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THE IRON LADY
How body shaming trolls spurred Louise Thompson on to be stronger than ever
JUST a few weeks ago, Louise Thompson received a direct message from a stranger who took issue with her honed and toned physique.
The follower wrote that she and her friend had been wondering whether Louise’s fitness coach fiancé Ryan Libbey, 29, didn’t crave a “more feminine” body and felt they had a duty to share those concerns with Louise herself.
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“It struck a chord because it tugged on an insecurity from when I was younger,” says Louise.
“I’ve always had quite bulky arms and when I was in my teens I had some boys say I was masculine.”
But while those comments in the message hurt, the pain was only fleeting.
Louise says any hate she receives these days about her seriously impressive body only serves to make her more resilient (“If you can learn to use criticism as fuel, you will never run out of energy”) and she no longer dwells on the attacks, which come as part and parcel of life on social media.
She’s also supremely confident about the way she looks – strong, fit and powerful – so when she’s accused by the body police of being “too masculine”, she pities them more than anything else.
“When people lash out, it stems from jealousy or insecurity or from hiding behind their own mask of hurt.
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“I don’t let things like that affect me in the way I used to,” she says. “If I did, I don’t even know if I would be here any more. Social media lures you in and it’s got all the ingredients for something really unhealthy. It’s the comparisons, the likes, the validation.
“But I’ve reached a place where I am happy the way I am. The moment you fall into the trap of wanting to look like someone else then it’s never-ending. It’s really damaging and it’s petrifying.”
She adds: “When I wake up, I look like a naked mole-rat! But I have a shower, click my fingers and think: ‘I’m going to turn this day around. I feel hot. I feel good. I feel confident and I know I look good’.”
She absolutely does. With washboard abs, sculpted arms and thighs that could crack nuts, Louise is in peak condition and has the ripped body of an elite athlete, having transformed herself from reality TV party girl to fitness icon.
At just 5ft tall she is petite but perfectly formed, and Louise, 30, makes no secret of the fact that she works incredibly hard to look like this.
She is currently midway through her second 90-Day Challenge of the year so far, which she is doing alongside an online community from her 25,000 Live Like Louise subscribers.
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“Physically strong. Mentally even beefier,” is how she described herself on Instagram recently, joking that she had developed muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been. I must be because I’ve never exercised this hard! I’m not going to lie, I’m absolutely exhausted, but I’ve never been this fit in my life. I’m working out five or six times a week.
“I eat around 1,800 calories a day which sounds a lot, but I have the muscle mass and my metabolism is very fast and I’m very active.”
Louise’s workouts during lockdown have been a mix of cardio and weight-training in the back garden and she’s overcome a previous hatred of running – a hangover from being forced to do cross country at school.
Most of her food intake comes from protein and she bases meals around this.
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She was recently diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune condition that affects her colon and rules out foods that can cause flare-ups, such as some green vegetables, tomatoes, nuts and onions.
“It’s a process of self-discovery and you have to find what suits you. It suits me not to eat until around midday because I operate best in the mornings when I’m not full and I’d rather have two large meals later on – a big lunch and big dinner.
“But every day is different. I know a lot of fitness trainers eat out of those plastic boxes and it’s chicken with heaps of seasoning and no sauce and veg. I don’t do that.
“Yesterday, for example, I had turkey mince fried in a pan with Loyd Grossman Tomato & Chilli Sauce, and then I hollowed out these courgettes and banged them in the oven.”
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Her diet and fitness plans are based on the age-old foolproof premise of calories in versus calories out. It doesn’t ever need to be more complicated than that.
She adds: “None of this stuff is rocket science, but I had no idea about it four or five years ago. And for me it’s been a case of learning by doing. I developed better habits so that now I don’t make terrible decisions.
“Every now and then I have blow-out days and I still eat pizza and ice cream, but I know I don’t need nearly as much and I don’t binge eat like I used to do. I’ve cut down on alcohol a lot, too.
“I think it’s crazy that we’re not taught more about nutrition at school. We have an obesity epidemic, which leads to heart disease and diabetes and all the pressure that puts on the NHS.”
