Alice Barraclough- Anyone Who Says You'll Be the Same After a Baby Is Lying

What's it actually like working in the wellness industry day to day?

Working in the wellness industry day to day, there are so many fads that you have to cut through the noise of.

I feel like my inbox is constantly full of press releases and studies coming out I mean there are studies coming out every day and it's quite hard to decipher like what are people interested in and what do people actually need to know like do they need to know about the study that says if they're eating red meat they're gonna get dementia do they need to know um the link between grapes and dementia whatever thing it is um so there's a lot of noise but there are also a lot of opportunities and I feel very fortunate to get some nice perks along the way, or be invited to do some pretty cool challenges or pretty cool fitness events.

So yeah, there's a nice mix of like chaos, but also quite a lot of fun too.

I mean how do you filter through all that noise?

Yeah I mean there's a lot of a bit silly and I think Instagram in particular just there's so much noise on that and that's a whole other conversation about influencers and what they're putting out there and who's actually qualified to be talking about what but I think we in the office we're mainly a team of women we frequently having features meetings and just kind of being like oh what do we think about this is this something that you'd be chatting to your girlfriends about in the pub or you know is this something that you've overheard in the yoga studio and is this something that people care about or not so it's kind of like just making it really real

what surprised you most about being in the wellness industry over the last decade how has it changed

I really feel like at the moment we've done a bit of a 360.

Like I think also having a year off maternity leave and now coming back into the office, I feel really, it feels quite jarring.

It feels a little bit like, dare I say, 2014, 2015 clean eating era coming back.

with the sorts of things we're writing about the rise of a Zen pick, the skinny jabs that, you know, thin feels back.

And over a decade ago, that's what we were writing about clean eating and the OG fitness influences of the time saying, you know, if you eat, basically, I mean, not verbatim, but if you eat like this, you'll look like this type rhetoric.

And I do feel like it's almost like we've come back to that and there was a body positivity movement and a very much of a kind of you know fitness is fun fitness is for everyone doesn't matter if you walk or run like you know trying to get out there whereas you know we've seen the rise in run clubs god I really feel like I'm going on a tangent here we've seen rise and run clubs and feels like everyone is suddenly a runner, which definitely wasn't the case when I was a teenager in an athletics club.

But yeah, everyone is now a runner in some form, which absolutely wasn't a thing when I first started working within fitness.

In fact, when I first started working at The Telegraph, they didn't even have a health and fitness page.

So that even goes to show that in the short space of a decade, how much more interest there is in that sphere.

It's true the figures are incredible with how many more people but also women who are now taking part in running and also hybrid races I feel.

I mean yeah and we've got to we've got to applaud them like that's amazing and I definitely am a firm believer of more people who are active the better like we know the health and fitness benefits to having an active healthy life and how much even walking for an hour a day or running for 15 minutes can make to our health and it's not just your physical health it's not just your cardiovascular fitness it's your mental health too it's connecting with others it's if you're running in a group it's you know loneliness is one of the biggest killers so if you can go out and you can meet someone to do that 5k and get coffee afterwards you've got a massive boost in your endorphins which again so many studies have linked exercise to a decrease in depression some have even said um it's just as good as taking medication you know there's mixed mixed reviews on that but Yeah, the benefits of exercise is something I'm sure you as well as I will not stop to harp on about until the cows come home.

Completely.

And also, you know, to inspire other people and children as well.

We'll touch on to motherhood later.

As nutrition editor, what would you say is the biggest myth that you wish women would stop believing?

You don't have to be perfect all the time.

I think there's definitely a pressure that you've got to eat clean, that you've got to be getting your 30 grams of fiber a day, you've got to be eating 100 grams of protein a day.

Obviously, there are things that you can do within your diet to make you feel healthier, keeping on top of hydration, making sure you're having plenty of complex carbohydrates along with your protein and your healthy fats.