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

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.

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.

Most importantly, the most worrying result of these crash diets is the effect they have on your relationship with food. It is my belief that food isn’t just fuel; it should be enjoyed and not just seen as sustenance. Entertaining fad diets or low-calorie restriction merely serves the purpose of showing that if you eat a very small amount of food you will achieve fat loss – but what lessons are then learned? Seeing quick results can often lead you to then fear increasing your calories once a plan has finished, resulting in a cycle of miserable restriction. It isn’t normal and it can’t last; we need good food to survive and thrive. One thing I want each and every one of you to tell yourself on a daily basis while using this book is that: You are in this for the long term. If you truly want to make change, forget magic-wand quick fixes and place your energies in believing that slow and steady changes, where you learn to eat in a sustainable, flexible and enjoyable manner, will ultimately provide you with the healthiest and longest-lasting results. It will allow you to eat a varied diet – full of goodness, but full of interesting food combinations so that you never feel bored or uninspired to try something new.

Over the next few pages I will share my top tips for week two and beyond. This is where we want to begin to make small changes to enable lifelong results. Write these down in your diary, stick them on your fridge or pop them next to your bed, so that you are gently reminding yourself of this week’s goals.

It is my belief that the morning is a pivotal time of the day; if we can have a good start, we are far more likely to make good choices throughout the rest of the day, too.

Although at first it may seem as if a little extra effort is required, establishing a consistent morning routine means that it will soon become second nature for you to implement your healthy habits, such as preparing your overnight oats and enjoying them when you wake up, instead of starting every day with that morning panic that means you begin your day stressed.

For the first few weeks of making a lifestyle change, it’s incredibly useful to set an alarm and get up at the same time every morning – this will allow plenty of time to prepare breakfast. To implement more structure into your mornings, try writing yourself a timeline for the first few weeks, and pop it on the fridge or by your bed. Mine would look a little like the list below, but it’s important to make it personal to you, ensuring that you allow enough time to complete each task without running around like a headless chicken.

1. Wake up, drink a glass of water.

2. Read a few pages of a book (10 mins).

3. Get up, prepare breakfast (15 mins).

4. Shower, dress, make-up (30 mins).

5. Leave the house.

When I speak to people who want to instigate a change in their physique, I always find that their focus rests solely on their exterior. Very few acknowledge that the biggest change to occur is often in the mind, which will in turn help to create physical change.

As I’m sure many of you can relate to, developing a healthy relationship with food and with your body isn’t the easiest of tasks, but I feel that incorporating both mind and body goals into your lifestyle change ensures that you’re constantly striving to achieve the balanced pyramid approach, as discussed previously, and you aren’t neglecting one aspect of what is a much bigger picture.

There are so many ways to set goals, but I often find that writing them down in a journal is a really nice and personal way of remembering them.

I also find that being organised with your food often increases motivation, and establishes a consistent routine that you are able to follow with very little effort. Planning your meals for the week ahead on a Sunday, for example, will help you to avoid those days where you search the cupboards for random ingredients to throw together when you get in late from work. It is then that you can often find yourself making the wrong choices.

Creating a shopping list and a food planner for the week is the perfect way to get into a habit of organising your meals for the week ahead, budgeting to ensure you don’t spend a fortune on food each week, and keeping your motivation high, as you have delicious planned meals to look forward to cooking and eating.

Examples of some simple swaps:

This may be slightly reiterating what I’ve spoken about at length regarding quick fixes, but I do feel it warrants another mention. One salad doesn’t make you lose weight, while one bad meal doesn’t make you put on weight.

It’s here where I remind you that, as stated at the beginning of this section, slow and gradual change is undoubtedly going to provide you with the most sustainable and long-lasting results. Don’t feel disheartened or beat yourself up because you see no instant visual change.

This book is about creating the happiest and healthiest version of you, both inside and out, and so the internal changes should be celebrated just as much as the external.

What I want this book to give to you: The Promise

• A motivational tool to help you break free from fad diets and establish a year-round healthy body and mind.

• A no-nonsense guide to nutrition, explaining why I make the choices I do, with research-based evidence to accompany my decisions.

• A sustainable, balanced approach to nutrition, whereby calorie or macro counting is ditched for more intuitive eating.

• A flexible guide to how to build the perfect plates. I will give you examples for all situations, where I show you how and why I build my plates the way I do.

• An alternative to ‘diets’, whereby you focus on short- and long-term goals, both physically and mentally, that don’t involve you stepping on the scales.

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