Hydration & eating behaviour¶

Loaded by step 6 · Owns the drinking schedule and the table rules · Appears in every menu, verbatim

Two sections of the client menu come from this page: Drinking and At the table. They are the same in every menu, which is why they live here rather than being composed per client.

They are not filler. Most of what makes a portion-controlled menu tolerable — feeling full, digesting comfortably, not finishing a plate in six minutes — is here rather than in the portion counts.

Water¶

11–15 cups a day (roughly 2.5–3.5 L). Water, or green tea, or herbal tea.

Where to sit in the range:

Toward 15 with high training volume, hot weather, high fibre, or a constipation answer
Toward 11 with low activity and a small body size
Above 15 is not better and is not recommended

Read nut_water for the starting point. "Under 1 L" or "No idea" means the change is large, and it needs the same graduated approach as fibre — it will otherwise mean a week of getting up at night, and the client will stop.

The drinking schedule¶

This is the part clients find surprising, so the menu states it as a schedule rather than a principle.

When	What
On waking, before anything else	1–2 cups of water, on an empty stomach
20–30 minutes before each meal	2 cups
During the meal	Nothing, or a few sips at most
From ~1½ hours after the meal	Resume normally

The gap around meals is deliberate: drinking with food dilutes what the digestive system is doing and, in practice, is how a meal gets washed down rather than chewed. The morning glass is separate — it is rehydration after a night, and it comes well before the first meal, which does not arrive for another 90–120 minutes.

Caffeine¶

Read nut_caffeine and nut_caffeine_latest.

Not on waking. Coffee belongs after the first meal, not before it.
Nothing caffeinated after mid-afternoon where life_sleep_quality is 3 or below, or life_sleep_continuity shows broken sleep.
Where nut_beverage_sugar is "Yes", the sweetener rules in Food quality apply to coffee too.

The menu does not tell the client to quit caffeine. Where intake is high — more than four a day — it notes the interaction with sleep once and leaves it.

At the table¶

Eight rules, and they go in the menu as a list. They are the whole of what this menu says about how to eat.

Eat without screens. Attention on the food — its taste, its texture.
Put the fork down between bites. The single most effective one, and the easiest to check.
Chew thoroughly, and unhurried. Digestion starts in the mouth, and what is not done there is done less well further down.
Do not eat stressed. A meal eaten tense is digested badly. Better to wait five minutes than to eat in that state.
Eat slowly. Satiety signalling runs about twenty minutes behind the stomach. Eating faster than that means eating past full before knowing it.
Stop at about 80% full. Not stuffed, not still hungry — comfortable, and able to imagine eating more without wanting to.
Sit down. Standing at the counter is not a meal, and it does not register as one.
One meal at a time. No eating while cooking the next thing.

Where the client's answers say to go carefully

Rules 5, 6 and 8 touch on eating behaviour, and for some clients that is sensitive ground. Where nut_emotional_eating is "Often", or nut_disordered_history is "Prefer not to say", keep this list to rules 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7 — the mechanical ones — and drop the fullness and pace rules entirely. Where nut_disordered_history is "Yes", the menu is not being written at all; see Scope & limits.

Why these are not optional extras¶

Rules 2, 5 and 6 are the mechanism by which the portion counts actually work. A client eating at speed will finish the portioned plate and still feel hungry, conclude the portions are too small, and add to them. The same plate eaten slowly registers as enough. The arithmetic in steps 3 to 5 assumes this page is being followed; without it the menu is a calorie target being enforced by willpower, which is a different and much worse plan.