YouTube fitness guru Emi Wong on how an unhealthy party girl turned her life around

Hongkonger Emi Wong has been posting popular YouTube workout videos on fitness and hygiene during the virus

Newly married, she talks about how her husband’s support helped her stop her unhealthy partying and overcome her eating disorder

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Hong Kong YouTube fitness guru Emi Wong. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Published: 1:00am, 26 Feb 2020Updated: 6:46pm, 26 Feb 2020

Lunges with a floor sweeper. Squats with laundry detergent bottles. Just weeks before her wedding, YouTube fitness guru Emi Wong released an Instagram video during the coronavirus outbreak with a healthy reminder for her 1.6 million subscribers. “Keep both hygiene and immune system up,” read the captions on her video, showing that cleaning and exercises can go hand in hand.

Many people in Hong Kong are working from home and avoiding crowds to reduce the likelihood of infection. But being homebound can be boring, as Wong’s followers have complained. Even as she was counting down the days to her private wedding in Thailand to Chad, the certified personal trainer posted this clip: “Time is not an excuse any more. Instead of lying around and watching TV, get up and get your endorphins going.”

While she and Chad expressed concerns their two years of nuptial planning would be disrupted by the global health emergency, she kept up the stream of encouraging advice and demonstrations. Wong’s workout videos are the most in-demand content on the YouTube channel she launched in 2017. A 10-minute clip on a full body high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout clocked over 8 million views, for example.

“Not everyone has the luxury of both time and money to spend hours in the gym every single day, but a lot of my workout videos are 10 to 20 minutes,” and anyone can do them at home, Wong says, to explain her channel’s popularity.

Emi Wong married Chad in Thailand. Photo: Handout

Wong tied the knot in a lavish but low-key ceremony in Phuket early this week despite the odds against it going ahead. She wasn’t always the picture of health that shines through in her videos, though; Wong underwent a lifestyle transformation that led to her online success.

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