Clean Eating Alice Eat Well Every Day: Nutritious, healthy recipes for life on the go. Alice Liveing
of being. And now, I am championing what I feel is a much-needed breath of fresh air into what I think is an incredibly saturated market. One of the most valuable things I learnt on my journey was that, to create the most lasting and impactful change, you must first start with the right environment in which to make that change. You have to know that you want to commit to eating to fuel both body and mind, and this book is designed to help you take the first steps and then go on to make it a permanent way of life.
After talking you through my approach, I will examine the basics of nutrition to help you understand what bodies need and why, so that you can make educated choices for yourself rather than having to religiously follow a ‘plan’.
After that comes the food section of recipes. Then I will help guide you on how to build the perfect plate, with the right balance of foods to fuel you both mentally and physically.
We could tell ourselves that we are going to begin our journey every single day, and yet that very rarely happens. Life gets in the way, birthdays happen, holidays happen, and suddenly we are a month, two months, a year later and have made no change. Now I’m not going to sit here and wag my finger at you; believe me when I say I am the first to discourage that prescriptive style of helping you achieve your goal. But what I will say is that there really is no better time to start than now. We’re creatures of habit, and change is going to feel weird. The first week, month or few months may feel difficult, and require a little hard work, but I believe that is only because you are undoing years of daily habits that have brought you to where you are today. While I’m not going to fob you off by saying that creating a total lifestyle change is going to be a walk in the park, what I will do is help you implement some everyday tools and techniques that will allow you to create a seamless transition into healthier, happier living.
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.