Your poop can tell you a lot of things, including it seems, what kind of diet is best for you to lose weight, according to a new study.

Poop is personal and shows what kind of bacteria are living in your gut. By determining your gut flora, researchers are beginning to learn why a high fiber diet isn’t always a universal guideline for weight loss.

Danish researchers found that when placed on a diet filled with lots of fiber, only some people lost weight. Others didn’t experience a change in weight, despite eating a healthier diet. This helped cement the theory that there’s no one size fits all approach to weight loss. Instead, diets need to be customized to individuals.

It might be tempting to send a stool sample off to a lab to find out what kind of diet plan would work best for the bacteria in your gut, but science hasn’t quite advanced to that degree yet.

Instead of studying your poop, you can try taking another studious approach if your current dieting efforts aren’t working out.

Weight loss often includes a total lifestyle approach, not just diet. So checking in with a nutritionist or dietician can help pinpoint the foods you are eating and what you might not be eating. Sleep and exercise also play a role in weight loss and should be included in your conversation.

If you’ve been eating a standard diet and aren’t losing weight, then increasing your fiber could help. But it might not. You have to also account for your age and gender and overall health when creating any diet plan because maybe you’re not working out correctly or sufficiently to meet your goals.

But when science does figure out how to test a bunch of poop to create unique diet plans, that sure will be interesting.

_{[Image via Shutterstock]}