Say hello to Lilly Sabri – one of the fastest growing female fitness influencers and serial entrepreneur who’s creating an empire from what she says is the ‘biggest graft of her life’ so far.

Having recently launched a fitness app, alongside a growing product line featuring supplements, workout gear, and soon-to-be-unveiled pancakes, protein bars, and oats… we’ve been lucky enough to get the inside scoop from this inspirational entrepreneur.

Lily, so lovely to meet you! For the readers that do and don’t know you, tell us about yourself and your passion for fitness.

For me fitness truly is a lifestyle, I’ve loved it ever since I was a child. I swam from a very young age, went and qualified for nationals, then went into tennis and athletics. This passion carried on well into university due to the pure love and enjoyment it brought me, as well as that personal challenge associated with fitness.

On that note, where did it all begin for you?

It’s a crazy story really, but it all began at a women’s health festival: BE:FIT 2017, I ended up meeting boyfriend Alex there and he said to me that I should be on Youtube because of my personality and energy levels. That was 7 years ago and I remember thinking that’s for the under 18’s tech savvy Influencers, but maybe it could work for me.

At the time I had zero social media accounts, was working gruelling hours with the combined workload of full day shifts at the NHS University Hospital Lewisham, alongside evenings and weekends working at football clubs in the area, including Barnet F.C. Ladies, and Barnet F.C. and Watford F.C.

I loved being a physiotherapist, it was an incredible start to my career in elite sports and helping people on their journey to fitness.

How have you found the last year and a half since COVID hit with everybody stuck behind the same four walls? Did you see an audience shift?

Absolutely, it’s the biggest shift I’ve ever seen. It went wild, 15-months ago when we started to get into our groove we were at 30,000 subscribers. The past year still hasn’t sunk in for both good and bad reasons. You want that time with loved ones but you simply can’t, yet your business endeavours are growing at such a speed you can’t not contain the excitement and enthusiasm to set more goals and help more people. Especially the Famillia.

Yes, ‘the Familia’, tell us about them! They are at the heart of you and your business

Honestly having the Familia is the best thing in the world, they give live feedback to me, I feel like we are really in it together. It’s so touching that 4 or 5 years on they are still active, still engaging, still asking questions, learning and supporting each other.

What piece of advice would you give to yourself in your 20’s if you could go back and do it all again?

To stop caring about the judgments. I come from a family of lawyers, Doctors, teachers, and it’s a battle of a journey, but if you have a passion regardless of University or others opinions don’t you dare dampen it.

Tell us about your journey to self-acceptance in your 30’s?

Although I’m very extroverted and outgoing when teaching and meeting people, I’m an Introverted extrovert which means the other side of me is very self doubt heavy and it’s meant I’ve had to learn self-assurance and true acceptance.

In 2017 your Instagram was hacked, how did you handle this experience and what did you learn from it?

The horror is that I was at a wedding the day before and I was confused about the hack as I’d just started making money from my 100k followers. The longer it went on the scarier it was and it’s truly soul destroying to know that something you’ve worked so so hard on was gone in seconds. Luckily, Alex worked with me and we managed to get it back.

We love the LEAN App, you’ve expanded to supplements, home workout equipment and proteins, so what’s next for you/on the bucket list?

Great question. So, I have several huge goals set:

1) The app, to help people scale and reach people
2) To secure the Lean with Lily domain name, which is hilarious because I was stressing that somebody had bought it and it actually turned out I’d purchased it 6 years ago to make sure somebody else didn’t snap it up.
3) My food line, it’s my absolute baby. Food brings people together, I love experimenting with food and food is an amazing form of self love. I also have a really positive relationship with food, a healthy one and believe that nasties do not belong in good, healthy food.
4) A book, because it’s always been a pipe dream.

Do you have a go-to morning routine that you can share with our readers?

Absolutely! Minne has got to be a juice/smoothie, I missed my juicer so much that I actually bought one while we were away. My go to is a double shot of coffee, nut milk and vanilla protein. Another goody is Nut butter, frozen banana, carrot and apple.

Then journaling for up to 15-minutes because even if it’s 15 minutes of me frantically scribbling down what’s in my head, it’s done, it’s down on paper and I’m happy to have it there. Journaling is amazing.

Amazing! Smoothies are fab, and I know you’re big on mood food so what’s next for your food range?

Well, I can tell you food isn’t easy. It took me 34 attempts to get the porridge right but the food range is incredibly exciting. It’s been designed by the familia for the famila, their likes, their dislikes etc.

We took a big risk, myself and Alex, 1.5 years ago by taking our savings for 10 months to cover everything in order to launch the food business, but we know it’s worth it. Our plant based bars will launch first.

After years of slogging away on YouTube it’s safe to say that Lily has now got her footing and is on an incredible journey to building her businesses! The surge to 3M subs in just 14-months is down to pure hard graft and no shortcuts!

Watch this space as we’ll have a sneak preview of Lily’s new product launch over the coming weeks.

You can check out Lilly’s Lean app, Lean supplements, and more on her Lean with Lilly website.

Written by Kaya Cheshire for Luxuria Lifestyle London and International