Most people know that if they want to feel and look their best, eating a healthy diet is important. But even a quick online search will show you endless conflicting information on what it means to lead a healthy lifestyle. For Sam Cutler, the path to true wellness was a multi-year journey. Now, through her app called MINDFULL, she’s sharing that path with the world.
Sam Cutler Mindfull
The MINDFULL approach to wellness is informed by both Sam’s personal background and her education in lifestyle medicine. In her early 20s, Sam struggled with fatigue, stubborn acne, food stress, and inflammation so significant that they led to stomach ulcers, damaged hair and nails, and anxiety. She started paying close attention to the foods that made her feel her best, and she found the answer in whole foods that limited inflammatory ingredients like gluten and dairy.
“I dove deep into eating whole foods 80% of the time,” she says. “I saw things open up for me in a way that I had never really experienced. I had lower brain fog, more clarity, more energy, and improved skin texture.”
There’s a significant body of research supporting her approach. Eating a diet rich in whole foods can help you lead a longer, healthier life — it lowers cancer risk, improves arthritis symptoms, enables you to get better sleep, and boosts low mood levels. It can even prevent or manage some forms of chronic disease.
Sam didn’t stop there. “I ended up doing a nutrition meal planning program at Harvard Medical School,” she says. “It was rooted in the foundation of lifestyle medicine, which is a newer concept. Lifestyle medicine is the idea that our lifestyle habits are used as medicine — as the first line of defense. It’s what we eat, how we sleep, how we manage stress, and all our daily habits.”
Sam created MINDFULL as a lifestyle program — not another diet. “MINDFULL is an app aimed toward women exploring how food makes them feel,” she says. “You need to learn what feeling good means for yourself because that baseline is different for every individual. MINDFULL is this combination of lifestyle, mindset, and nutrition, which empowers you to make choices for your own needs.”
For many people, eating a healthy, balanced diet while leading a busy life is difficult. When creating MINDFULL, Sam took that into account — the app makes healthy eating fast and easy. “It's all simple, clean ingredients,” Sam says. “Many of our recipes are less than five ingredients. We also have quick and easy no-cooking recipes, advise on ingredients for meal prep, and focus on simplifying your life.”
MINDFULL shows clients how they can make whole-body wellness a part of everyday life. So it’s only fitting that members can learn from Sam and each other in real time.
“A key component of the app is our community,” Sam says. “Leaning on other women who are feeling the same or going through similar experiences. Whether you’ve already healed your body or you’re just starting to change your life, you have the power to inspire others.”
In a saturated industry, MINDFULL stands out. Unlike many wellness programs, it recognizes that there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to health. “Nutrition doesn't have to be a calculated experience of measuring, tracking, and restricting,” Sam says. “It can be about learning and listening to your body. Ultimately, we all have different approaches, but my belief is that the only true way to find sustainable health is by intimately learning our own bodies.”
MINDFULL highlights the importance of understanding your own biodiversity — and for the wellness industry, that’s a beautiful thing.