17 Jan Consider your Healthy Meal Plan Headaches Sorted – Lifestyle Kitchen Lab

Sticking to a healthy lifestyle can be a hassle. It’s hard enough to find the time or energy for exercising or staying healthy, let alone prepping food and cooking it. We are not being lazy, just…..time-poor! A good alternative is to use a healthy food delivery service direct to your door.

Kenex Kum (right) describes herself as a Food Experimentalist but the former events director and her business partner, Ashima (left) (Nutrition Consultant and Yoga Instructor) are a dynamic duo whose ethos is about eating right. Their catering company, Lifestyle Kitchen Lab provides the solution to home-delivered wholesome meals. Also on offer is nutritional advice and thus tailor-made meals are created for their clients. Lifestyle Kitchen Lab started off focusing on weight management meal plans but increasingly their clientele are people with chronic diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol or cancer.

In the beginning…

It all started with Kenex herself because she was advised by the doctor to lead a different lifestyle for her health and so from 2011, Kenex started “eating clean” which meant cooking without food additives or colouring, cutting out processed foods, cooking at home and eating out much less. She learnt to cook and experimented with food such as mixing her own multi-grain rice which today, Lifestyle Lab is known for. Soon after, Kenex’s Dad was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, and taking her “eating clean” experience to the next stage, she worked with a dietitian to produce wholesome meals for her dad, saving him from a diet of liquidised meals!

The idea to set up Lifestyle Kitchen Lab then snowballed because a friend then asked Kenex to prepare food for weight loss. Thus, Lifestyle Kitchen Lab was launched! In 2018 together with Ashima , they moved to premises in Desa Seri Hartamas, Kuala Lumpur to a kitchen where they can cook the food and continue to experiment in.

The Lifestyle Kitchen Lab Way

The “Lab” in their title is precisely that. Kenex and Ashima say that their vision is to create, “A cooking laboratory that combines culinary instruction using healthy wholesome ingredients, nutrition education, exercise, mindfulness and personalized health coaching.” The chef-like image in the logo, indicates Lifestyle Kitchen Lab being the chef or you being your own chef through cooking lessons where clients are taught to cook from scratch usi ng basic ingredients. Cooking is made easy with simplified recipes for healthy tasting food and dietetic information is also included as part of it. This means getting the appropriate meal plans and diet that suits you. Kenex refers to this as the “Teaching Kitchen” concept.

The holistic element in their philosophy is the ability to also do Yoga to complement the healthy eating – for healthy living. The people who have taken this up have found the Yoga useful for stress and pain management particularly for patients with cancer, those with chronic health conditions or highly stressed professionals.

Talking about the food…

Kenex does all the cooking herself and in fact, insists on this because she is then in control of the ingredients going into the food. Everything is homemade, even the Kimchi. Kenex makes multi-grain Chinese dumplings and bakes flourless cakes for her clients. Not even Stevia is used because this is processed thus adding more toxins to the diet so either Gula Melaka (palm sugar) or fruits are used to sweeten.

Many of Kenex’s clients have chronic conditions so eating well is paramount because good nutrition is necessary to get better. Everything is measured so that there is not too much or too little potassium or magnesium in the diet, for instance. Some clients require a little more salt in the diet whilst those on weight management programmes do not as salt encourages water retention. Fresh food like meat is not ordered in bulk because everything provided has to be as fresh as possible. The thing about having this form of tailor-made food delivery is that you get just the right amount of food, meaning that there is minimal to no waste.

Thank goodness Kenex is passionate about cooking and food creation. Knowing that you are going to have healthy food delivered and having fun experimenting with new dishes you would never think to cook on your own is a bonus as far as I am concerned, not to mention having your meal plan headaches sorted!

Where do they deliver?

The catchment areas, for the moment, are Mont’ Kiara, Bangsar, KLCC and everywhere up to Sunway.

For more information on Lifestyle Kitchen Lab, contact Kenex Kum on 019 730 2906 or visit FB fan page, Lifestyle Kitchen Lab.