From Private Equity to Health Coaching to Founding a Skincare House

If you had told me at 23 that I would be living in Miami Beach, married to a man who runs a peptide research company, and building a skincare house of my own, I would have asked what you were smoking. I had a plan. It was a good plan. It just was not mine.

This is the story of how I became a health coach at 26 and a founder at 28, and why those two things turned out to be the same decision.

The years that made the question urgent

After college I did what looked like the right thing: New York, finance, then private equity, where I worked in capital fundraising and investor relations. I learned to read a document until it gave up its secrets. I learned that the story someone tells you and the story in the numbers are often two different stories. I am grateful for that training. I use it every day.

I was also, quietly, coming apart. The pace, the hours, the culture. My body kept sending signals I was too busy to read. When an offer came to move closer to my family in New Jersey as Vice President of Business Development at an advertising technology company, I took it. I was 24, I respected my team, and I liked the work. And still, underneath it, something was not right. My health kept declining, and the Northeast no longer felt like home.

The turn

The change did not start with a plan. It started with a feeling that my health was pulling me in a different direction, and a decision, for once, to follow it.

Movement was already the strongest part of my life. Pilates and weight lifting had been my anchors for years. But I realized I understood the gym far better than I understood everything around it: what I ate, what I put on my skin, what was in the air and water of the rooms I lived in, how sleep and stress and light were shaping the way I felt. I wanted to understand the whole system, not just the hour I spent training.

Every time I visited South Florida I felt better. Clearer, stronger, more myself. So in the summer of 2024 I moved to Miami Beach and enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and AFPA’s Holistic Nutrition program. IIN has a line I have never stopped thinking about: coach yourself first. I took it literally. Before I ever worked with a client, I became my own case study. I stopped outsourcing my health and started reading the fine print.

What coaching taught me

I ran a virtual health coaching practice and worked one-on-one with clients, and I am grateful to every person who trusted me with their story. The work was meaningful. But the biggest lesson was not a coaching technique.

It was that the habit I had built in finance, refusing to accept a claim until I had seen the evidence, was exactly what health needed. Most of what people are told about their bodies arrives as marketing. Labels, protocols, ingredient lists, studies that get quoted and never read. Coaching showed me how many people had been dismissed, told their symptoms were normal, and handed a product instead of an answer. I could help them one at a time. I wanted to reach more of them, and more honestly.

Why I stopped coaching one-on-one

The format was too small for the mission. That is the honest version. One-on-one work is intimate and valuable, and it reaches a handful of people a week. What I actually wanted to do was hold the whole category to a higher standard: the information, the food, the products. So I closed the practice, kept the standard, and changed the format.

Meeting James, and meeting peptides

Along the way I met James, a personal trainer with a deeper understanding of the human body than anyone I had known, and a peptide research company of his own. We married in May 2026, the same month I turned 28. He is the most careful thinker I know, and our shared curiosity has taught me more than any textbook.

Through his work I was introduced to peptide science in 2024, and I fell down the rabbit hole. What peptides are, how they signal, why the specific sequence matters, why delivery matters even more. I started paying real attention to what was in the skincare I had been buying, and to how little of it was designed around the science I was reading. Over that year my skin changed in a way that years of expensive products never achieved. I want to be honest that this is my experience, not a controlled study, and I cannot separate every variable: I was also sleeping better, eating better, and living in the sun for the first time. But it changed what I expected from skincare, permanently.

Founder at 28

Last winter I had an idea for a peptide-based serum built the way I wished the products I had spent thousands on had been built: around the science, with nothing hidden. At the start of 2026 we began building AMINATIDE, a luxury skincare house grounded in peptide research. Over the course of this year I have been turning that idea into a reality: formulation partners, packaging, quality standards, the unglamorous diligence that decides whether a product deserves to exist. We are now developing our first three products.

I will say more about them when there is more to say, and not before. That is the standard. If you want to follow along, AMINATIDE is where that story lives.

What this site is now

Wellness with Tia is where I write about everything else: food, strength, health, skin, and the fine print behind all of it. Recipes I actually cook. Notes on what the evidence supports and where it runs out. Corrections when I get something wrong. No coaching packages, no protocols, no promises.

If any of it is useful to you, that is the whole point. The occasional longer letter goes out as Tia’s Health Notes, if you would like it.