‘I devoted life to fitness for 10 years – worrying changes hit body’

Alice Liveing first started sharing her fitness journey online 10 years ago but she had no idea the toll it would take on her body. The then 22-year-old was among the first of the fitness influencers on social media platform Instagram, known as “fitfluencers”.

To begin with she used the site to share healthy recipes with her followers, before branching out into fitness tips and workout routines, ultimately gaining more than half a million fans. Alice, from Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire, also posted pictures of herself to monitor her progress with her audience often praising the way she looked.

Appearing on ITV ’s This Morning today she shared a warning with presenters Cat Deely and Ben Shepherd. The now 31-year-old explained: “I’m sure anyone knows and can attest to the fact that if you lose a bit of weight, the first thing that people say to you is, ‘Oh, you look amazing’, and, ‘You look great’.

“And that can be really nice. And suddenly when you start hearing that a lot, it kind of feeds into that nice, happy feeling of validation.”

Alice said she started her journey with the best intentions. “When it comes to pursuing a healthy lifestyle, we will still start out with the best intentions,” she said.

“You want to eat well, you want to move your body. There’s nothing wrong with those things.” But her lifestyle started to become too extreme, leaving her “ill”.

Alice continued: “I think that many people, and I’ve spoken to so many women across the years, kind of go down the same path where you start to get a little bit connected to doing more and then doing more. What we know about health and fitness is more doesn’t always equal better.

“You can do too much exercise, you can eat too little to fuel your body. And so understanding that there is that tipping point, you know, yes, those things matter, but actually going too far with them can actually take you in the opposite direction.”

Over this time Alice, who is a fully qualified personal trainer, lost a lot of weight and revealed she was eating so little that her menstrual cycle actually stopped. Comparing a photo of herself at the peak of her exercise addiction to now, she commented: “We mustn’t take how someone looks as a kind of connection to how they actually are operating health wise.

“So in the photo on the left, I actually didn’t have a menstrual cycle. And that was something that I lost as a result of my body being under too much stress and struggling with the amount of exercise that I was doing and also just not eating enough to fuel my body.”

Now Alice is focused on eating the right foods to fuel her body and using exercise as a tool for strength, something she details in her new book, Give Me Strength.

She said: “I think that we must realise that, you know, finding a place that’s in the middle. Yes, exercise matters. I’m sat here as a personal trainer, and I’m obviously going to tell you that moving your body is important and that’s a crucial part of the book, but also doing it in a healthy and sustainable way for the long term.

“You know, I want people that come to me to train for the rest of their life, not just to look good on the beach this summer. And so it’s about trying to give people reasons to connect to exercise in a healthy and positive way. That doesn’t mean that they fall into the mistakes that I did when I was in that place.”

Alice added: “I sit here as someone who’s tried to very much own the fact that I got it wrong. The book is, is I guess lifting the lid on a lot of that stuff and trying to say, look, I could have done better and here’s how and actually because of what I’ve gone through here’s how I think that things can change for the better.”