My StoryWhen I was growing up in Northern Virginia, I often had a digital camera in my hands. From a young age I was very creative, and for years, videography was my number one creative outlet. I loved it so much that in high school, I even bussed to a different school, several miles away, for a TV production class. My teenage dream: become a TV or movie director.
My dad has a heart of gold,
and he’s always been incredibly strict with my two sisters and me. I’m the youngest. He wanted me to get a college degree in the sciences because he thought that would lead to a more stable job than an arts degree, so that’s what I did.
During those early premed months in college, I was most engaged in my nutrition classes. Unfortunately, the same time that I was hitting the books, I personally got tangled up in toxic diet culture. After quickly gaining my Freshman 15, I set my sights on one restrictive diet and weight-loss tactic after another. I went from vegetarian to vegan (the horror—I LOVE cheese!), to Whole30, to obsessing over detox teas. Not only did these diets and tactics not work, they also really negatively affected my relationship with food and with myself.
I wanted to dig deeper into food and nutrition, so I switched from premed to nutrition in the dietetic field. Through my education and studying evidence-based research, I learned that the diets and weight-loss tactics I was trying were not, in fact, good nutrition. I learned that cutting good from-theearth foods out of my diet—and essentially starving myself—was also not good nutrition. I began to look critically at all the ever-changing, and often quite harmful, current and historic nutrition myths, fads, and diets. Through education, I slowly but surely got to a better place.
I graduated from Virginia Tech in 2018 with my Master of Science degree in nutrition and dietetics, and in 2019 I became a clinical dietitian at a hospital in Haymarket, Virginia. This was around the same time that TikTok was gaining traction and rising in popularity, especially with millennials like me. At first, I didn’t see the appeal. It seemed like a never-ending supply of short, silly videos of kids dancing. I didn’t get it.
When the pandemic hit several months later, our hospital became a different place overnight. It’s still hard for me to properly convey what those early pandemic hospital shifts were like. With all the long nerve-wracking days and incredible stress, I gave in and downloaded TikTok. I wanted to distract myself when I wasn’t masked up and helping patients. It worked. Once it was on my phone, I was hooked. I needed that escapism.
While watching TikTok, I’d get nutrition video ideas from the lyrics of a song or from a certain beat. I decided to use my expertise as a dietitian and try my hand at teaching some of the nutrition lessons I’d learned in grad school. I featured songs that were trending and posted videos every few days. I had fun making them, but they didn’t seem all that impactful.
That is, until my magnesium video came out. I wanted to show people how important magnesium is, especially for managing stress and overall wellbeing. It felt like a very important and timely PSA for myself and my coworkers (we definitely needed to manage our stress!) and I wanted to share that intel with my TikTok followers.
I posted my magnesium video early in the morning, before arriving at the hospital. At some point midday, while charting a patient, my phone started to blow up. I mean, BLOW UP. I got thousands upon thousands of views on that video, and they kept coming. All day.
All night. And ultimately, all week. The fact that people were interested in nutrition on TikTok completely caught me by surprise. From that day on, I posted something nutrition-based almost every day.
From 2020 to 2021, I gained millions of followers. It was all so exciting. Little, fresh-out-of-university me suddenly had an audience. And it wasn’t small! There was this huge group of people all around the world interested in what I had to say about nutrition. And they were
really interested. In the beginning, that seemingly overnight success was a bit overwhelming, for sure, but I also loved it. I was helping people. And I was having fun while doing so. I’d sort of become the director younger me had dreamed of becoming. Sure, it looked a little different from what I’d imagined, but I was filming and editing and widely sharing impactful information.
My life completely changed in the following years. I quit my job and became a full-time content creator making nutrition-related posts and videos. Along the way, I’ve shared so much helpful nutrition info and guidance, developed all sorts of delicious and nutritious recipes, gained amazing social media friends, and partnered with dream brands that I admire. I still think it’s wild how two of my primary passions, videography and nutrition, just naturally came together.
And the very best part? What I do doesn’t feel like a job. It really doesn’t. I’m living my dream. I get to help millions of people develop an informed understanding of nutrition and intuitive eating in large part through my favorite medium, videography. I love my life.
Copyright © 2026 by Steph Grasso, MS, RD; with Liz Crain. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