Is staying as lean as she is now sustainable in the long-term?
“Good question. I’m not putting any pressure on myself to stay this way because life is about so much more than looking a certain way. There’s a chance Ryan and I might want to start a family and then I’ll have to cut back on the exercise. There are other things I put a lot of value on – fitness isn’t the be all and end all.
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“It’s funny because I do have an addictive personality – I’ve struggled with drinking in the past and also having an addiction to work.
“But I’m not addicted to fitness. I have a good relationship with it and I get a rush from it but I don’t need to do it. I’ll take a couple of weeks off after this challenge and rest. I love rest.
“I know my addictive tendencies and this is not that. I enjoy it, I don’t force it.”
Louise’s fitness journey began four and a half years ago when she first got together with Ryan.
Back then she used to “dabble with the gym” but never stuck to it and says she was caught up in a destructive cycle of partying, drinking and lurching from one disastrous relationship to the next.
The mental transformation she’s undergone over the last few years has been just as remarkable as the physical.
“I was always with the wrong people. I was a chameleon, adapting to whoever I was with, jumping from relationship to relationship and none of them suited me.
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“I was drinking and partying a lot and I didn’t really care what I looked like or what I was doing to my body. I’ve been working with a life coach recently and I’ve cried for younger Louise, because I do feel really sorry for her.
“I know whatever happens, I’ve been through the worst when I was on Made In Chelsea and going through the whole Spencer and Lucy saga and trending worldwide on Twitter.
“Twitter was much more popular back then and it was so cut-throat – I was called a troll, a dwarf, poisonous and horrible things about the way I looked.”
Since lockdown, the online fitness industry has seen an explosion, with over 40% of Brits accessing workouts via YouTube or live streams.
I was drinking and partying a lot and I didn’t really care what I looked like or what I was doing to my body.
Louise and Ryan quickly adapted the business they set up together and decided to put out their live workouts for paid-up members via a Facebook group, which gave them more control than if they’d put everything out to the masses on Instagram.
“The demand has been huge and the feedback has been amazing,” says Louise. “Yes, the numbers would be higher if we → did it on Instagram but I’d rather keep it to a smaller community. People don’t commit properly if you make it free for everyone.
“We also made the decision that we would give all the NHS workers free access to the live workouts and that has been really popular.”
Lockdown has led Louise to reassess many aspects of her life, things she’s known she needs to address but has put off until now.
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“I’ve always been a people-pleaser and a yes person, and I think I’ve finally learned to say no without feeling so guilty. I know what my limits are and that I can’t say yes to everything. I don’t need to. In other cultures they’re so much more direct and reply to emails saying simply: ‘No, I can’t do that,’ and no one takes it personally.
“I thought 2020 was going to be the year. I had friends’ weddings, cool events and was really excited about work, and all of that has been cancelled, which is a shame.
“But at the same time, a lot of good has come out of it personally. I’ve had some clear-outs, spent time redesigning the house and building a bit more of a home with Ryan and I feel I’m engaged a lot more with the Live Like Louise community because we’re all in this together.
“It’s also made me realise that a lot of the travelling Ryan and I were doing was just for the sake of it – we didn’t need it, we weren’t getting excited about it, we were just there existing and we didn’t live the experience fully. Now I’ll definitely make the most of everything.”
She also turned 30 three days after Boris Johnson announced the country was shutting down.
“Oh yeah, my 30th was wild,” she says, drily.
“It did feel like a milestone, though. I’m not going to be the person who fixates on a number, but at the same time… It makes you think about the future. I think every woman considers: ‘Oh god, am I going to have a hard time getting pregnant?’
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“We’ll probably have children before we get married. I am a bit broody. I love kids.”
All this came off the back of what was a challenging 2019 during which Louise suffered an existential crisis, leaving her relationship with Ryan hanging in the balance.
They’d already called off their planned wedding at the end of 2018 and Louise says she found herself in a “weird place”, unsure about the future and suffering a resurfacing of the anxiety and depression she’d thought were behind her.
