one small change

Kailey Mann is a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach and the founder of Best Feeling Forever. She resides in Los Angeles, CA.

What was the last thing you ate?

Siete makes churro strips now and they are so good.

What is your favorite junk food?

My favorite category is chips, and my favorite chip is Torres Truffle potato chips. I would say that they are gourmet food, not junk food -laughs- but, if we’re going for something you could get at 7/11, I would say Classic Nacho Cheese Doritos. They are the peak snack food and everything should be measured up to them.

What’s your favorite health food?

I don’t really categorize foods like this but I’m a big smoothie person. I love all sorts of salads, fresh bread, most fruits, and vegetables. For a healthy snack, I think about packaged options, things that are really accessible. I think any Siete chip falls into that category.

I love this. Chips as a health food is a new take and I’m always looking for a diverse perspective -laughs-

What famous person would you love to sit down for a meal with?

Nora Ephron. There is no one like her and never will be. She is a woman who is extremely talented in so many ways, who also wrote about food.

What is your favorite environment to eat in?

Ideally, in a restaurant sitting at a table with people you love. You’re growing, you’re making new memories together. The food can enhance that but it doesn’t need to necessarily be life-changing, it’s more about the experience. If the food is life-changing, that full-sensory experience of eating together will help solidify the memory.             

Another favorite place, which is the exact opposite, and usually happens when you’re in LA, is in the car. I had a series called Riding in Cars with Snacks and I reviewed snacks while I was driving. I was doing it anyway, so I decided to start recording it -laughs-

What is your perspective on the arts of eating and cooking? 

As a health coach, I try to make cooking more approachable. I try to take out the intimidation factor and allow people to give themselves permission to make cooking easy. It’s overwhelming for busy women to even make time to eat, much less prepare food for themselves. Working with your natural inclinations and not trying to live up to a culinary standard is really important. There can be freedom to cooking, throwing random ingredients together, and saying I made this for myself and I feel grounded.

I’d love to hear more about how you became a health coach

I started a blog in college called Snack Face which was all about food and my relationship with it. After I graduated from college, I worked in social media for over nine years and eventually reached a point of burnout. Instead of hiding behind a computer, I wanted to be able to help women one-on-one regarding the very topics I wrote about in my college blog. I went to IIN in 2020 for nutrition school and now I’m a national board-certified health and wellness coach.

I started my company bff to help women find their best feeling forever. It’s about being able to recognize that you have the tools and power to access your bff. Especially when you don’t feel great, those tools become even more important. 

Women will come to me wanting to learn how to find balance in their day, find a workout schedule that works for them, lose weight or gain weight, but that ends up being a really small part of what we end up focusing on. What’s underneath that are so many layers of habits, and belief systems. We spend a lot more time trying to understand those and replace them with more helpful ways of thinking. A large part of that has to do with food. 

I’ll use myself as an example. I had an eating disorder in my late teens and early twenties, and the way that I spoke, read, and felt about food was always centered around categorizing and relating it to what it would do to my body. Food was always a threat. What became extremely helpful in my recovery journey was changing my language around food, not categorizing food, and not thinking if eat this one thing, it’s going to do X to my body. 

I found such strength in seeing other women have great relationships with food, reading Nora Ephron, and Eat Pray Love which was actually life-changing for me. Reading about someone going to Italy and enjoying food seems silly now but it was a groundbreaking story because of how the media talked about women’s bodies. If you go back and look at magazine articles from that time it’s truly disgusting to see how female celebrities were treated and talked about.

I had to create new meaning for myself around food and learn to rely on myself. I had to figure out what feeling good and healthy meant to me. 

The foundation of my business will always be about helping and empowering women. My goal is to improve women’s relationship with food, their bodies, and themselves and help them learn how to prioritize themselves first and foremost.

Our healthcare system does not give people what they need. I think most women have some type of disordered eating and it’s because we’re pummeled with messages our whole life. At a certain point, you pause and realize that these messages are untrue.

I would argue that social media presents its own issues and challenges. It can make young women, in particular, think that they can just follow what someone else is eating or doing and that it’s going to work out for them. Then you’re left feeling confused and ashamed and wondering why it didn't work for you. It’s easier to try and trust something else other than yourself. Our healthcare is not health care—it’s sickness care, and it doesn’t help people feel empowered and in tune with their body or intuition. 

What role did food play in your household growing up?

I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. My mom is Canadian and an excellent cook. She made everything from scratch, and we had beautiful meals with plenty of vegetables, and always had fresh fruit on the table. 

