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
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