Sadia Badiei (Pick Up Limes)

Sadia Badiei is a popular YouTuber.

She has more than 4.1M subscribers on her YouTube channel, ‘Pick Up Limes.’

Sadia is also a blogger; and was a Registered Dietitian.

Introduction-

Sadia Badiei was born on 6 March 1991 in Pakistan.

Both her parents hail from Afghanistan; they emigrated to Canada due to a war in Afghanistan.

Sadia was born at the time her parents were preparing for emigration.

At the age of six months, she, along with her parents, emigrated to Canada.

She grew up in Canada and hails from Vancouver, Canada; and is a Canadian.

Sadia has two sisters; her eldest sister, Sara Badiei, is an engineer and entrepreneur, she is a co-founder of ‘mHealth Global Innovations,’ Vancouver.

Inspired into veganism-

While in high school, at 15, Sadia decided to adopt veganism for health reasons, but at that young age, she didn’t have the willpower to be completely vegan.

In October 2014, she adopted veganism full-time and has been a vegan since then, thanks to the TV show, ‘The Walking Dead.’

After watching one of the episodes of this TV show where humans were forced to resort to cannibalism in a post-apocalyptic world, Sadia couldn’t justify eating animals, as she felt that animals would also feel pain much like humans.

So, for ethical reasons she became a complete vegan.

Also, at that time, Sadia was studying nutrition and plant-based lifestyle, and found it to be very nourishing.

Education & career-

Sadia joined The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia to attend the medical school; here, she learnt about the Dietetics degree and enrolled into it as it seemed a good back-up plan in case, she didn’t make it to medical school.

Also, dietetics seemed a tangible career in the healthcare field, and as she had no proper knowledge of nutrition, she decided to learn more about it.

From 2009 to 2014, Sadia studied Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Dietetics from The University of British Columbia; she completed the degree with honours grade.

Prior to attending university, she worked at several restaurants, and at H&M.

In 2013, for four months, Sadia worked as a Teaching Assistant at The University of British Columbia for ‘Nutrition Concepts and Controversies.’

In 2013, she also worked as a Dietetic Intern, and from June 2014 to September 2014, she worked as a Clinical Dietitian at Vancouver Coastal Health.

From December 2014 to December 2015, Sadia worked as a Registered Dietitian at MSK Health and Performance Clinic, and Provincial Health Services Authority.

From June 2014 to December 2015, she worked as a Clinical Dietitian at Provincial Health Services Authority; here, she worked as a Registered Dietitian from June 2016 to September 2016.

Starting ‘Pick Up Limes’-

In January 2015, Sadia started her blog, ‘Pick Up Limes’ as a hobby to share with her family and friends.

Her web developer friend helped her create the website.

Sadia wanted the name of her blog to be cheerful, fun, and related to food; once, while walking home from work, she was thinking of different names and suddenly ‘Pick Up Limes’ popped into her head.

So, she searched for ‘Pick Up Limes’ domain name and as it was available, she started her blog, ‘Pick Up Limes.’

On 15 January 2015, she published her first blog post, ‘Cranberry Lime Bliss Balls.’

For the first couple of years, Sadia published only 4-5 recipes on her blog.

Becoming a YouTuber, thanks to travelling-

After completing B.Sc., Sadia developed a great itch to travel the world.

But at that time, she had student loans to pay off and was working at a good job, so she postponed her trip.

Then, one of Sadia’s beloved persons got terribly ill and passed away; this made her realize that even though life is beautiful, it’s too short not to follow her dreams.

So, she decided to travel the world; having vision boards and listening to ‘The Success Principles’ book by Jack Canfield (this is her favourite book) gave her the courage to travel.

In 2015, Sadia packed up her backpack and travelled for six months.

While travelling, she started vlogging for the first time, and uploaded her vlogs on a YouTube channel in order to document her journey, and keep her family and friends updated on her journey.

This experience of working on YouTube gave Sadia the confidence to later start ‘Pick Up Limes’ YouTube channel on 26 October 2016.

She started this channel to share her passions of nutrition, recipes, and minimalism; at that time, she got inspired by watching a lot of YouTube videos, so, she decided to reciprocate through her ‘Pick Up Limes’ YouTube channel.

As Sadia was working as a dietician in hospitals, she used to teach nutrition to people suffering with illness but through her YouTube channel, she decided to teach nutrition to the general public, so that they can prevent illness.

Also, she, through her YouTube channel, wanted to showcase that eating well and leading a simple lifestyle isn’t complicated.

On 9 January 2017, Sadia published her first video on Pick Up Limes channel, ‘Ruby Red Green Smoothie » pre- or post-workout drink.’

Rejecting medical school for ‘Pick Up Limes’-

It took Sadia five years to become a dietitian, and in the end, she got accepted to the medical school at The University of British Columbia.

But she turned it down and chose to continue working on her ‘Pick Up Limes’ YouTube channel as its community was growing and she was positively influencing many people; also, it became her passion.

The day Sadia received the acceptance letter to the medical school, she had 100K subscribers on her YouTube channel, and thanks to this she realised the potential of her channel.

At that time, she was content with working on prevention methods through her channel and didn’t envision herself working as a physician.

So, in 2017, Sadia became a full-time content creator and continued working on her YouTube channel and blog.

At that time, she used to also counsel clients one-to-one but later stopped it.

A successful YouTuber-

It took Sadia two and a half weeks to grow from 10K subscribers to 100K subscribers on her channel; and it took her three months to grow from 100K subscribers to 500K subscribers.

As of December 2023, she has 4.15M subscribers on her ‘Pick Up Limes’ YouTube channel, 867K followers on Instagram, 172.4k followers on Pinterest, and 107K followers on Facebook page.

Sadia earns from a variety of sources like advertisements, and ‘Super Thanks’ on her YouTube videos, affiliate marketing, app, and sponsorships; she also earns from advertisements on her website.

She films her videos with Canon EOS R6, Fujifilm X-T4, and GoPro HERO8 cameras and has a team helping with ‘Pick Up Limes’.

Personal life-

Sadia got engaged to Robin de Rozario on 26 October 2021; and they got married on 23 July 2022 in British Columbia, Canada.

She met him during her travel in Thailand, on a beach under a palm tree; they became friends and travelled Thailand and Cambodia.

Later, they travelled together in Europe, and this started their relationship.

Robin is a Dutch and hails from Netherlands; in the end of 2016, Sadia moved to Netherlands as a part of continuation of their relationship.

After arriving in the Netherlands, she started seriously working on the ‘Pick Up Limes’ blog and YouTube channel.

Robin did Ph.D. and works as a Software Engineer at Pick Up Limes.

Sadia lives in Eindhoven, North Brabant, Netherlands.

Some interesting facts about Sadia Badiei-

She wasn’t always health conscious, as during university she survived off burgers, ice cream, chicken fingers, etc.
Sadia is a complete vegan whereas Robin is mostly vegan.
Her favourite thing about the Netherlands has been bikes; she loves the extensive cycling routes and the ability to travel to almost all places by bikes.
Sadia is a Pisces and a polyglot as she knows English and Farsi.
Her favourite thing is making recipes; she creates recipes at her studio with a lot of experimentation.
In one of her YouTube videos, Sadia collaborated with Nathaniel Drew, a popular YouTuber.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Sadia Badiei?

Share with me in the comment section below.