Building a Business When
You Have Nothing to Lose

Let me start by saying — as 2025 drew to a close and 2026 arrived, the question everyone wants to know: do I need to diet? What does the founder and CEO of Diet Ideas say?

Diet is not really a phase. It should be a sustainability lifestyle that we have to embrace every day. So it's not about New Year's resolutions. It is about everyday choices. Every single day.

Good. But that is not quite what we are here to talk about today. Today we want to talk about youth entrepreneurship — about your journey. You are quite young, you are the founder and CEO, and it has been a remarkable path. So let us start from the very beginning. Where did all of this begin for you?

So from school — right? I always wanted to be a lawyer growing up. I joined every public speaking competition, I always won. But then the moment I was filling in my university application through UPU, I suddenly did not want to be a lawyer anymore. I cannot explain it. It just changed.

And I ended up choosing dietetics. I honestly did not know what the word meant. It sounded completely alien to me. But somehow I chose it for eight out of twelve of my application options. And I was accepted into UKM — the National University of Malaysia.

Year one of university — I hated dietetics. I did not like cooking. I did not want to go to hospitals because, honestly, I am scared of ghosts. That is very real. And I did not like being in a kitchen. So I had this major question: how do I survive the next four years?

And your solution was a blog?

Yes. I opened a blog online. I just kept writing — whatever the lecturers taught me, I typed it into the blog. It was purely for myself, to kill time and to process what I was learning. I had no expectation from it whatsoever.

Then, without me doing anything deliberate, the blog started attracting people from Brunei, from Indonesia, from Singapore, and even from the Malaysian army — all asking for diet consultation help.

But I was still just a student. So I kept going back to my clinical instructors, asking how to handle these requests. And somehow, people started paying me for online consultations. This was done through Skype back then. Online consultation was still considered quite unusual in Malaysia at the time.

So the business started before you even had your degree. And it started from authenticity — you were not trying to build anything, you were just writing what you knew.

Exactly. Writing is therapeutic for me. I write when I am stressed, when I do not know what to do. That blog had everything — my studies, my thoughts, the typical things a teenager writes about. There was no strategy. No audience research. And then it just happened. So I would say the formula was passion, plus authenticity, plus doing something purely for the sake of doing it — without expectation.

After university you got headhunted by a technology company from India — they found you through the blog. So that was your entry point into understanding how health and technology could come together. What happened from there?

That job was my first real education in health technology. But as a dietitian, I kept seeing the same problem — most elderly clients did not know how to use technology. And they were the ones who needed help most urgently. So I kept going to my supervisor saying: why don't we just do home visit services? Go to the people who cannot come to us.

Every time, the answer was the same: our business model has been built a certain way, we cannot change it.

So eventually I thought — okay. Then I will just do it myself. That is the short version of how Diet Ideas was born. I wanted to help elderly people get nutrition support, and because my employer would not move, I moved instead.

You come from a business family — your mother's side in F&B, your father's side in construction, import, export, tourism. Did that foundation make entrepreneurship feel more natural, or did it actually make it harder because you knew how hard it was?

It was both, I think. Seeing the family business meant I understood that running something is not glamorous. It is very hard. I had a front-row seat to what it actually costs — financially, emotionally, in terms of sacrifice. So I was not going in with romantic ideas about it.

But at the same time, I had absorbed some of the entrepreneurial instinct just from being in that environment. The willingness to try something. The comfort with uncertainty. That was already in me before I consciously realised it.

What was the moment you realised this is not just an idea, this could actually be a sustainable business?

Honestly, I did not have one clean moment. It was more of a gradual realisation because I had to keep forcing myself forward. I was working at my job, still bored, still throwing ideas to my boss that kept getting rejected. And I remember thinking — I am twenty-three, I come from a business family, I have this knowledge, I have this skill. Maybe I should just try.

And from there, we operated in three modes from very early on: home visits, office visits, and online consultations. All three running simultaneously, even through COVID-19. That is what built the foundation.

There is a Steve Jobs idea — I will not quote him exactly — but the essence is: if there are things you do not know, you build a team that does know. How did you maintain the confidence to do something you did not fully know how to do?

The client flow was not always consistent in the beginning. Five per year, ten per year. But I kept upgrading my knowledge constantly. Every time I learned something new from a lecture or a hospital rotation, I brought it to my clients immediately. And because I was genuinely confident in what I knew — my clinical foundation was solid — that projected to the clients. And they got results.

So my theory is: you must be confident in yourself first. You have to convince yourself before you convince anyone else. But here is what I also believe — action leads to confidence. You do not wait until you feel ready. You take action, and the confidence builds from doing.

Were you ever afraid of people's perception? Of being judged for what you were trying to do?

At the very beginning — yes, absolutely. I was watching what people thought. Worried about whether I was doing things the right way, whether my approach was appropriate, what my family would say. All of that.

But at some point when things got really difficult — when I genuinely had nothing to fall back on — something shifted. I stopped caring. Because at that point, the only things that mattered were: can I pay my team's salary? Can I pay the school fees? Can I pay the rent? Can I keep moving toward the dream? Those were the real questions. And when you are living at that level of stakes, other people's perceptions become completely irrelevant. You can say whatever you want about me. I do not care. I have got a business to keep alive.

Do you have any regrets? And what are you most proud of?

I think I may have what you call toxic positivity — I tend to reframe everything into a silver lining. So with entrepreneurship, genuinely, I have done everything I could. I have given it everything. No regrets there.

But motherhood is different. I have two children, and my youngest is now two years old. After the caesarean delivery, I went back to work after two weeks. My son did not get as much attention as my firstborn did. And that sits with me. When I look at his face, I feel it. If I could go back, I would take at least one month and just focus on him.

And there is another thing I would change — the financial boundary between the business and our personal life. There was a period where we had no money to pay my firstborn's tuition fees because we had used those funds to pay the team's salaries. As a founder, you do not want to compromise on your team. But it came at personal cost that I did not anticipate clearly enough. I wish I had set clearer boundaries between what belongs to the business and what belongs to the family.

I want you to know — from the first time I met you until now, I am always in awe of the resilience and the sacrifice you carry. What you have built is genuinely remarkable. There is so much more I want to explore with you, but we need to wrap up this episode — with the promise of another one.

Of course. I look forward to it. Thank you for giving me this space.

Every guest on this show gets the same final question. If you had one wish to make the planet a better place, what would it be?

My children are a big part of why I do what I do. And I think the one thing I would wish for — even though I am a dietitian, even though my kids already get good nutrition at home with fruits and vegetables always on the table — is for society to truly understand that food is medicine.

Not just for individual health. For future generations. For our planet. If we could genuinely educate society on how nutrition shapes everything — from our personal wellbeing to the wellbeing of our families to the health of the planet — I believe that is where the real change begins. Peace and happiness in families starts from a foundation of health. And health starts from what we choose to put in our bodies every day.

Food is medicine. I completely agree. Thank you so much, Masfara, for being on The Centered Edge today. It was a genuine pleasure.

Thank you for inviting me, Dr. Manju. It was amazing and lovely to be here.