From Chronic Health Issues To Founder Of Nutrition App MINDFULL: Sam Cutler’s Journey To Feeling Good

Photo Credit: Sam Cutler

Are you dealing with a lack of energy? Dull skin? A general sense that something is off? You aren’t the only one. Like many young women, Sam Cutler once battled with these issues. That struggle set her off on a journey of self-discovery that ultimately led her to develop MINDFULL™, a health coaching and meal planning app that’s helped over 2,500 women in the last seven months alone.

When she was a young adult, Sam struggled with chronic health issues: adult acne, inflammation, and lethargy. Like most other women who face such issues, she thought dieting might solve her problems. It sounds like a reasonable deduction, and thanks to a lack of education, it’s a common train of thought. But this faulty reasoning leads to a cycle of yo-yo dieting that doesn’t make you feel any better — and it was no different for Sam.

Sam began chronicling her journey on her now-popular wellness page, The Fit Fatale, which has since blossomed into a community of over 350,000 women globally. She also decided to take a step back and look at the big picture, tackling her health problems directly instead of attempting to treat her symptoms by unproductive dieting. “I decided to become a certified health coach,” she says, “not initially to coach — just to gain a better understanding of what was truly going on inside of me.”

But the biggest step in her journey didn’t come until she suffered a concussion that left her bedridden for three months. Anxious to take any step necessary to prevent long-term brain damage or other chronic health issues, Sam Cutler took a more holistic approach. She examined the connection between brain and gut health as she ate more foods that promoted healing. The result was something far greater than what she initially expected: Her change of focus helped with more than just her concussion.

“As I went through the process of looking at what I was actually eating, I noticed much of it included ingredients I couldn’t pronounce, often in packaged or modified forms. I slowly shifted into 80% whole foods,” she says. “And once I started to do that, I saw things open up for me in a way that I had never really experienced. I had less brain fog, more clarity, more energy, skin healing — all of this progress.” This was the missing key — the piece of the puzzle that keeps so many people from truly seeing long-term results in their health.

As she continued to heal, Sam dove deeper into lifestyle medicine, pairing her previously established degree in psychology and health coaching experience with the likes of the National Gut Health Conference and completing a nutrition meal planning program offered by Harvard Medical School. When she applied what she learned to her own life, Sam gradually started feeling better than she had in years. It was a long and hard-fought journey, but finally, armed with a combination of personal experience and health education, she began to receive thousands of requests from women all over the world, asking her to take them on as clients, provide one-on-one coaching, and create customized meal plans. It was then that she created MINDFULL.

MINDFULL offers video-based weekly meal plans (complete with grocery lists), a coaching and recipe library, monthly video Q&As with Sam, and access to a 24/7 community of women striving to improve their lives.

One of the central focuses of MINDFULL is what Sam calls “food freedom,” an approach that doesn’t involve precise measurement or counting calories. She encourages her clients to continually learn about their bodies and discover which foods work best for them.

“If you eat something that doesn’t feel good, you can view that now as learning about yourself — versus holding yourself in a place of guilt or fear,” she says.

Sam struggled for years before she was finally able to crack the code, completely transform her mindset, and break free from practices like unhealthy dieting to meet social norms. That’s why MINDFULL is so much more than a nutrition app — it’s a whole-body healing experience meant to share the years of wisdom that Sam had to learn the hard way. Through MINDFULL, she hopes to help other young women break free from traditional diet culture and discover a way of life that helps them look and feel their best.