Livinia Nixon finds her groove
Livinia Nixon is just as sunny on the inside as her smiling TV persona. Here, she shares how she stays in peak health.
Former Hey Hey star, now weather presenter, shares her health secrets
Let’s be frank: most of us rely on a smidge of makeup to get skin that looks like flawless alabaster. For Livinia Nixon, who turns 45 this month, that creamy, glowing skin is all natural. Livinia, who’s been the chief weather presenter for the weeknight editions of Nine News Melbourne for more than 15 years – but is known to all of Australia as the girl from Hey Hey It’s Saturday
– is truly ageless. It’s easy to put it all down to lucky genes, but that’s not so. Truth is, Livinia Nixon is a poster girl for the kind of balanced, healthy lifestyle we all aspire to. So we were curious to know how this mum of two little boys, Henry, 10, and Ted, who turns seven next month, manages to juggle motherhood, a busy TV career (she’s been with Nine for 23 years), a happy home life and keep her own health and happiness front and centre. Livinia, spill your secrets please!
Things don’t matter as much as we think. It doesn’t matter if the house is a bit dirty and the washing hasn’t been sorted.
“If you want to have a work/life balance, you’ve got to work hard for it, which is ironic. You’ve got to protect your time, almost verging on being a little bit assertively selfish,” Livinia says.
CARVING OUT ‘ME’ TIME
On a recent Sunday night, Livinia announced to her husband, Alistair Jack, that she was going out to the movies… by herself.
“It was great!” she says of her stolen moment of ‘me’ time. “I’ve learned to read the signs that I’m getting stressed. I can feel the anxiety and tension building up in my shoulders and stomach, churning so much it’s almost trying to talk to me. And I know what my stress relievers are.” She then shares some useful tips:
• “Just having some time on my own. Even if you can’t get out of the house, just having a bath is so nice. It’s got to be piping hot, and I throw in some Epsom salts for relaxing my muscles.
• “Exercise – even if it’s the last thing I feel like doing – is such a great endorphin release.
• “Things don’t matter as much as we think: it doesn’t matter if the house is a bit dirty, and if I haven’t had time to sort out the washing when it’s dry. I’ll say to the kids, ‘Let’s all get dressed off the rack,’ which means putting on the clothes that aren’t ironed yet.”
She also guards her time spent out of the spotlight. “I get a lot of invites to things, and when I look at them, I always imagine it’s that night, and then I decide if I want to go. “When you get invited to things six months out, you think, that sounds great! But when it rolls around, you’re exhausted, you just want to go home, you want to have dinner with your children and tuck them into bed. So I always pretend it’s that night, and I do end up saying ‘No’ to a lot of things.”
THE ART OF DAILY LIFE
When Livinia’s alarm goes off around 6am, she launches into a whirl of activity. “I get up early, creeping around the house, trying to do a little bit of washing, get breakfast ready, do lunch boxes. And if I have a busy day, I’ll have to do dinner before 7am. (Being on air each night at 6pm means she’s home well after the kids have their dinner.) “Sometimes I think to myself, ‘I don’t know if this is good, or really depressing!’ ” she says.
“I don’t love cooking; I find it’s just another job that I have to do. But I am very conscious that, as a family, we need to eat well. So I have a whiteboard and on the weekend I’ll write down what meals we are having Monday to Friday… again, that’s kind of depressing!” she laughs.
Fitness comes after school drop-off, and it’s something she approaches with a similar efficient mindset. “If you make a dentist appointment, you turn up. So by making a fitness ‘appointment’ with myself, I try to honour it,” Livinia says. “I’ll either head to my golf clinic, try to squeeze in Pilates or a yoga class, or I’ll play Cardio Tennis. I play every Monday morning, which I love! The music is pumping and it doesn’t really matter if you hit balls in or out. When I get in the car at the end of it, I’m a beetroot,” she says with relish.
After exercise, her working day begins, maybe a photo shoot, filming, recording voice overs for segments on Getaway or Postcards, MCing an event, then into the studio for the 6 o’clock news. “Then I’m home by 7.30 to catch up on everyone’s day.”
