microbiota of an individual's gastrointestinal tract, comprising microbes, their genes, and their functional traits, is fundamental to host digestion (McWhorter, Caviedes-Vidal & Karasov, 2009), detoxification (Kohl et al., 2016), development (Parfrey, Moreau & Russell, 2018), immune function (Broom & Kogut, 2018), protection from pathogenic bacteria (Roggenbuck et al., 2014; Mendoza et al., 2017), and cognitive performance (Davidson, Raulo & Knowles, 2020a).