Downtown resident and Personal Chef Megan Huylo is a finalist on HLN’s Cook Your Ass Off.
Our Lifestyle and Family Editor met with Downtown resident Megan Huylo who is a plant-based personal chef and healthy lifestyle expert and is making a splash on the first season of the new cooking show Cook Your Ass Off. The show is hosted by celebrity chef and Top Chef winner Richard Blais and appears on the HLN network. (Formerly Headline News).
Cook Your Ass Off challenges contestants to create amazing recipes inspired by personal stories presented by a guest judge who needs to eat healthy and learn new ways to cook with healthier ingredients.
Each week, three chefs battle it out to help inspire and transform lives by switching up ingredients and turning unhealthy recipes into amazing dishes. When the finals air on March 16th, one chef will be crowned the winner and walk away with the Grand Prize of $50,000. When asked what surprised her the most about the competition, she stated “Honestly, I was most surprised with myself. I went in there on the first day saying, “just make it through the first elimination round”, and here I am heading to the finals. It just goes to show how often we sell ourselves short. I need to stop doing that!
Chef Megan is a personal chef and healthy lifestyle expert specializing in whole food, plant-based cuisine and has conquered each challenge with grace and tenacity. She learned about the importance of healthy eating when she was diagnosed with cancer as a young girl. As a cancer survivor she strived to eat and live in a healthy way. After earning her B.S. from the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, she became a corporate recruiter on Wall Street. But, she decided to pursue her passion for a healthy lifestyle and embarked on her culinary journey.
She attended the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health & Culinary Arts and completed the Certificate Program in Plant-Based Nutrition from the T. Colin Campbell Foundation and Cornell University. She has diverse experience working in many notable NYC kitchens from high-end restaurants to popular cleanse companies. Most recently, Megan launched a unique custom cleanse service that is garnering rave reviews.
Her culinary philosophy is to use natural, organic, whole foods and to prepare them in delicious, balanced ways and of course, to encourage everyone to eat their veggies.
She started her plant-based food & lifestyle service, Downtown Epicure to continue promoting her philosophy and to share her love of healthy eating and living and has been inspiring downtown residents and now America as she continues her run on Cook Your Ass Off. Be sure to tune in on Sunday, March 16th at 7 p.m. on HLN to watch the finale.
— Denise Courter