When I got to junior high and had more freedom to eat what I wanted, my lunch usually consisted of Cooler Ranch Doritos, Nutty Buddy bars, Countrytime lemonade. That was really fun and I’m glad I had that experience.

When I was 14, my body started to change. I resisted it and I didn’t understand it fully. I was in cheerleading and dance and there was a lot of focus on my body and how I looked. I’m 5’10’’ and as a tall person, I felt out of place. When my body started to change, I felt like I can’t have curves and I think a part of that was that I was involved in modeling at a young age, as well. I got my measurements done and knew my weight. Unfortunately, I knew what the “proper measurements” were for a model. Once I wasn’t as active with cheer and dance, the summer before my senior year I had a physical coming up for the golf team. I decided that I would try to lose a few pounds before they weighed me. I don’t know exactly what drove me to do this, but I dieted and ran around the lake every day, and it was just enough, at the right time of my life, that I thought I could keep this going. For some people, it could be a little phase, but with my personality type, the way that I like to control situations and my body, it was the recipe for an eating disorder. I lost a significant amount of weight and had all of these tests done. Everyone was like why is Kailey losing weight? I had my blood drawn, urine, and stool tests, to try and see if something else was going on with my body, and ultimately the diagnosis was that I was suffering from anorexia. The message was that I needed to get this taken care of or I would be taken out of college. I think at that point I knew that I needed to get better, but I wasn’t in a place where I wanted to get better for myself. I wanted to get better for my mom and my family so that they wouldn’t pull me out of college.

The shift happened for me in my junior year when I went to intern at a vegan lifestyle magazine in San Francisco for 3 months. Even though you had to be completely vegan in the office, we had lunch together every day and my coworkers were always so excited. They were like “it’s vegan, we can eat it!” and I was eating things I hadn’t eaten in years like white rice, vegan pizza, Oreos. It lit these people up! That was part of my personal awakening and a true turning point. A lot of it was me being okay with the changes my body was going through, too. When you’re underweight and start to gain weight your body holds onto a lot of water. Your face looks different, and you have to be okay with being uncomfortable for a little bit and know that it’s temporary. 

In my senior year of college and the year after, I started to eat the right amount of food for my body and started to accept myself. I dropped a lot of language surrounding food and bodies. It's hard to condense, but that’s part of my story.

I think that’s a beautiful telling of it, and the point of me asking is to shine a light on stories and experiences so that women can take a second and think I’ve felt like that before or someone has put pressure on me to do something like that. I want people to feel less alone.

That’s why I started my blog in college and shared so much of my journey because I felt like if I could make one person feel less alone, then that would be great. That’s how I feel about coaching, too. If I can help one person have a better relationship with food or themselves, then my work here is done. That’s my driving force. I feel for anyone who is in the thick of it, because I know it feels like there is no end in sight. You might be thinking how am I going to get out of this? But you have to keep going. You have to keep trying. I know that you can get to the other side.

Also, ask for help. I think it’s really hard to get through anything by yourself. Whether that’s a friend or family member, a therapist, a health counselor, there are so many great resources for people.

You don’t have to do it alone.

If you were able to condense things down, what ways can women have a positive relationship with food?

Drop any specific labeling of food. There is no good, bad, healthy, unhealthy. Experiment with what food means to you, and see how that removes any kind of power it has over you when it comes to language.

This isn’t for everyone but it’s something that has been helpful for me. Make a list of all of the food that scares you. For me, at a certain point in my life, trail mix was a thing for me. If trail mix was in the house it would be the only thing I could think about. It was the only thing that I wanted to eat. An experiment I would do, depending on where you are in your journey, is to make sure that you have trail mix in your house every day for the next several weeks and see what happens. The first week maybe you are thinking about it all the time, eat too much of it and don’t feel great the next day. Then maybe the second week, you might not think about it as much, and the third week you might not want any of it. You learn that foods do not have power over you, even if it might feel like it.

If you want to make a change in your life, like eating more fruits or vegetables, or maybe you’re in a rut and you’ve been ordering in for every meal. You don’t have to overhaul everything at once. Make one small change, like ordering fruit or a salad along with the rest of your takeout. If you want long-lasting change and good habits, start with one thing at a time.

The process is so much more important than achievement

That is the character-building part. The achievement is one thing but the process is what builds your character.

If you have built a strong foundation of habits that support you and experiences that you feel great about, that’s what it’s about. It’s very powerful.

What is your vision for women in terms of eating and cooking?

I want women to have freedom when it comes to food. I want them to enjoy food and feel unabashedly free in making whatever choice they want. I want women to feel excited, happy, and in support of their true essence.

This interview has been edited and condensed.