Why are we building a recipe app?

Between TikTok viral recipes, Instagram food reels, and independent chefs creating content every day, there definitely isn’t a shortage of recipes online. So why are we building another one?

I was diagnosed with PCOS when I was just 16 years old, in a country that didn’t have the most information on PCOS as a condition. I was told that beyond potentially making it harder for me to carry a child when I wanted to, it was a primary cause of my acne and sudden weight gain.

At the time, all of this didn’t bother me that much. I had no plans of being a mother and knew I was going through puberty. What I didn’t know was that I would be on a 10-year journey attempting nearly every diet you can name: low carb, no carb, keto, pescatarianism, calorie counting — whatever I heard might be beneficial for me, I followed almost immediately. Most lasted a few days. The more ambitious ones lasted a couple of months.

Here’s the thing that every woman with a chronic health condition has felt: it’s an extremely lonely and isolating journey that is rarely talked about or understood by people who live without needing to manage one. Even when I discovered that close friends struggled with some of the same conditions, the conversation usually stopped at the diagnosis. No one really knew how to deal with it. Everyone was just trying to figure out what worked for them.

Somehow, even with so many women living with PCOS, no one really knew how to navigate it.

Then I finally felt what support could look like.

I found out what that safety actually felt like when I finally saw a registered dietitian a year ago, for the few sessions my insurance covered. Shoutout to Annie <3. She knew the science behind why my eating behaviors were the way they were, gave me recipes to actually try, and for the first time I felt like someone was on my side — helping me navigate my relationship with food and support my PCOS journey.

Then my sessions ran out.

When I looked into paying out of pocket to keep going, it was over $200 a session. So I went back to figuring it out on my own.

Every plan I came up with to reverse my PCOS came with the same questions: Is this right for me? Is it working? Am I about to waste another two months and find out it doesn’t?

And then there were two of us asking the same question.

Fast forward to 2018, on the first day of college orientation, Malaika and I met. In the years we’ve known each other, we continued to bond over wellness, diet, and everything we tried in order to be and feel healthier.

Only in the last year did I learn more about her chronic health condition, which required a low-inflammatory diet. That led to the same conversation over and over again: why isn’t there a place for women like us — managing conditions that cannot simply be cured — to get food and nutrition information we can actually trust, and fit it into our lives without letting it completely take over?