If you are feeling even remotely less than your best and prettiest self, I advise you not to sit next to Saskia Gregson-Williams. The Hampshire 17-year-old is a dancer about to take her first major job with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago and a clean-eating blogger with her own range of Naturally Sassy energy bars (available soon from Ocado) and a new cookbook that excludes almost everything — meat, fish, gluten, dairy — somehow without becoming utterly joyless.
In person Sassy, as her friends and family call her, is proof of her own chia-seed pudding recipes: she looks like a cross between Natalie Portman and Jane March, all glossy hair, lustrous skin, porcelain teeth and a frank, sunny demeanour that fizzes up through her writing.
Her assistant suggested reining in the number of exclamation marks in her cookbook: “She said: ‘It sounds like you’re speaking in a really high-pitched voice all the time.’ I said, that’s because I AM!” Oh, and her maternal grandfather was the Radio 2 favourite David Jacobs, her mother is a beautiful former actress and organic guru, and her dad’s a film composer who plays in a scratch band with Adam Sandler. Jealous?
To be fair to Gregson-Williams, getting here has involved hard slog and determination. She has been training in classical dance since she was 7, practising up to eight hours a day, and finished her GCSEs at 14 to devote more time to it. She says that dance is “a lovely industry but also a horrible and hard one” and it did not repay her early devotion kindly.
“As a dancer, the primary thing everyone suffers is that you need lots of energy but also need to look good in a leotard,” she says. “Everyone ate small amounts of really bad food. For me that meant sugar — you don’t need to eat that much to get an energy hit. That made me feel terrible and lethargic all the time.
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“As well as not feeling my best while I was dancing I had burnout because I wasn’t eating enough and my muscles were in a terrible way because they were inflamed. I was constantly getting injured and I am still battling today with an injury I got when I was 13. I was so tired I went over on my ankle and ripped one of the tendons. Since then I have been in and out of rehab facilities, getting steroid injections.’”
Alongside this, she had “chronic eczema since I was young. It was all over my neck and my body and I was incredibly insecure about it. Being in a leotard all day, you can’t really hide much.”
At 14, Gregson-Williams took a job in a show promoting classical ballet in Morocco. “I was injured but pushed myself through it and got a really bad dose of campylobacter. It wasn’t diagnosed — to my doctor I was just a ballet dancer who was getting very skinny — but I couldn’t hold anything in my stomach, was feeling so depleted and exhausted.”
Her mother and her half-sister Sadie — who runs the activewear and wellbeing website Hip and Healthy — had always been on at her to eat a better diet, and loaded her with books on wellness and healthy eating.
She read them, began searching online — and this is the part you may wish to take with a grain of sodium substitute — “and started to see this link between food, inflammation and how I was feeling. You can have anything from acne to an injury like I had or even cancer, and inflammation is often a contributing factor, or the factor, that makes it a problem. And I was eating an inflammation-prone diet.”
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Initially she excluded dairy products from her diet, as her mother and sister did, to see if it helped her eczema; this meant giving up lots of refined sugar, such as chocolate. “Within two months, my eczema started to go,” she says, “and my energy levels started to come up.”
She offered to compose healthy recipes for Sadie’s website; the first involved laying a pre-cooked smoked trout fillet on a bed of pre-cooked lentils. “I realised I had to up my game, and the discipline I had for ballet I began to get for food.”
She took online courses in nutrition from Oxford Learning College, “the first focusing on the basics, the second on vegan and vegetarian food, but also finding out why [we think] meat is so good and what we might be lacking if we didn’t eat it”.
Much of her studying was done on the 5.45am train she took to reach her 8am dance class at Pineapple Dance Studios in London. At home, she took over the family kitchen to test each recipe rigorously. The gluten-free bread took a long time to get right; the strawberry and tahini scones were a disaster. Six months into writing for Hip and Healthy, she stopped eating meat and gradually went completely vegan.
Gregson-Williams started taking her vegan brownies into the studio where “the other dancers were intrigued”, and began to pick up an online following among dancers, athletes and but also teens. One of her proudest moments came when Lauren Cuthbertson, a Royal Ballet principal dancer she idolised, messaged her on Facebook to say she had converted to a largely plant-based diet.
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She set up the Naturally Sassy blog with the encouragement of her half-brother Tom, “who’s a bit of a hippy”, but the aim was always to produce her own food range. The cookbook was a natural development of an e-book produced with Sadie three years ago.
Her book is upbeat, chatty, can-do. “A nut-milk bag comes in handy if you’re making your own dairy-free milk,” she writes. Despite the huge number of foods excluded, it does not come across as prescriptive; her proposals for larder-stocking and recipe-planning are eminently practical. Some of her recipes sound positively enticing even to my unreconstructed palate, such as pho courgette noodle soup and raw pad thai. (The lentil cottage pie not so much, although Gregson-Williams claims it went down well with the fussy, boozy young banker with whom she briefly shared a flat.)
There are even beauty preparations in the book — coconut sugar lip scrub, avocado face mask — and tips for a healthier lifestyle, such as embracing hot yoga and hot baths. Not that she is trying to set herself up as a lifestyle guru, you understand, much less to represent herself as medically qualified or a “top nutritionist”, but if she can persuade a few people to try chlorella powder or spirulina, why not?
Even among the tribes of youthful vloggers and teen-preneurs, Gregson-Williams strikes me as unusually self-possessed and focused, possibly because of her upbringing. Her mother, Emma, gave up acting when she met her father, Rupert (Sadie and Tom are from a previous relationship), and the family moved to Los Angeles for her father’s film work when she was 7. Gregson-Williams, who was used to her dad messing around with scruffy musicians in his Hampshire garage, suddenly saw him jamming at a party with Adam Sandler. “Dad does the music for all his films,” she says blithely, “and he thinks he can sing.”
Her father sent her to the snotty Village School in the Palisades, where “everyone was a celebrity’s daughter, asking how big our house was”, and she still has close friends from that period, including one now dancing with the New York City Ballet.
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These US connections make her move to Chicago less daunting. Los Angeles “feels like home” because it’s where she first got properly passionate and disciplined about dance, thanks to a fierce but inspiring Russian tutor: “He had no English, but I picked up Russian words: mostly ‘idiot’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘repeat’ and ‘again’.”
The Gregson-Williamses moved back to Hampshire when she was 12. One benefit, she adds, of growing up in an arty family is that they are not fazed if you tell them you want to devote your life to ballet, do your GCSEs at 14, then launch a food blog and recipe brand.
Does she stray from her nun-like path of pliés, arabesques and food-exclusion? Might there be a night she lurches, famished, on to the Chicago streets after a performance and wolfs down a dirty hot dog? No, she says: “The only thing I really crave and have is coffee — you just can’t replicate it with a matcha shot — and if all you’re doing is having a coffee I think that’s the least of your worries.” She is single and doesn’t drink or smoke. The PR for the cookbook pipes up for the first time: “She’s still only 17.” Bloody hell, yes she is.
Naturally Sassy by Saskia Gregson-Williams is published by Ebury Press, £16.99