Emily English has just gasped the biggest gasp I’ve ever heard. It lasts for about 15 seconds, maybe more. As she inhales, she grips the sides of the stool she’s sitting on and leans back in horror. ‘Hard. Awful. No,’ she says, incapable of getting full sentences out. ‘Just, no!’
I’ve asked her if she would ever try Huel, the sludgy, grey-coloured protein shake that men – and it is mostly men – lug around in enormous bottles and drink as a replacement for meals. It’s designed to bulk people up; English thinks it’s revolting. ‘I would rather starve. I would rather wait till I got home and eat normal food. I’m sorry, like, you’re not a baby. You’re not on formula! Hard no.’ I tell her about a former colleague of mine who exclusively drank Huel for lunch at his desk. Cue more gasping. ‘Sackable! That is a sackable offence.’
English, 29, is probably the most famous nutritionist in Britain and definitely the most famous nutritionist on the internet. On Instagram, where she posts recipes as Em the Nutritionist, she has 1.8 million followers; on TikTok her videos have a total of 14.3 million likes. Clips of her various culinary activities get stupefying numbers of views: 9.8 million for preparing a breakfast bagel, five million for scrambling eggs.
Jacket and skirt, Sandro. Earrings, Susan Caplan. Headscarf and bag, Aspinal of London
Online popularity translates into book sales, too. Last year, English’s first cookbook, So Good, went straight to the top of the Sunday Times Bestseller list. In its first week it sold 35,000 copies, five times more copies than the book that occupied the number two spot. The follow-up, Live To Eat, is published on Thursday.
Unlike other social media food figures, English doesn’t have a niche. She’s not a vegan who cooks bolognese with cashews and mushrooms; she doesn’t create recipes for a million different flavours of butter. Her recipes include calorie counts but aren’t targeted at people trying to lose weight. Everything is healthy but it’s not all ‘clean eating’ or diet food. Flick through English’s new book and there are instructions for ricotta and tomato gnocchi, super-green shakshuka, potato fish pie, spatchcock chicken and beans, salmon and spinach filo quiche with cottage cheese. And when I mention, for instance, Deliciously Ella – aka Ella Woodward, the 33-year-old British cook whose plant-based empire is worth £60 million – English says she thinks she’s great. ‘But, personally, I don’t identify with her food. I wouldn’t look at it and think that’s something I would make. Nor would my mum or granny.’
I’d guess that her fans are, mainly, women like me in their 20s and 30s. On Instagram, 98 of my friends – nearly all female – follow English and I would hazard that, most days, someone in the YOU magazine office eats one of her recipes for lunch. When I ask them what appeals, they say, ‘She sneaks vegetables into things’ or ‘It’s stuff I was already making versions of before’. And they all, inadvertently, repeat the title of her first book: ‘It’s so good’.
English has her own explanation. ‘When people can’t distinctly say what it is about my food that they like, that’s because it’s normal. It’s, like, why do you like a sunny day with a blue sky? Well, because it’s sunny and blue and lovely. I just tapped into this normality.’
One of Emily’s hugely popular Instagram videos: this one got nearly 29,000 likes
The videos also appeal, very probably, because of English herself. She’s a mixture of cheery and frank. She is also a former model with perfect skin and great hair. Who knows how much those things help her videos, but I doubt they hinder them. ‘Sometimes people comment: “Why has she done her hair to [film a cooking video]?” And I’m, like, because if I didn’t, unfortunately, it wouldn’t look as put-together and polished.’
English got the highest mark in her school year for chemistry and has a degree in nutrition from King’s College London. After graduating, she was offered a place as a private nutritionist at a Harley Street clinic. Then Covid happened. English made a website and found a few clients, who she created bespoke meal plans for – it was enjoyable work, but there wasn’t enough of it. Her then-boyfriend, now-husband, a creative strategist called Aaron McFeely, suggested she upload cooking videos to Instagram. Within two years she had a million followers. Today, she still films and edits everything herself and McFeely is her ‘chief taster’. She has been known, when she’s started work early, to wake him up with a bowl of carbonara. This is impressive, given that he was a vegan when they met. ‘I converted him!’ How long did that take? ‘Not long.’ She lured him back to animal products with an egg.
After three years of nutritional education, English believes the most important dietary rule is: ‘Eat more vegetables and get your P&F.’ The latter stands for protein and fibre. ‘And protein doesn’t mean you have to nail loads of chicken. There’s protein in grains, legumes, dairy, beans.’ (English rates the brand Bold Beans: typically £4 a jar, but delicious. ‘They’re the second love of my life after my husband.’)
She’s also good at food facts and hacks. Take tomatoes. They contain naturally high levels of the stroke-reducing antioxidant lycopene. But once they’ve been tinned, they’re even better for you. It’s because the canning process intensifies the tomatoes, packing more of the fruit in a small space and boosting the level of lycopene. Or sourdough bread, which, according to English, increases in nutritional value if you freeze it. Apparently, freezing converts starch to ‘resistant starch’ and reduces a ‘glycaemic response’ – which, in other, non-sciencey words, means it’s less likely to turn into glucose once it’s digested.
Alongside Huel, what are English’s other food red flags? ‘I hate protein bars. If I want protein, I’ll have a couple of boiled eggs. Also, they taste gross, they’re full of weird stuff, they’re just not that nice.’ Ditto McDonald’s. ‘Hate it. Don’t want it.’ She estimates she last went ten years ago.
