KK&F is 1!

For one year now, you’ve been inviting me into your kitchens and onto your Instagram feeds. 365 days later, I think it’s time we expand our relationship further. Introducing, kaylaskitchandfix.com!

Currently

I am a 27 year old Ohio-native magazine designer/art director living in Chicago, IL navigating through the ever-growing wellness scene here as well as everyday life.

I started my wellness Instagram account, @kaylaskitchandfix, at the beginning of 2019, but my wellness journey started waaay before that. My path to get to where I am today is messy and not something I open up about often (especially online, hello new territory!), but I feel it is necessary to share my story with you all so that you can fully understand my passion for health and wellness and how it has grown into what it is today.

Let’s go back to high school

My junior year of HS is when my struggle with disordered eating started. I remember crying on an exercise bike after eating an orange (!!!) and working out for hours after going out to dinner with my friends, when I would actually allow myself to go in the first place. I spent all my time thinking about my body and how I could restrict my calories further and further to the point I was hardly allowing myself any at all. Every so often I would binge and do everything I could to reverse that calorie intake. I’m not going to get into all of the details, but my mindset and the way I treated myself mentally and physically was rough.

Back then, I had no idea how my eating habits, or lack thereof, 9 years ago would affect my life every day moving forward. I was so malnourished that I was recommended for a hormone specialist that told me I was heading towards the path of diabetes and PCOS. That’s when it clicked for me that I had to fix this. From there, I started seeing a holistic medicine doctor that educated me on balanced diet principles and later, food allergies. She tested my allergies and found, cue the biggest game changer in my wellness path, that I was allergic to gluten (among other things). Keep in mind, this was right before I left for my freshman year of college and had just gone to Costco to stock up on allllll the oatmeal for my dorm.

At this point in my life, I knew I wanted to get to a healthier place, but I did not take action through my diet. I lived in a small college town for four years where I lived off of either french fries and vodka Sprites or nothing at all. I definitely restricted my calories less, but every so often, I would slip back into that place. I didn’t know how to cook, and I didn’t prioritize learning because I kept myself super busy with friends, school, work and clubs. It was a great experience, but I wish I would have thought about how my diet might be affecting me. It wasn’t until after I graduated that I started learning to cook and paid attention to what I was eating.

While my allergies have been a learning experience, I would never say I “struggle” from them. Instead, they have pushed me to learn to read food labels, experiment with foods that work for my body, teach myself to cook healthfully without gagging (my old norm, to be honest) as well as cook those once “forbidden” foods with healthier ingredients (not to say that I don’t allow myself to eat those unhealthy versions of my favorite foods in between). People often gawk at my allergy list and respond with comments along the lines of “that sucks,” but to be honest, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Flash Forward

While I can’t imagine what it would be like to still be in that place that I used to be in, it’s also not something that just goes away. It has taken so much time and effort to stop those unhealthy thoughts and habits, and it’s honestly something I still work on every single day.

My wellness path has grown past just the healthy food scene and into a lifestyle. I now view exercising as a luxury, not a punishment, and have been working on completely switching over to a nontoxic lifestyle. Obviously it’s not cheap, so I have been taking my time and not beating myself up over the hiccups.

My message that I want to give to you all is that in order for it to be attainable, wellness is not always perfect. One size does not fit all and we all need to find the balance of what works for us with our lives. It’s taken me a long time to learn this, and I still have to stop and remind myself, but one of my main goals in helping myself is hoping to help others like me in the process. If I’ve learned anything from the wellness community on social media, it’s that we have all struggled with some type of body image and food relationship issues. It feels good to be there for each other, even through a screen. That might be millennial of me to say, but if this helps even one person to know they aren’t alone, then this is all worth it to me.

While I would obviously NEVER wish my past struggles on anyone, I am so grateful for where I am today because of them. I knew back then that recovery would take serious work, but I never could have imagined how that work would turn to passion and change my life for the better.