diff --git a/recipes_source/distributed_checkpoint_recipe.rst b/recipes_source/distributed_checkpoint_recipe.rst
index 118dc7e7794..6a70bb02b0b 100644
--- a/recipes_source/distributed_checkpoint_recipe.rst
+++ b/recipes_source/distributed_checkpoint_recipe.rst
@@ -193,6 +193,7 @@ The reason that we need the ``state_dict`` prior to loading is:
         model = ToyModel().to(rank)
         model = FSDP(model)
 
+        optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(model.parameters(), lr=0.1)
         # generates the state dict we will load into
         model_state_dict, optimizer_state_dict = get_state_dict(model, optimizer)
         state_dict = {