Alice Liveing - Clean Eating Alice Eat Well Every Day - Nutritious, healthy recipes for life on the go

These tools aren’t miraculous exercises or superfoods that will somehow transform your physique, but rather are small lifestyle changes that I feel are essential in establishing the most stable platform from which you can then progress your journey. It is all about making your own decisions and understanding what food is good for you and how to make sure you eat right every day.

For the first week, I am not going to encourage any changes within your diet or exercise regime, I just want you to focus in on yourself and encourage you to become aware of your daily habits. Becoming more aware of, and tuning into, your body seems silly, but can often be key in understanding why you may be held back from achieving your desired goal. For example, many studies have shown the benefits of getting a good amount and quality of sleep and the correlation this has to weight loss, and yet this key aspect of our lifestyle is so often overlooked by many ‘diets’. I want to encourage you to not focus solely on diet or exercise, as I feel that they are only small pieces of a bigger picture. Try thinking about a few of the questions below, and perhaps keep a diary for this week to help you better understand your body and mind, and how they may be affecting your choices:

• What and when are you eating?

• How does this make you feel?

• Are you drinking enough water?

• Are you getting decent sleep?

• How much are you moving throughout the day?

• Are you feeling stressed?

• Have you exercised today?

• If so, how did that make you feel?

I see our bodies as a pyramid. I know first hand that we cannot solely focus on changing one aspect of our bodies without stepping back and working on the bigger picture in order to establish the most lasting change.

Move

I am not a hardline personal trainer who is going to insist that you work out for hours on end or go to the gym every day. That isn’t always healthy, nor is it sustainable – and most of all, it isn’t a realistic approach to exercise. And I am a realist; I know how busy life can be and that fitting in exercise is something that can often fall to the bottom of the list when other things take over. My advice here would be not to panic about having to take exercise, but just get started by gradually increasing your daily activity levels – perhaps by walking to work a few days a week, going for a brisk walk in your lunch break or generally being more active throughout your day. All of this will mean you increase your energy expenditure without even stepping into a gym.

To make exercise a part of your routine, you need to find an activity that you enjoy. I began weight training and I found instantly that it was something I felt engaged in and so I was motivated to get stronger, but I know this doesn’t happen for everyone. Whether it's Zumba, aerobics, swimming or cycling, if you want to achieve long-term change it is important to find a way of getting moving that you love, then incorporate that into your week in a realistic timetable. I hope with my first book, The Body Bible , you will also see how simple it can be to do a good workout in the comfort of your own home.

If you are really struggling with motivation, try purchasing a step counter so that you can see how active you are throughout the day; seeing the numbers in front of you might inspire you to keep moving and increase your exercise level. Partnering up with a workout buddy is also an excellent way of motivating both parties to work out. And finally, setting goals – both short- and long-term – can help you to keep on track with your exercise regime.

Mind

It is my honest belief that no lasting changes can take place until you are in a positive place in which you can then establish your new lifestyle. It sounds a little clichéd, but I feel that, before physical changes can be seen, the biggest change needs to occur in the mind. You want to establish a good relationship with your body whereby you feel as though you are making changes not because you hate the shape you are in, but because you want to become the healthiest, happiest version of yourself possible. We are constantly encouraged to compare ourselves to others and to idolise celebrity bodies in glossy magazines and on social media, and this allows us to become disheartened with the package we are given, driving us to believe that we need to make drastic changes in order to achieve our desired physique. I hope that reading this book and following my Instagram encourages you to divert your mind to focusing on the fact that healthy looks different on every body, there is no one desired physique and your goal should ultimately be health and happiness: neither one should be sacrificed to achieve the other. I want this book to inspire a love of food and creating recipes that you enjoy cooking. A big motivator for me when I started on this path was to savour the excitement I felt watching the food I cooked take shape into a delicious-looking plate I knew was doing me good.

Food

This was the biggest change for me, and the third element of our pyramid. Food is such an integral part of us, and the thing we often find the most difficult to change for a lasting period of time. We develop habits from a young age that then carry us through our lives and are often quite difficult to undo, and I know first hand that by creating healthy habits that you incorporate into your day-to-day routine, eating well will slowly become second nature to you, resulting in a lasting and sustainable change. What must be understood here is that nutrition isn’t ‘one size fits all’. It’s incredibly complex and requires you to make decisions based on your own body and not because it worked for X or Y, so therefore it must work for you. That is why I haven’t created a ‘plan’ or ‘six weeks to fab’ book where I promise you rock-hard abs in a given period of time. That is not me. What I can deliver on is a book full of nutritionally dense recipes that you can incorporate into your own healthy balanced life. Your choices. Your goals. Your body. I’m just here to kick-start your motivation and inspiration, and be your pocket personal trainer and cheerleader along the way.

You’ve identified some good foundations from which you can begin to incorporate sustainable changes to your lifestyle. But first, let me explain where my approach comes from. The world we live in constantly instils in us that instant gratification is the norm. We have become accustomed to everything happening at the click of our fingers and you only need to flick through a few glossy magazines to be told that you can get abs in six weeks, and that diet shakes will apparently provide you with the correct nourishment over real food. I’ve spoken at length throughout my journey about how drastic diets and extreme measures – the whole ‘no pain no gain’ approach, although they may be incredibly motivating in the short term and provide quick results, simply aren’t sustainable for a long period of time. In my opinion, they can be mentally and physically damaging.

Dieting on very low calories is likely to leave you with some sort of nutritional deficiency. It’s incredibly difficult to consume enough of all the vital macro and micronutrients you need for basic health and hormonal function when you are restricting yourself in this extreme way. Your body can take a real hit, and dramatically reducing your calories creates an increase in the body’s production of the hormone ghrelin, as well as others. These hormones are the hunger hormones, sending signals to your brain to tell you you’re hungry. This therefore can mean that as soon as the ‘diet’ ends, you can feel an excessive desire to eat more than you need, therefore succumbing to a rebound period in which binging or over-eating can then occur, creating the yo-yo diet effect that we so often see.