Alice Liveing - Sampler: Clean Eating Alice: Kick Start Your New Year

Contents

Firstly, Id like to say thank you for downloading this. Deciding to change your approach to eating and exercise takes huge courage and will require you to completely overhaul your previous concept of what a diet should be.

With this ebook to guide you, it is my aim to help you look and feel healthy and confident from the inside out. It wont be easy. Speaking from experience, years of yo-yo dieting made me extremely dubious that anything would work in the long term for me. But with the right mindset and belief, you can make a complete change to your lifestyle. I promise you will get out what you put in. This ebook is just a small glimpse of what you can expect both in terms of food and fitness use this to kick-start you on your journey to a new lease of life and a new way of living.

The New Year provides the fresh start you need to make the necessary changes to kick start the new you. There is something extremely satisfying about beginning a fresh year with new goals, new hopes and dreams and a determination to implement permanent change. If you set your targets and mentally sign up to starting off the New Year in the right way, you have everything in place to succeed. It is the perfect chance to wipe the slate clean, change your mentality and really commit to new habits and routines. A lot of these New Year, New You diet releases promise instant weight loss, and usually through fairly unhealthy means. I wanted to avoid that message at all costs, but you cant deny that the New Year does provide the perfect impetus to make a change.

When I began my journey, I knew it wasnt a quick fix that I was after, that what I really needed was permanent change. In a world where everything is so instant and we have been conditioned to believe that a diet should have rapid results, weve lost the understanding of how we nourish our bodies to achieve long-term, sustainable change. I understood that I needed to make changes, to have the commitment and consistency to see it through and the knowledge that this was now my normal, and I wouldnt return to old ways and bad habits ever again.

I started on this path simply for me. I used my Instagram blog as a way of keeping me motivated when it came to trying new flavour combinations, mixing up ingredients and sticking with my new clean way of living. It didnt occur to me at the time that it might inspire others in such a big way. As soon as I began posting online, I started getting feedback, people asking for tips and engaging with the food I had put together. Having people comment on my food was the ultimate encouragement and it spurred me on to keep experimenting with ingredients and remain on the right track.

Clean eating has been well documented and interpreted in a whole host of ways, but to me it is simple. Clean eating meant cutting all the rubbish from my diet, binning the foods that made me fall on the sofa exhausted, not because of my job or my college course, but because the food I was eating was bad for me. Adopting clean eating forced me to realign my relationship with food, to stop using it as my crutch and to start understanding the impact it had on me. It was about listening to my body and making long-term changes.

Everyone has a different path. This ebook and my book, The Body Bible , arent going to dictate anything to you there is no one size fits all when it comes to food and wellbeing. Thats why the books wont focus on what you can't have it isn't about being on a diet it's a guide towards a new way of thinking. There are other books on the market that promise a quick fix, but the truth is that unless you make a change for life, those books will always bring you back to needing a book like this.

I hope that my philosophy will make you more mindful about the food you choose and about incorporating some kind of exercise into your life. We have to understand that the food we eat has a direct effect on how we feel. This knowledge has changed my life, and it will change yours too. I have transformed my body with lean, healthy meals and a structured and consistent exercise plan. This ebook will give you a taster of how I got started. There are some recipes and an example of the kind of HIIT workout that will get your heart rate up and endorphins flowing, to improve both your physique and your mood.

This approach will help you achieve health and happiness, no matter what size you are. My recipes arent for people who have hours a day free to spend in the gym or slaving away in the kitchen. This is an ebook for busy people who want to look and feel great. You have just got to want it, and once you are sure you do, this ebook will help you get it!

The first thing you need to know about me is that before I started this programme, I was possibly the unhealthiest person you could meet. I was also one of the unhappiest.

We all form food-related opinions and patterns from a very young age and they can be hard to break. Getting healthy is all about educating yourself and the first thing to learn is that there is no such thing as a quick fix that gives you a result for life. Being healthy can sound scary and complicated it isnt. It is about being realistic and consistent. This book is here to help you with every step.

I am happy to share the story of my relationship with nutrition and food to show you how I got started on this clean eating path. This download, and my book The Body Bible , will set you off on the right route. For me, now it is all about maintaining the lifestyle and physique I have worked hard to create. I can relax a little knowing that I have the ability to rein it in if I need to, but also to allow myself a little more flexibility with the foods I eat. However, this is what you need to get started.

Looking back, I can see that my thoughts about food werent always straightforward. From a young age there had always been triggers that would set me off on a period of binge eating that I couldnt control. I was a classic example of someone who struggled everyday to overcome my bad eating habits. I would repeatedly fall off the diet wagon, only to climb back on, dispirited by failure and even more desperate to shift the weight. It became a destructive, depressing cycle I was locked into. I now know this is very common. We feel like failures and dont know how to change things in a permanent way, so we just carry on doing the same thing and feeling bad.

I had tried every diet out there, particularly the quick-fix goal diets designed to shed the pounds efficiently. The problem was that I would never quite banish the 7lb they promised, and then I would watch as the few pounds I had shifted crept right back on. It felt like a constant war.

It was this incredibly disordered eating pattern that was then exacerbated when I went away to university. Being accepted into the Bird College of Dance, Music and Theatre Performance was a dream come true. I thought I could out dance my bad eating habits, given that I was doing a degree that involved dancing practically all day, but the opposite turned out to be true. I just didnt understand that my whole attitude needed an overhaul.

The physically demanding nature of my degree meant that this was the first time I entertained the idea that I needed to make some changes. In terms of sports, I had enjoyed PE at school but never really excelled at any particular sport. At secondary school my friends were all in the sporty crowd, all playing lacrosse and netball for the A teams, while I took more of an interest in drama and the performing arts.

My first year away at university passed in a bit of a blur though one of the things that stood out early on was the fact that I had to cook for myself. This was something that Id never really done before and I was useless! As a result, I turned to comfort food and simple, quick meals that would fill a void but were far from nourishing. I just carried on eating rubbish and filling my body with unhealthy fuel. It was in the dance studio, though, where I began to suffer the most. I was riddled with insecurity about my body and my confidence was at an all-time low. I was suffering with bad skin and excruciating fatigue. By the time I got to the end of my first year, I felt hopeless. Id worked so hard to get there, I adored being on stage and it felt like I had found the thing I loved, but I hated the way I looked and was in terrible shape, so standing in front of a full-length mirror every day, unflattering leotards and all, wasnt the best idea. In truth, despite dancing for eight solid hours a day, I was putting on weight.