My Health Journey

Hi, I’m Alisha. I live on the southern end of the Gold Coast with my wonderful husband Dan, and our gorgeous little boy Leo.

My love of fitness began in high school with a Les Mills pump class. Ever since I’ve had a gym membership and have been lifting weights, because I love feeling strong and capable.

Over the years I’ve learnt A LOT from personal experience and various trainers and experts around different approaches to fitness. I will forever be a student, however I’ve come to believe fitness is not the be-all and end-all of being healthy. It actually starts with how you feel about yourself, and how you feed your body.

As a child, my parents owned a local health food store, and we had a huge veggie garden. I was brought up mostly vegan for the first 10 years of my life, but when my mum remarried, we started eating meat and sweets during my high school years.

Looking back, as a teenager, I always had issues with bloating and abdominal pain. It wasn’t until my early twenties as it continued to worsen, I had a sneaking suspicion I could be allergic to wheat, gluten or yeast. A blood test confirmed I had a moderate intolerance to gluten. Although this confirmed my suspicion, I didn’t eliminate these things immediately or completely from my diet and I reaped the painful consequences. I continued to experience the symptoms but also began to get an eczema-type rash around my eyes.

Finally, I saw a naturopath who tested me for Candida (gut yeast infection), and confirming it, put me on a strict protocol for one month.

I’ve realised weight gain and weight loss has more to do with the stress in my life, and the foods in my stomach than how much cardio I’m doing.

This was the best thing I ever did, because it forced me to eliminate the things that were hurting my body, allowed me to break the cycle and develop new habits in my eating.

I learnt a lot about different ways to sweeten foods naturally and developed a love of making raw vegan desserts!

I started to incorporate more organic produce, and less processed foods into my diet and started to believe and embrace the idea that my body is my temple.

I was also curiously convinced by the health principles in the Bible (that are backed up by modern science) that our bodies were designed to thrive on a plant-based diet.

These days, I rarely have anything containing refined sugar, I try to avoid all gluten and wheat, and eat mostly plant foods. I eat a lot of fresh organic produce that I source from local farmers & markets, make as much food from scratch as I can, and experiment all the time with new recipes and ways to create healthy, tasty & nutritious food.

I work out regularly, but I’ve learnt to train smarter not necessarily harder. I’ve realised weight gain and weight loss has more to do with the stress in my life, and the foods in my stomach than how much cardio I’m doing.

My experience is unique, as is yours, and there are so many ways to incorporate holistic health into your life starting now.

I believe in Living Abundantly. I believe health and fitness is not just about looking good on the outside, but feeling good on the inside.

I’m passionate about serving and empowering women to transform their lives and learn to live abundantly! However it’s not possible unless you’re healthy from the inside out, starting with our mindset. I love providing solutions for detoxing the body, forming clean eating habits, and exercising intelligently. But most of all, I LOVE helping women transform and refocus their thinking from self- loathing to self-care and value, and from a focus on calories and weight to true happiness, health and nutrition.

It’s so important to develop a healthy relationship with food. Doing so is intricately connected to realising the truth – we are truly unique and beautiful individuals right now, who are worth the effort it takes to live abundantly.

I take a holistic approach to health and fitness, and integrate not only food and exercise habits, but consider lifestyle habits, hormonal influences and relational impacts on health. I personally advocate for a plant-based, whole foods diet due to the extensive research on its benefits for the human body, as well as my personal experience with this approach.

To me, nothing is more fulfilling than guiding women to invest in themselves and their health, and in return seeing them live a life they never thought possible.

Alisha Christie

Unleash Fit Living