Dr Emilia Thompson RNutr

About

PhD, MSc, RNutr

I’m a nutritionist, educator and coach specialising in the intersection of nutrition, behaviour change and relationship with food.

My work focuses on helping people improve their health, body composition and.or performance without sacrificing their mental wellbeing or relationship with food.

For many people, food and exercise start out as tools for improving health. But over time they can quietly become sources of pressure, control, guilt or anxiety. For others, food has been a source of comfort, stress or frustration for their entire lives and, despite having discipline in all other areas of life, something that they struggle to get a handle on.

The work I do through coaching, education and speaking is about helping people move towards sustainable health, psychological flexibility and a more peaceful relationship with their body and food.

My story

Like many people working in this space, my interest in nutrition didn’t begin academically.

It began personally.

As a teenager I struggled with cycles of restriction, binge eating and body preoccupation. What started as an attempt to improve my health gradually became something much more complicated - a relationship with food and exercise that felt increasingly rigid and difficult to manage. What felt at the time like something I was doing to control my body, was something I later realised was an attempt to regulate my feelings and find control in lifes uncertainty.

During my early twenties I moved into competitive bodybuilding. For four years I competed internationally and did pretty well, finishing 2nd in Britain.

From the outside, it looked like discipline and achievement.

Behind the scenes, however, the extreme dieting, body scrutiny and weight cycling reinforced many of the patterns I had been trying to escape. Disordered eating in bodybuilding was glorified, as it continues to be within the fitness space.

That experience was a turning point.

It forced me to ask a difficult question:

What good is exercise and ‘eating well’ when it detracts from your overall health and wellbeing?

That question ultimately shaped the direction of my career.

Alongside my academic training in exercise physiology and nutrition, I began exploring approaches that addressed the psychological and behavioural aspects of eating and health.

This led me to study mindfulness and compassion-based approaches to behaviour change and to complete training as a meditation teacher.

These experiences helped me see something clearly:

Most health approaches focus only on what people should do.

Very few address why behaviour feels so difficult to change in the first place.

Understanding behaviour, emotional regulation, habit patterns and self-compassion is essential if we want health changes that actually last.

That perspective now sits at the centre of my work.

My work today

Today my work spans four main areas.

Coaching

Through the ETPHD Coaching team we support clients to improve their relationship with food, body and movement using compassionate, evidence-based coaching.

Our work focuses on helping people move away from cycles of binge and/or restriction, food noise and inconsistency towards sustainable habits and long-term wellbeing, whilst supporting hormonal health and navigating the misinformation in women’s health and fitness.

You can explore this work through Balanced Blueprint, our flagship coaching programme.

Education

Alongside Emma Storey-Gordon, I co-created EIQ Nutrition, an evidence-based education platform designed to improve the quality and safety of nutrition coaching within the health and fitness industry.

Our goal is to help coaches better understand:

eating behaviour
disordered eating
behaviour change
ethical nutrition coaching

And support their clients in getting the best results possible.

Thousands of coaches and practitioners have now completed EIQ Nutrition programmes.

Mentoring

Through ETPHD Mentoring, I work directly with nutritionists, coaches and practitioners who want to build confident, ethical and effective practices.

Mentoring focuses on building an ethical and values-aligned business, whilst developing the skills that sit beyond basic nutrition knowledge, including:

ethical marketing
building sustainable systems
creating a values-aligned business
creating a coaching method that breaks the mould
working safely with disordered eating and complex client relationships with food
developing confidence as a practitioner and business owner

The aim is to help practitioners deliver better, safer support for the people they work with and have the impact they deserve