The Surprising Health Lesson Kylie Sakaida Learned While Writing a Cookbook

If Kylie Sakaida could do it over, she might've approached the cookbook writing process differently.

There was a months-long period when Sakaida — of @NutritionByKylie social media fame — was recipe testing for her book, "So Easy So Good," which is out April 8. During that time, she was spending all her time "holed up" in her apartment and admits she didn't do "a great job" of prioritizing self-care.

"It was truly leaning on other people during this time that helped get me through the really difficult, stressful, isolated process," she says, pausing to think about any other ways she carved out time for herself while writing the book. She chuckles: "If I were to do this again, I would have to reevaluate."

You likely recognize Sakaida from Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, where she has collectively more than 6 million followers. She aims to disrupt the nutrition space by offering healthy recipes that, at their core, are easy to make — and are sustainable to maintain, unlike restrictive fad diets that are so popular on FYP pages.

The publication of her cookbook also feels like the logical next step in cultivating a passion she's had since childhood. She's only talked briefly on social media about her experience with ARFID, or avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. But the challenging experience inspired her entire career. As she explains it, the disorder — which "centers around sensory sensitivities, fear of vomiting and choking, and is characterized by extreme pickiness even though it's much more complex than that" — led her to lose a lot of weight and become "extremely" malnourished and dehydrated in elementary school.

"I experienced this part of childhood where I lost my hunger cues, I no longer trusted my body, food became such a source of stress, and therefore social interactions involving food became stressful," she says. "And it got to the point where — I didn't realize it at the time — but my family was very concerned about my life and whether or not this would be something that we would get through."

Ultimately, a dietitian helped her turn it all around: "She helped me understand food and how important it was, and really helped food no longer have that power over me." And so, food became a source of joy. Sakaida even started a cooking club in high school.

These days, all of Sakaida's past experiences have shaped her into the registered dietitian she is — someone who works with each patient to create a sustainable and culturally congruent eating plan. Sakaida hails from Hawai'i, where food is so engrained in locals' way of life. When she moved to Boston for college, the biggest culture shock she had to deal with was food, and she was briefly convinced that there was "no room in my diet for my own cultural foods."

But when she started seeing patients in her dietetic internship, she realized they were from communities that also weren't properly represented in the healthcare system. "So I took the time to learn about their foods and cultural preferences, and I was like, why haven't I been doing that for myself?" she remembers.

That's why, on social media and in her book, she now shares recipes that encompass "all the flavors I've developed a taste for and also all the flavors I grew up on." And, importantly, she looks at it all from a nutritional standpoint; for example, in the book, she goes over the benefits of brown rice versus white rice (she loves the latter because it's such a staple in Asian and Hawaiian cuisine).

Balance is a throughline for Sakaida, and something she hopes to teach others when it comes to healthy eating. It's the only way that it can be sustainable, she says. Especially in a world in which fad diets and weight-loss medications reign supreme, Sakaida's message is to find healthy ways of living "that you feel like you could really keep up for the rest of your life."

"One food, one meal, won't make or break your progress for your health, so I don't think it's helpful to stress about eating 'perfect' all the time or completely cutting out a certain food for the rest of your life, because at the end of the day, it's about small consistent choices over time, and I think that healthy eating is all about making choices that work for you long term," she says.

For her, that means continuing to enjoy the foods she grew up on — like lau lau and spam musubi — as well as creating recipes like her blackened fish taco bowl, which has become a frequent go-to in the busy rush of her life.

Ultimately, the book is for people like her — who, whether they're holed up in their apartments recipe-testing 24/7 or not, struggle to prioritize self-care. "Sometimes there's barely enough time to unwind and focus on ourselves," she says. "I'm hoping that people will love the book and that it will be helpful, as someone who's also overwhelmed and tired and busy."

Lena Felton (she/her) is a senior content director at PS, where she oversees feature stories, special projects, and identity content. Previously, she was an editor at The Washington Post, where she led a team covering issues of gender and identity. She has been working in journalism since 2017, during which time her focus has been feature writing and editing and elevating historically underrepresented voices. Lena has worked for The Atlantic, InStyle, So It Goes, and more.