When life gets busy, cookbook author Emma Petersen knows how hard it can be to get a healthy balance with food.
After studying history at Leeds, where she started a food blog, Petersen, now 29, took a law conversion course and won a two-year training contract with a city law firm. “Those sort of courses are like gold dust, and it was always my plan to be a lawyer, earn loads of money and retire early,” she says.
But achieving that six-figure salary required sacrifices.
Fitness fan Petersen, who has completed Ironman Triathlons, says: “Suddenly I had no time to cook, was living off Deliveroo, and didn’t have time to train. I started to get depressed.”
The job itself was manageable, but the truth was Petersen couldn’t let her “social media baby” go.
“I burnt out because I was juggling being a lawyer with a social media influencer and ended up doing both badly. So I quit the day I qualified.”
Now, Petersen has 813,000 followers on her Instagram account, and she’s following up her Sunday Times bestselling debut cookbook (2025’s Healthyish) with her second offering: Healthyish High Protein. It’s all about hitting your daily protein and fibre targets naturally with easy meal preps and nutrient counts.
She suggests the current craze for adding protein to everyday foods isn’t always necessary, saying: “I’m not anti-protein powder but we should just cook properly. There’s protein in everything from eggs, cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, lentils and tofu… To meat, fish and dairy.” Petersen adds that her recipes use “everyday ingredients in clever ways”, making for a “more natural way” to add protein to your diet.
She points out everyone benefits from more protein and fibre, whether they train or not. “Protein helps repair and rebuild muscles and cells, and fibre slows digestion and helps you feel fuller,” she explains.
Londoner Petersen, who has just moved to the countryside with her fiance Matthew and is in the process of renovating an 170-year-old cottage, shares her top tips on how to make healthy food exciting…
1. Max out on more
We’ve been taught that eating healthily means eating less – less carbs, less fat, less calories, less sugar. But Petersen says: “A more mentally healthy way would be to add to it to make it more balanced.
“If you have a slice of toast with a smear of butter on it, you’ll be hungry an hour later. But a slice of toast with chia jam and peanut butter gives you healthy fats and carbs.
“It’s not about taking away – it’s adding things that make it a well-rounded meal.”
2. Build your breakfast
Petersen makes her own granola every week. “My recipe for vanilla cardamom and apricot granola can be substituted with whatever store cupboard ingredients you have. No apricots? Use raisins.”
And she explains how easy it is to get your daily nutrition requirement. “The granola has seven grams of protein, and with yogurt and other bits, you’ve got a high protein breakfast.
“It also has five grams of fibre – a fifth of your daily intake – and that’s before adding fresh fruit.”
3. Get stuffed at lunch
Petersen is all about easy lunches, particularly sandwiches and pitas you can stuff with an array of fillings.
Her favourite filling – and a recipe that features in her latest cookbook, is “a chicken salad with yummy pickles and dill, which are all chopped together so it’s spoonable. You can make a big bowl of the filling and keep it in the fridge.
“And if you want to make your own carbs from scratch, I have a two-ingredient bagel recipe – just yogurt and self-raising flour.”
4. Make healthy food tasty
As a massive lifelong foodie, Petersen is on a mission to make healthy food taste good.
“No one’s gonna get excited about a plate of plain steamed vegetables,” she says. “But if you roast them until they’re crispy and then add seasoning, feta and something crunchy like in my cookbook, you’ll eat the whole tray!”
5. Leave room for the ‘ish’
Not everything we eat needs to be nutritionally perfect. “If you’re craving pasta – eat pasta. Don’t try and feed yourself a salad,” says Petersen. She suggests making your pasta a bit more balanced and satisfying.
”Start with what you love rather than overhauling the way that you eat, and then build it from there. Try to be healthy but leave room for the ‘ish’.”
6. Guilt’s out, happy’s in
Everything in moderation, especially moderation. Petersen believes “it’s just about finding that middle ground between food that makes you feel good, and food that makes you feel good eating it”.
She says, “Don’t feel guilty and think, ‘Oh I need to start again tomorrow.’ If you had a Mars Bar and it made you happy – success. It might not have fuelled you, but you must have enjoyable things.”
And she takes her own advice. “Hey, look, what did we do on our first night in the cottage? Did I cook from scratch? No, I got a Chinese takeaway!”
Healthyish High Protein by Emma Petersen is published in hardback by Pavilion, priced £22. Photography by Lucy Richards. Available now.
