What is Healthy? One youth's journey (part 2)

Part 2 of a blog post by Melissa Walters, Nourish high school Co-op student

Cook once eat twice, this is Kayla’s favourite food quote! To me this means when you cook dinner, make more than you think you will need and save the rest for lunch the next day. Kayla is a Registered Dietitian and she has been working with Nourish Nova Scotia for 10 months. I interviewed Kayla for advice and to help me discover the answers everyone wants to know. A few of the questions I asked include: are you healthy, why and what makes someone healthy?

Kayla sees herself as healthy; she eats whole foods and has a healthy relationship with food. Kayla believes one part of being healthy is having a healthy relationship with food. For example, if you were to go to a birthday party and you were offered a piece of cake and you ate it, would you feel guilty or stress from eating something that wasn’t classified as healthy? Having a healthy relationship with food means that if you eat a piece of cake while you are trying to eat healthier, you don’t feel bad about yourself. You are allowed to eat a treat every once and awhile and you shouldn’t feel bad for eating certain foods. Having a healthy relationship means you feel good with what you’re putting in your body.

I also asked Kayla for advice on time, health and meal preparations. As a student who works and participates in many extra curricular activities, it can be challenging to find enough time to put together a nutritionally balanced lunch for school. So I asked Kayla what are some ways I could make my food options more nutritionally balanced.  She suggested from personal experience that I could make time on Sunday afternoon and put together little snacks and healthy goodies for the week ahead. I found some really yummy recipes on the Nourish Nova Scotia website that I plan on trying out for myself. Some recipes I want to try are, overnight oats, green monster smoothie and the banana oat pancakes. Thank you Kayla for the suggestion. I can’t wait to try out all of this amazing advice and see how I can incorporate it into my everyday life.  

Stay tuned for part three and discover what being truly healthy means to me!