Alice Liveing, a fitness influencer who encourages her clients to build strength above how they look, has revealed her regrets at once making her living by being a ‘clean eating’ influencer.
The Instagram star, 30, and author of Give Me Strength, now runs a fitness programme which focuses on how clients can build muscles to become stronger over and above aesthetic incentives.
However she is also a previous author of The Body Bible, which she published under the name ‘Clean Eating Alice’, which was marketed as ‘a guide to embracing a better way of living’.
Now, speaking to The Sunday Times, the London-based influencer has reflected on her previous ‘Alice-with-the-abs’ persona, which saw her front her Instagram content with a muscular yet tiny frame – revealing that her weight dropped so low, her periods stopped.
Fitness influencer Alice Liveing, who is based in London, has revealed her regrets over once penning a ‘Body Bible’ dedicated to clean eating
Despite becoming a hugely successful cookbook author and receiving publishing deals that celebrity chefs would envy, Alice has revealed that her dedication to so-called ‘clean eating; left her sleeping badly, with thinning hair and ‘terrible’ skin.
She has revealed she was 25 years old and had just met her now-husband Paddy when she visited a fertility specialist to find out why her periods had stopped; but she was shocked by the doctor’s assessment.
‘She told me, ‘You’re not eating enough and doing too much exercise, your body is in a state of stress and if you carry on you won’t be able to have children.’ Those words changed my life,’ Alice said.
Following the news she might struggle to conceive, Alice began following a programme to gain 10kg which saw her exercising less and eating more. However, as she slowly put on weight, the influencer has revealed she struggled to always stick to the programme and fell back into ‘bad behaviours’ from time to time.
Alice, who now dedicates her career to helping people be healthy whatever their weight, admits her former Instagram persona was ‘smoke and mirrors’
The fitness influencer (pictured at last year’s National Television Awards) now runs the Give Me Strength app
As she changed her life, so too did her career, and Alice dropped ‘Clean Eating’ from her Instagram title in 2017.
Now Liveing’s page is full off encouraging images of a woman of a healthy weight encouraging others to improve their strength and fuel their bodies accordingly.
She has just penned her newest book, Give Me Strength (which is also the name of her fitness app) but has revealed the process of writing it was ‘painful’.
Alice said: ‘I bear a lot of responsibility for perpetuating a potentially damaging narrative.’
She added she didn’t realise what she was doing was ‘wrong’ but added she can now ‘own her mistakes’.
Looking back on her life as Clean Eating Alice, the influencer revealed she was often exhausted and in private, avoided social events that involved food or made excuses about having already eaten when she did attend dinners.
It was around the time Alice met her now-husband Paddy (right) that she was given a warning she might struggle to have children. Pictured with Marvin and Rochelle Humes at Wimbledon
Despite this, Alice would pretend differently online and sometimes posted snaps of enjoying pizza with her friends on Instagram (even though she had ordered a salad for dinner).
‘That’s the bit I feel guiltiest about — I was lying, being disingenuous,’ she said, adding that her previous Instagram life was ‘smoke and mirrors’.
The influencer tracks her issues with food back to being a student at theatre school.
After a year of boozing and eating junk food, as many students do, Alice claims one of her tutors told her she should be ‘conscious of her body’ if she ever wanted to pursue showbusiness seriously.
The words clearly stung as Alice took a personal training course, began dieting, and dropped from a size 12 to a size 8 within months.
She opened her Instagram account alongside her body transformation and it rapidly gained several thousands of followers. At 22, and, in her words, with ‘no qualifications to write a book’, she was offered ‘life changing money’ to author books on clean eating and weight loss.
Now, as Alice embarks upon a new mission encouraging people to be healthy rather than to ‘eat clean’ she has suggested that some people within the ‘fitspo’ community are struggling with the same food issues she once had to deal with.
However for Alice herself, she finds ‘joy’ in both life and food.