NURTURING GOOD HEALTH WITH CHINESE MEDICINE
“I’m a big believer in acupuncture stimulating ‘chi’ [life force] to get rid of stress. My mum studied Chinese medicine in her 40s and we would go and see the Chinese doctor at the change of the season, because that change in the environment affects the foods you should eat and impacts your body. It’s a different mindset: It wasn’t about going to a doctor when you’re sick; it was about going to a doctor to maintain your health. And I still do that now. I go to see a Chinese doctor at the change of seasons, and I go to a natural therapies centre, which does acupuncture and [dispenses] Chinese herbs, probably once a fortnight.”
Acupuncture helps calm Livinia’s busy brain. “As a working mum, you’re constantly thinking three steps ahead. It’s draining! And it also adds to your anxiety levels. After an hour of acupuncture, you walk out of there, and it’s bliss. That re-sets me as well.” As for her clever mum? “My mum is in her 70s now, she does yoga every day, she goes canyoning, which I just… whoa! She doesn’t let anything stop her. I’m not that extreme!”
SCORING CAREER GOALS WHEN YOU’RE IN A COUPLE
“My husband, Alistair, and I have learnt that it’s really hard for us both to go hard in terms of our careers at the same time. When Henry was born, Alistair [a builder] was really busy, I was working on Hey Hey and doing the [weather on the] news. We both just kept working as though we didn’t have a child! After a couple of years, it just got too difficult. We decided we’d only have one person going really hard at a time, so he took his turn and I stepped back a little bit, and then he stepped back and I started going really hard. We just sort of worked out this balance.”
Before Livinia was swept up into the Hey Hey universe with host Daryl Somers, she was a model, most known for her performance in a high-profile ad for Physical skim milk in 1995. In those days, Livinia says, “I was very shy. I hardly said two words.”
Her modelling career foundered on a trip to Japan: “I lived in Japan modelling for two months and I was a butterball! Who comes back from Japan fat, honestly?! All that sushi – I ate for Australia!”
In 1997, Livinia launched her TV career, initially hosting an afternoon children’s show called Plucka’s Place before replacing Jacki MacDonald on Hey Hey It’s Saturday until it was cancelled in 1999.
Of that time, Livinia says, “We would have so many laughs hanging out together before the show. That probably was the highlight for me – the camaraderie between everyone, and the jokes! There’s a real energy you get from hundreds of people standing there and cheering. And you kind of feed off that energy. That in itself is unique; I haven’t felt that since.”
So what happened to the shy girl who couldn’t speak up? “Like everything, you’ve got to challenge yourself – you’ve got to push yourself out of your comfort zone. I think it just brought out another side of me earlier.”
AGELESS ENERGY
In the intervening years, Livinia’s career has seen her hosting the drive shift on Melbourne’s Nova 100 with Ed Phillips, hosting a revamped version of Sale of the Century called Temptation with Ed for four years, and jetting around the world to report for Getaway.
Along the way, she’s also become wiser. Asked what advice she’d give if she could go back 20 years and talk to herself, “I’d probably say, ‘Loosen up, sweeheart!’ “I think you’re so worried when you’re 24, thinking, ‘What am I doing? Am I going to get married? Where is my career going?’ I just bought a house when Hey Hey was axed so I really felt I’d had the rug pulled out from under me... [now I know] there’s always bumps in the road, but that was probably an unsettling time.”
Are there ever times when she thinks, ‘Gosh, I’m almost 45, how did I get here?’ “No, I never think that! For starters, I don’t have time to sit down and think about it. I’m really happy with where I am in life. I’ve ticked a few of the boxes I really wanted to. I really wanted to write a book, so I wrote a couple of books and that was really satisfying [ Henry’s Pirate Adventure, based on a character she created for her son, Henry, and the educational weather kit, Livinia Nixon’s Discover the Weather]. And I wanted to become a mother, and I’ve done that. I feel like I have a lovely relationship with my children and a lovely relationship with my husband.”
You could say that, right now, Livinia is sailing through calm, happy waters. The weather forecast ahead looks fine indeed.
You’ve got to challenge yourself – you’ve got to push yourself out of your comfort zone.