Alice Liveing: “We didn’t realise we were promoting disordered eating to the nth degree.” Photo / Getty Images
Alice Liveing: “We didn’t realise we were promoting disordered eating to the nth degree.” Photo / Getty Images
Alice Liveing became famous for ‘clean’ eating and hardcore workouts, but behind the scenes she was dangerously underweight. I hold my hands up - I was wrong, she says.
Alice Liveing will never forget the day she selected an old favourite dress to wear to an event. “It was short,navy blue, with feathers round the bottom. I’d worn it to my first film premiere and remember feeling amazing in it,” she says. “But this time it wouldn’t go over my bum. It was a very conflicting moment: ‘Oh, I didn’t realise I’d changed that much.’ I had to grieve the body I was losing and that had been put on a pedestal, but also realise how much happier I was now.”
Liveing’s complex emotions were understandable. A decade ago Clean Eating Alice, to use her Instagram handle at the time, was one of our biggest “fitfluencers”, forever flaunting her minuscule, muscular frame to her 700,000-odd followers, yet never hinting at the toll maintaining that physique was taking on her physical and mental health. “My skin looked terrible, my hair was falling out, I was sleeping badly, always in a bad mood, had low energy levels, poor cognitive functioning,” she says. “But for so long I was oblivious to what I was doing to myself — or rather I didn’t want to believe it.”
After all, “Alice-with-the-abs”, as she was known, was attracting money, deals for cookbooks that overtook Jamie and Nigella in the charts, endless invitations to glamorous events and lucrative clothing deals. “At weekends I remember being exhausted from undereating and overexercising, but still going to the gym, then putting make-up on and standing in front of the mirror and taking a photo to show off my body. Then I’d collapse on the bed and watch the comments come in, ‘OMG! Body goals!’ Those made me feel on top of the world. But, looking back, in some photos I look so unwell.”
Her periods stopped, but for a couple of years she ignored this until, aged 25 and having met Paddy, now her husband, she decided to consult a fertility specialist. “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. I needed someone to shake me up and say what you’re doing isn’t OK because before that I’d been like a deer in the headlights.”
Knowing a family was more important to her than a tiny body mass index, Liveing embarked on a slow about-turn to gain 10kg, cutting back on exercise and consuming more calories. “But I definitely had difficult days when I restricted my food and fell back into bad behaviours.”
She also had to reconcile herself with losing the ultra-honed identity that had bought her so much kudos. In 2017 she dropped her Clean Eating tag in favour of her real name. Recently she posted a shot of her former ultra-ripped physique next to one of her today, healthy but six-pack free. “I’m definitely not claiming to speak for the body-positivity movement, I still have a very slim body, but that post really brought home how I’ve had to learn to love other parts of myself, to have confidence there’s more to me than being the smallest person in the room.”
We’re sitting in a café near Liveing’s home in Fulham, southwest London. Radiating health, she’s chatty and upbeat in a smart pink trouser suit. Now 31, she works as a personal trainer and runs her Give Me Strength app, focusing on training for long-term health rather than #beachbodygoalz. She has just published her fourth book, Give Me Strength. As well as offering genuine fitness tips garnered from her time as a personal trainer, it outlines how — despite having no nutritional qualifications — she found herself preaching potentially “excessive, addictive” habits to her unquestioning followers.
“It was often painful to write, but I bear a lot of responsibility for perpetuating a potentially damaging narrative. I was so wrapped up in that world that I didn’t recognise what I was doing was wrong, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve been brought up to own my mistakes,” she says.
Liveing was far from alone in espousing these hardcore regimes, with a generation of influencers making fortunes pushing carb, gluten and sugar-free diets (a culture many now distance themselves from) and/or hardcore workouts.
“We celebrate health and fitness for good reasons, but we didn’t realise we were promoting disordered eating to the nth degree. It was like a badge of honour — you would do things like put courgette in your porridge, totally weird but at the time really normalised.”
What no one knew was that Liveing was training to the point of exhaustion, avoiding social occasions that involved food or, if she had to attend, inventing excuses about already having eaten, scanning menus in advance to pick the lowest-calorie options. “I was constantly preoccupied with food. It becomes very isolating.”
Yet on social media she would post, for example, a shot of the pizza her friends had ordered, rather than the undressed salad she had chosen. “That’s the bit I feel guiltiest about — I was lying, being disingenuous, trying to get across this image of ‘Everything’s fine, I don’t have food issues!’ " She says “without doubt” many other health influencers are using the same ruses to conceal eating disorders. “It’s smoke and mirrors, it makes me so angry and frustrated, you don’t have to post what you eat at all — that’s far better than saying, ‘I had five doughnuts!’ when you didn’t.”
“A huge number of influencers and content creators have difficult relationships with food," says Liveing. Photo / Getty Images
Having grown up in Buckinghamshire, at 18 Liveing won a place at theatre school, where initially she subsisted like most students on beer and chocolate. But at the end of her first year one of her tutors asked: “Do you want to have a serious career in this industry? Because if so you need to be conscious of your body and right now you’re not nailing it.”
She immediately began dieting, using knowledge gleaned from Google, and exercising — taking a basic personal training course. Within months she had dropped from a size 12 to an 8. “It was massively celebrated: ‘Wow, you’ve lost weight, come and stand at the front of my class! We’ll put you up for good roles.’ My friends’ reaction was ‘Oh my God, she’s so disciplined!’ even though I wasn’t eating anything like enough.”
The Instagram she’d started to hold her training regime to account rapidly amassed followers and she was offered a two-book deal. “I was 22 with no qualifications to justify me writing a book, but I was being offered life-changing money. Once the dust had settled I had a feeling I was out of my depth but I’d signed a contract and everything snowballed.”
After her fertility reality check, Liveing had a lot of therapy and actively distanced herself from the “fitspo” crowd. “A huge number of influencers and content creators have difficult relationships with food — I don’t blame them because they’re a product of an environment where they’re told they’re amazing for looking a certain way. But I can’t be in those spaces, I feel very triggered.”
She has unfollowed anyone who makes her feel bad about herself. “What’s more important, upsetting someone for a day, or changing my whole life?” she says.
She still eats a “relatively” balanced diet and trains — the difference is everything now is in moderation: when she’s tired she’ll have a day off exercising, if she fancies an ice cream, she’ll eat one. After we talk, she’s off to meet friends at a dinner for Paddy’s birthday. Previously she would have been tying herself in knots about such an occasion, now she’s excited. “I haven’t looked at the menu in advance. I’ll have dessert and won’t think twice about it. There’s joy in my life again.
