It’s fair to say that Kiwi sisters Julia and Libby Matthews are hometown heroes of the clean-eating community, after starting their eponymous blog back in 2012. Their timing was perfect – having created a website to answer their friends’ numerous health and wellbeing questions, they quickly realised they were onto something when their page – initially just a Tumblr – started to garner a big following.
“We got 100 ‘likes’, and we were so excited,” says Julia. “Our first post was about a green smoothie. No one we knew was doing anything like it – and the fact that Libby was studying nutrition really helped. We weren’t just like, ‘Oh, I want to be a health blogger.’”
In the years that have followed, the rise of health and fitness websites and Instagram pages has been astronomical. Green smoothies are now mainstream, available at your local café. Libby, 27, and Julia, 29, have become synonymous with clean eating in New Zealand and have a massive online following to show for it: 42,000 follows on Instagram, 48, 000 followers on Facebook. And now they’ve channelled their efforts into a cookbook: Julia and Libby’s Wholefood Kitchen. On a sunny Auckland day, Good Health Choices sat down with the pair to talk wellbeing, clean-eating criticism and what’s next.
When did you decide you wanted to do a cookbook?
Libby: When we started our page, we always thought it would be amazing to do a cookbook, so this is a dream come true. We were approached two years ago, but because we were both studying full time, we knew we didn’t have the time. But then a year later I’d finished studying and Julia was studying part-time, so we thought, ‘Why not do it now?’
To read the rest of this story, including the girls’ food philosophy and their gluten-free recipes, pick up a copy of Good Health Choices magazine on stands now with Julia and Libby on the cover.
