Karen Velderrain always felt at home in the kitchen.
“Cooking was a big part of my childhood, and I learned to cook when I was little little,” she says. “I always watched my mom growing up and then that just progressed as I got older.”
Being in the kitchen with her mom led Velderrain to develop her own passion for cooking. But it wasn’t until last September that her cooking earned her a social media following, gaining more than 150,000 TikTok followers in the last year alone. Velderrain has a unique approach to meal prep and cooking videos. As a soon-to-be registered dietitian and current grad student herself, she tailors her content specifically for college students who want to eat healthy on a budget.
Velderrain has a bachelor’s degree in nutrition dietetics and is currently working on a master’s in exercise and sports nutrition at Texas A&M. She has been meal prepping since undergrad and decided to create TikTok videos to teach others how easy and budget-friendly it can truly be.
“When I started cooking for myself, I noticed how important cooking is and that skill in life,” says Velderrain. “It contributed to why I chose the career I did.”
As a college student, she knows how hard it can be to keep herself fed, but her expertise in nutrition allows her to make substitutions in recipes to include healthier ingredients to create a more nutritious alternative without compromising on taste or affordability.
“I think with social media and diet culture, there’s a lot of misinformation out there,” she says. “People out there that claim to know what they talk about, and it can be very dangerous sometimes. I think that is one of my biggest goals — to show that healthy eating can be very simple, and it really doesn’t have to be that hard.”
Her aim is to help others maintain a healthy and balanced lifestyle without resulting to a diet; it’s all about moderation, not necessarily cutting out “cheat” foods. Eating healthy in college does not have to cost an arm and a leg if you take the time to plan and meal prep.
“I think some misconceptions [about cooking in college] are that cooking has to be difficult or that eating healthy is boring, that it has to be chicken, broccoli, and rice all the time, and that is not true,” she says. “One of my biggest goals of my videos is to show that it doesn’t have to be boring and that you can eat what you like. It’s all about balance.”
When it comes to creating content, Velderrain’s process is both creative and practical. Drawing inspiration from platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok, along with other content creators, she continuously seeks out new ideas to keep herself and her audience engaged. Velderrain finds new recipes weekly by taking inspiration from her personal recipe catalog, such as chicken lettuce wraps and veggie tuna salad, and scouring the internet. She is always on the hunt for new meal ideas in order to prevent boring not only her viewers but also herself.
Balancing the demands of content creation with her academic responsibilities all while holding an internship is certainly challenging for her. Every Saturday, Velderrain goes grocery shopping with a budget of $70 at most. This allows her Sunday to be open for meal prep.
In the immediate future, Velderrain plans to create more educational videos for her followers instead of ones only detailing her cooking. Once she graduates and gets her license, Velderrain intends to do one-on-one consultations. She also hopes to create a blog soon to have a home for all her recipes and dreams of having her own cookbook one day.
“The whole reason I got into my career was to help people live a more balanced and healthy lifestyle,” Velderrain shares. “I want to inspire people to just change their overall habits and not just think of it as a diet.”