“I had a lot of things ending and changing at the start of 2019 and I’m not good with change. I’d left Made In Chelsea, I decided to set up the fitness business and then my agent, who I’d worked with for eight years, left and I was just in a really unsettled place.
“All my life I’ve been told what to do and I’ve done it. I was a straight-A student at school, great at uni and then on Made In Chelsea I was told what to do and even who to be every day. And suddenly having the freedom to make my own decisions… I couldn’t handle it and I had a bit of a breakdown around April.
“I went away with Ryan to Bali and kept having panic attacks and I was convincing myself our relationship wasn’t right. That continued for the whole of last year.”
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She adds: “I never really gave myself a chance to recover from everything that happened during Made In Chelsea. There were a lot of things that affected me much more than I realised at the time, emotional damage I’d never dealt with over the last 10 years and I ended up having this crisis.”
She says she and Ryan “stopped communicating” and “ended up repelling like magnets”. It’s only in the last few months and having been confined to the same place that they’ve finally talked through their issues and emerged happier than ever before.
“We grew so far apart we were just companions, living in our own little worlds and working too much. Sometimes you need to take a step back from a situation, talk and figure out what the root cause of the issue is.
“And now we’ve started communicating, I’ve fallen in love with him all over again and it’s reassuring to know we went through the bad phase and managed to get to a really good place.
“Relationships evolve so much and the first two years are all fun and games and getting to know each other, but then you have to figure out whether you can make your lives work together and with everything each of you want.”
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The same could be said for work and Louise admits she’s got some decisions to make regarding her future on Made In Chelsea.
Earlier this year she made a brief return to the E4 show with younger brother Sam, who lives next door with Love Island girlfriend Zara McDermott (“Zara has it all and Sam’s punching!”), but said afterwards that the experience had left her feeling deflated. She’s uncertain where she goes from here.
“I don’t know what’s happening with me and the show, but I’m open-minded. Some of the people on MIC are my friends but most of them aren’t, so there’s not a huge draw to do it very often.
“It’s time-consuming and they edit it all down to something so small and I wonder if I could use that time instead to film something cool myself and work on my own stuff because I think that makes me happier.”
Is sentimentality perhaps stopping her from drawing a line under things?
“God, yes. I hate goodbyes. I’m terrible at them. And reality TV is class, I love it. One day I’ll end up on The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills when I’m baller enough to buy a house there because they crack me up.
“It’s a great thing to have been part of and I’ve learned so much, even from the really terrible relationships. I’d never be rude about it but while I have incredible memories, going back now is not the same.”
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She says in the next five years she’d like to have had children, developed the business further, moved out of London and possibly even emigrated to the States.
No matter what she’s been through and despite the considerable heartache she’s played out on screen, Louise has no regrets about signing that MIC contract back in 2011, a decision which changed the course of her life and shaped the whole of her 20s.
“No regrets, none,” she says, firmly. “I think everything has panned out exactly as it meant to, and I’m sticking to that.”
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READ MORE SUN STORIES
In the make-up chair with Louise
What’s your lockdown skin routine?
My complexion has improved a lot as I’ve prioritised looking after it and I’ve been drinking buckets of water.
In the morning, I use The Organic Pharmacy Rose Diamond Cleanser and a combination of Skinceuticals Hydrating B5 Gel, Dermalogica Age Smart Rich Repair, James Read Tan Mist and Omorovicza Magic Moisture Mist.
What do you use at night?
I love By Terry Oil Cleanser, Fresh Rose Deep Hydration Facial Toner and Murad Retinol Youth Renewal Night Cream.
What are your make-up bag essentials?
Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Gel, Chanel Les Beiges, Fresh Sugar Lip Polish, Glossier Futuredew and SPF30, minimum.
What’s your best bargain buy?
Revolution Re-Loaded Velvet Rose Eyeshadow Palette is great.
Who are your beauty icons?
Lauren Bacall and Alicia Silverstone.
Louise Thompson shares steamy exercise video with boyfriend Ryan
Hair & make-up supervision: Aimee Adams
Styling: Lynne McKenna
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