She’s not entirely averse to fast food, though. ‘My husband loves Greggs. I don’t like their sausage roll but I really like their bacon roll. Though I’d want something more in it – like a slice of tomato and lettuce. But that might be a bit premium for Greggs.’ Takeaways are fine, too. Not every night – ‘the best food is the food you cook at home’ – but occasionally. (After we meet, I see on Instagram that English and McFeely have had takeaway pizzas with a bottle of white wine by the river for dinner.)
Jacket, shorts and headscarf, Armani. Earrings, Soru. Bag, Longchamp. Rings, Emily’s own
It all sounds great, really: eating loads of vegetables here, ordering takeaways there. But English has not always had such a happy, or easy, relationship with food.
She grew up on a council estate in Kempston, Bedfordshire, the second child in a family of five siblings. Her dad was a graphic designer and sign maker (‘He did the logos for David Lloyd gyms’) and her mum was a full-time mother. Her grandma – ‘Janet, an absolute boss’ – ran Cornfields, a local restaurant where she was head chef. When English was 15, she got her first job helping with food prep; Janet paid her £5 an hour for three hours every Sunday.
Cornfields taught her about cooking, as did being a child in ‘a very big family that was not necessarily in the easiest financial situation’. While her mum looked after three children under the age of three, a nine-year-old English started doing the family food shops at Tesco and would make enormous pots of chilli con carne for dinner.
Things changed when she was 16. English attended V Festival in Essex and was scouted to be a model for Asos. ‘I was their first in-house model. I loved it. I was nurtured. I was supported.’ After a few months, she signed with an agent and did jobs for retailers such as Debenhams and Accessorize. The work gave her ‘financial freedom’, and English went travelling for an entire summer. ‘When I came back my agent took my Polaroids and said: “We need to talk about your thighs. I think they’ll shoot better if we slim them down.” It was like a switch went off in my head.’
She googled ‘weight loss’ and followed diets. She stopped eating with her family. ‘I had a full-blown eating disorder, acutely, for six months. I wasn’t able to do anything. Even walking felt exhausting. My weight dropped and dropped and dropped. People think eating disorders are about what you look like, but it wasn’t. It became this OCD, obsessive, ritualistic thing that was like a control mechanism for me. Which is textbook.’ What did her parents think? ‘My mum wasn’t exposed to any sort of diet culture. She couldn’t understand it. She had no idea what to do.’
English remembers one afternoon, sitting in the garden with her siblings. Their mother had made them cheese rolls. ‘I look at this cheese roll and I have, like, a mental breakdown. I am going: “I can’t eat it.” And my mum is, like, “Please eat it.” And everyone else is just sitting in the garden, eating their cheese rolls. I realised at that point: “This is not normal. I should be able to eat a cheese roll with my family.”’ She quit modelling, found a psychiatrist and started cognitive behavioural therapy. A year later she began her nutrition degree.
I ask, then, what English thinks about Ozempic. She pauses. ‘So I know, and have, friends who are in their mid-40s, and Ozempic has changed their lives.’ She describes people who have ‘food noise’ – those constant and exhausting thoughts about food and calories. Taking Ozempic can silence it. ‘But the thing about Ozempic is it’s like sticking a plaster over a wound that needs stitches. As soon as you stop it, everything’s going to go back to the way it was before.’
She continues, ‘I think it’s given people an easy mechanism to change their bodies in a way that isn’t necessarily good for us. And we don’t know the long-term implications of it. My biggest issue with drastic weight loss is that people aren’t preserving their muscle mass, and that’s worrying. People don’t realise that the decisions they’re making now have consequences for when they’re older – when they’re frail and can’t walk up the stairs and they’re getting fractures and are unable to pick up their grandchildren.’
She’s also suspicious of the ‘intuitive eating’ movement – a term that was coined in 1995 by two dietitians, but has been recently popularised on social media. It encourages people to listen to their body and eat accordingly. ‘It’s sketchy, I think. Because a lot of people say: “Just eat intuitively,” not realising that people can suffer from dysregulation of hunger hormones, which means they’re always hungry.’ And if you are always hungry, English’s advice remains the same: eat enough veg, eat enough P&F. ‘It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.’
Not overcomplicating things is English’s bread and butter, or, I suppose, her protein and fibre. There are so many voices on the internet, all claiming to have nutritional answers, it’s hard to know who to believe. ‘If someone’s telling you something is going to change your life, and if that thing is expensive, well, that’s probably for their own gain. Fortunately, most of the best things in life are free: stressing less, walking more, breathing, sleeping.
‘Look, all people want is to be healthy and to cook food that makes them feel good. Because when we are healthy, we feel fun. We’ve got energy to laugh and socialise. We feel good. And feeling good is amazing. It’s actually amazing. It’s so good.’
EMILY’S EATS AND TREATS
Fruit or veg?
Veg.
Starter or pudding?
Both!
Best restaurant
Dorian in Notting Hill. I love it so much. Max Coen is one of the best chefs I’ve ever met.
Go-to dinner-party meal
My chicken lasagne. With a big side salad and homemade garlic bread. The secret is loads of chopped parsley and loads of garlic in the butter.
White wine or red wine?
Again, both.
Tea or coffee?
Tea.
Veggie sausages: heaven or hell?
I really like the Linda McCartney ones. I really do.
Favourite foodie figure
Meredith Hayden. She’s this generation’s Martha Stewart.
Bougiest restaurant experience
The Ritz. I said this on [the foodie interview show] Topjaw and everyone rinsed me. But they’ve all come round to it. It’s got two Michelin stars. It’s charming, brilliant, pure theatre and worth every penny.
Fashion director: Sophie Dearden-Howell.
Picture director: Ester Malloy.
Make-up: Katie Daisy.
Hair: Jay Pinder at PRTNRS using Color Wow and Cliphair.
With thanks to Newington Greens at All Greens.
