Hack #1: Learning About the "Zone" (Glycemic Index)

Little did I know when I started reading Barry Sears’ Zone Diet book back in the early 2000s, that it would teach me a way of eating that would make it easy for me to "hack" my body's insulin production and level out glucose levels more naturally, long before I had any idea that my health and well being might depend on it twenty years later.
     Sears' book appealed to me because I was feeling tired and having trouble concentrating at work in the afternoons, and found that a snack only slightly helped me get over the 3:30 hump. As Sears explains in his book, "food" to the brain is blocked temporarily when the stomach gets a meal full of carbs to digest and has to pump lots of insulin into the body. This made sense to me, because I was eating mostly bread, chips, fruit and only a couple thin slices of meat at lunch.
       Sears "prescription" to avoid this is to eat a better balance of protein / carbs / fat at every meal or snack to avoid the insulin rush. In particular, he talks about things like juice, corn, desserts and other foods with a high glycemic index that most affect these insulin spikes. This learning permanently altered what I would eat for breakfast for the next 25+ years, except on rare occasions that I decided to treat myself to sweet things.  
     This book taught me not only the idea of “macronutrients” and how to balance them by counting grams of carbs, proteins and fats in foods, but also made me more aware of "hidden" sugars in jars of pasta sauce, flavored yogurt, juices and other common "healthy" (processed) foods that could make me feel tired or sleepy if I ate or drank these foods by themselves instead of in balance with proteins and fats.
        His claim was that when we eat a balance of macronutrients, it optimizes brain energy metabolism by slowing down the body's production of insulin and glucose, which, when we eat a lot of carbs at once, can temporarily "block" metabolism of the type of energy the brain needs.