From lunch photos to 2.1 million followers

She borrowed someone else's audience first.

She was one of 36 physicians in a practice with 30-minute appointments, and she's said trying to teach patients about food in that time wasn't sustainable. So she took the teaching somewhere else.

She had no audience, so she borrowed one. A podcast she listened to mentioned a brand new site called MindBodyGreen, so she wrote an article and sent it in. They took it, so she sent more. Not exactly a complicated strategy.

Borrowing an audience means you can start before you have your own. By 2015, MindBodyGreen had named her one of its Top 100 Women in Wellness to Watch.

Start with the smallest thing.

Readers started asking how to contact her, so she built a five-minute WordPress site. Five minutes. I've spent longer choosing a font.

She didn't plan a launch. People asked, and she made the smallest thing that answered them.

The questions she kept getting became her products, in order.

She noticed she was giving the same advice over and over, so she started small mastermind groups to talk it through. Then came a video course on social media strategy, brand building and handling criticism. Then downloadable recipe guides.

You can see the demand in her comments. Under one recipe post, a follower asks, “Any low carb dishes?” That's a patient telling you what to make next.

This is how an audience turns into income. She gave people a next step for the questions they kept asking.

Then she leaned toward the work she liked.

By 2019 Amy said she'd moved away from building products and toward consulting and media, because she enjoyed it more. She'd already been in HuffPost and on The Dr. Oz Show. Bobbi Brown (yes, the makeup Bobbi Brown) had even asked her to help develop the first collection for Evolution_18.

She posted for years, badly at first.

By September 2023 Amy had posted 5,166 times, which works out to roughly nine a week for eleven years.

One of those posts is a carrot cookie, vegan and sugar-free, and captioned “Ok it's amazing.” It's a shot so close you can see her thumb, and she posted it anyway.

Put your Corner in your profile name.

Her handle started as @fastingmd, which gave away her Corner before you read a single post. It's @dramyshah now that her name is so big you'd recognise it anyway. But until that point, she led with her niche.

Your name compounds over time.

I'm So Effing Hungry came out in February 2023 through Harvest, a HarperCollins imprint. Hormone Havoc followed in February 2026 and is a New York Times bestseller. She went from 308k to 2.1 million followers over that time.

That's roughly 1.8 million followers in three years, after 11 years of getting to 308,000. From the outside it looks overnight. I couldn't find a source that explains those last three years, so this part is my read: it's just simple compounding.

Eleven years of posts and articles were still out there with her name on them, and every new book or reel sent people back to all of it. Each thing she put out made the next one work harder, which is why the growth got faster the longer she kept going.

She wishes she'd taken more risks sooner.

In 2019 she said the business took about 20 hours a week, squeezed around part-time clinical work. Burnout, she's said, is what pushed her to build it in the first place.

She called the fear of being judged by other professionals a huge hurdle, and said she'd take more risks sooner if she did it again. Handling criticism is also one of the topics in her video course.