I used to be a well being guru – however acquired so skinny my hair fell out

Even the sight of her hair clogging the brush, falling out in clumps, failed to make Alice Liveing stop and ponder her lifestyle.

When brain fog clouded her memory, making it hard to remember the dance routines for the musical theatre shows in which the actress and singer performed, she did not link it to the extreme form of eating she was becoming famous for.

Indeed, on the surface, ‘Clean Eating Alice’ — her brand on social media — was nothing but a huge success. As an online influencer, she was attracting thousands of followers and significant sponsorship, with regular social media posts of the skinny, toned physique so many envied and aspired to. And yet, behind the scenes, she was exercising for hours on end to achieve highly pronounced abs, and restricting her calorie intake to just 1,300 a day.

The clean-eating message she promoted online had, in real life, turned into ‘orthorexia’, an obsessive eating disorder in which sufferers consume only ‘pure foods’ — in Alice’s case this meant a diet of lean proteins and steamed vegetables — dismissing meals that contain anything ‘impure’ and missing out on vital nutrients.

While Alice was scooping up followers by posting endless pictures of seemingly-healthy dishes of chicken, eggs and vegetables, with not a speck of oil, sauce or fat, her body weight was dropping so fast, her periods stopped.

‘Anyone looking at me from the outside when I was at the height of my “success” in 2018 must have thought I had made it,’ says Alice, 31. ‘I had accrued an incredible Instagram following of more than 600,000 and I felt like a “somebody” at last.

‘With that came exciting brand collaborations, invitations to incredible events and opportunities out of my wildest dreams. The world of social media success can be a crazy one, and my feet barely seemed to touch the ground as opportunity after opportunity came in.

‘I flew first-class to New York with Gap, I partied in the Hamptons in the U.S., I attended movie premieres, I released a clothing collection with Primark — I even got to interview Louis Theroux. I was living every twentysomething’s dream and, for a while, I convinced myself I was happy with everything I’d achieved.’

And yet it was all an illusion.

In a new book out this week, Give Me Strength, Alice credits a piece published online by the Mail six years ago for the realisation that her ‘clean eating’ regime might be damaging not only to her but to her followers, too.

Discussing the rise of problematic diet fads among young women, the article quoted experts including dietician Renee McGregor, author of Orthorexia, When Healthy Eating Goes Bad, who said ‘unqualified Insta-stars’ were promoting ‘a very dangerous way of eating’. Clean Eating Alice was mentioned by name.

When she read it, Liveing felt ‘an overwhelming sense of guilt. I was horrified and felt deeply ashamed,’ she says. ‘I remember staring at my name [in the article] and just wishing and willing it not to be true. I felt guilt like I’d never felt before.’

Digging into the consequences of orthorexia, which, if left untreated, not only include hair loss and memory impairment but osteoporosis, heart disease and even infertility, she realised she ‘couldn’t keep preaching my clean-eating message’.

‘This was a wake-up call for me. While I never set out with ill-intentions, I couldn’t carry on the same way now I knew the implications for my followers. The thought of them risking their fertility, bone and cardiovascular health by following my advice left me feeling sick. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with talking to people about food and I had to accept I didn’t have the knowledge or the training to do that.’

She admits that during the six years of sharing thousands of photographs and videos as Clean Eating Alice, she considered going hungry as ‘a badge of honour’. For her, this led to the loss of her periods — having too few nutrients and too little fat means a woman’s menstrual cycle stops because the body isn’t healthy enough to sustain a pregnancy.

‘Realising that was why my periods had stopped a few months earlier, and not, as I’d been telling myself, as a reaction to coming off the Pill, really brought home to me the damage I was doing,’ says Alice. ‘I thought: “Why am I prioritising this physique over having children?” Something I knew I desperately wanted one day.’

Although Alice would weigh herself daily back then, she now won’t talk numbers beyond admitting she was a size 6, for fear of encouraging others with eating disorders.

Faced with incontrovertible evidence that her message was harmful, she made the brave decision to admit it, and to change that message entirely. Initially nervous about her ability to stick to a less extreme regime, however, and fearful of scaring away subscribers, the transformation didn’t happen overnight.

The first step was replacing the Clean Eating Alice moniker with an account under her own name on Instagram, where she no longer shared her spartan meals. Instead, she focused on strength exercises, but in a far less radical form than before.

‘Gone were the workouts that “shredded your abs” or “inflated your glutes”,’ says Alice. ‘I completely altered the way I spoke about exercise — the key for me now is feeling and looking healthy, not emaciated.’

Alice also had therapy, which helped her re-establish normal eating patterns, gradually re-learning that no foods were off-limits, or ‘unclean’; adding more fibre, carbohydrates and even sugar and alcohol to her diet; and sharing this development with her followers.

At one point, Alice posted two juxtaposed images of herself, the first taken the previous year of her, looking skinny, in bra and knickers, for a Women’s Health magazine shoot, and alongside it an up-to-date shot of her, a stone heavier, in her underwear.

‘I thought I’d find happiness in being lean. I genuinely imagined my life would be better if I was smaller. In reality, it only served to exacerbate the issues that were already there all along,’ read the message next to it.

Alice’s mea culpa was welcomed by her army of fans.

