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 clot.