Kylie Kain ’14 was pushing her body to the brink. She couldn’t keep up in lacrosse practice, and she was constantly exhausted. The culprit, she later learned, was severe iron deficiency anemia, a condition in which the body lacks the necessary amount of red blood cells to get oxygen to the body’s tissues. “My iron levels were almost at zero,” she says. On top of that diagnosis was her eating disorder — she ate little throughout the day, and then binged in the evenings.
Looking back nearly a decade later, Kain wishes she’d had the help of a dietitian to rectify her relationship with food and address her iron deficiency: “I wish I’d had more education about how to properly fuel my body, what impact alcohol could have on my body, and on my ability to perform on the field. It led me to really want to be that person for others.”
Now, as owner of Kylie Kain Nutrition, she’s helping clients meet their nutrition and exercise goals — including many female collegiate athletes, who face problems similar to what she experienced. The Colgate philosophy major set out on this new path at St. Louis University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in nutrition and dietetics and a master of science in nutrition and physical performance. “If I was going to do this profession, I wanted to do it 100%,” she says. Today, she gives clients the tools they need to improve their individual health.
Get some insights from Kain on her work as a registered dietitian nutritionist and certified personal trainer:
Everybody is trying to give you nutrition and eating advice, or [telling you] how to lose weight. There’s so much misinformation out there.
Most people come to me and say their goal is to lose weight, whether their doctor told them they need to, or they just want to. I usually will change their goals from weight loss to other things: Add more vegetables into your diet or reduce your sodium intake. I don’t like the focus to be weight loss because you can certainly lose weight without improving your health.
I do one-on-one counseling. I’ll go grocery shopping sometimes with clients. I’ve done virtual cooking classes. I write meal plans for clients. I also offer guidance toward achieving normalized lab results and assist with the dietary management of many health conditions such as hypertension or pre-diabetes.
Transitioning from being an athlete to finding balance in physical activity [can be tough]. It doesn’t require pushing [your] body to extreme exhaustion to get that healthy response to physical activity.
One of my favorite things to tell people is to be your best self. Don’t be what someone else thinks you should be — be you, and be it well.