‘I was honest with them, and myself, about the fact that, far from feeling happy in my old body, I had sadly developed an incredibly disordered eating pattern, as well as body dysmorphia,’ she says. ‘Even at my smallest, I wasn’t satisfied. I would look in the mirror each morning, checking to see if anything had changed, and I never truly liked what I saw.

‘There was always something that I would pick at or feel self-conscious about. It was utterly exhausting.’

In fact, Alice’s ‘disordered attitude’ to body image began in her childhood. She has a vivid memory of being at a Hear’Say concert, aged nine, with her mother who at the time was around 18 st and ‘always on a diet’, and a man yelling, ‘Get out of the way, you fat b****’ at her.

‘I felt so bad for her,’ says Alice. ‘I could see she was bigger than my friends’ mums and she couldn’t do things such as jump on the trampoline with me and my siblings. I could also see she was desperate to lose weight, and was unhappy about how she looked. All her language around food and exercise linked back to being slimmer, never about simply being healthy and active.’

The middle of three children raised in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire — her father was a marketing manager for a telecommunications firm while her mother was a receptionist at a hairdresser’s — Alice’s early years were pretty idyllic. However, aged 11, and a pupil at £24,000-a-year Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, the germs of her obsession began to sprout.

‘Calories and fat content — things I’d never considered before — were a constant part of everyday conversations and made me much more aware of what I put into my mouth,’ she says.

‘My boobs seemed to develop pretty quickly and I distinctly remember a conversation with one of my friends at the time who informed me that “the bigger your boobs, the fatter you are, because boobs are made out of fat”.

‘This comment brought about instant shame and was the start of me feeling as if I needed to hide my body in baggier clothes to cover the fact I felt bigger than the other girls in my friendship group. I remember feeling hungry at times and yearning for the desserts and snacks on offer at school, but I soon learned that hunger was purely a by-product of achieving a smaller body, which was ultimately far more important.

‘I worried about how much pasta mum was serving me, and asked if she could sub out potatoes for vegetables in other dishes. Without realising, I had sleepwalked into a controlled relationship with food.’

Her self-esteem was already fragile, but matters went from bad to worse for Alice when, at 16, she found herself in a relationship with a boy who was initially controlling and later became violent.

He punched her numerous times over the course of a year while she was in sixth form, before accosting her outside her school, hitting her in the face.

Horrifically traumatising though the experience was, it finally put an end to the terror he had inflicted on Alice as a restraining order was put in place and he was later convicted of assault, fined and ordered to do community service. ‘I felt immense shame about being a victim. I’ve since worked with domestic abuse charities and now know this is a common response, as is the feeling that eating very little and making myself smaller would make me happier and more desirable again,’ says Alice.

Aged 18, she won a coveted place at Bird College, a dance and musical theatre conservatoire, in South-East London, where students were all weighed on their first day and where, she says, she quickly became conscious that the most successful performers were the slimmest.

It was in her second year, in 2014, that Alice got serious about avoiding ‘bad foods’ and set up her Instagram account Clean Eating Alice, initially just to keep herself accountable and share meal and workout suggestions with any other devotees.

‘The first image I uploaded was of a plate with a chicken breast and vegetables — most of the meals were awful, really basic — and I can’t believe people followed me to see more,’ she says, laughing at the memory.

But follow her, in their hundreds of thousands, they did and, to her relief and gratitude, continue to do so, even now she’s more likely to tell them to ‘eat the pizza’ and ‘skip the workout if you’re tired’.

An actress who, for a couple of years after graduating toured with shows such as Annie, she also qualified as a personal trainer ten years ago.

Instead of proselytising about calories, however, Alice’s message now is much more ‘a bit of what you fancy does you good’, with one recent video showing her tucking into a cream-filled pastry.

Six years on from the publication of that article, she is now a stone-and-a-half heavier and a healthy size 10 — the size of the beautiful lace gown she proudly wore to her wedding in May to husband, Paddy, a financial adviser.

The couple, who live in Fulham, South-West London, met back in 2016 via the dating app Happn. Paddy has been a ‘big support’ in Alice’s recovery, reminding her he fell in love with her as a person, not her washboard stomach.

‘I stipulated to the designer who made my wedding dress that I needed to be able to sit down and eat and drink everything on the day,’ says Alice. ‘Champagne, lots of canapes, followed by the salmon starter, a main course of beef with lots of sides, including chips, and Eton Mess for dessert.

‘I had it all, including a second helping of Eton Mess while I was getting my hair done before the first dance.

‘As part of my recovery, I try not to let food have the power it once did over me, when I would think about everything I put into my mouth and be for ever thinking about how much exercise I needed to do to burn off the calories.’

She and Paddy, 37, hope to have children in the future, though for now Alice is concentrating on creating content for her exercise app and growing the audience for her podcast, both entitled Give Me Strength, on which she talks about fitness and healthy — rather than ‘clean’ — eating habits.

‘Looking back at photographs I proudly shared, in which my abs were so prominent because I had so little body fat, makes me feel very sad,’ says Alice.

‘I’ll always feel guilty for any possible harm my clean-eating messages may have caused to others.

‘However, I’ve tried my best, for the past five years, to right my wrongs and be honest and accountable, as well as encouraging people along on this healthier journey I’m now on.’ 

Give Me Strength, by Alice Liveing (Penguin Life, £18.99), is out on July 4.