How Galey Alix Turned Heartbreak and a Health Crisis Into HGTV Stardom: 'Starting Over Saved Me' (Exclusive)
The 'Home in a Heartbeat' designer lost a fiancé, a job and a dream home in an instant — but what waited for her on the other side was even better
HGTV
Galey AlixGaley Alix never intended to become an HGTV star.
The Home in a Heartbeat host had a successful career in the finance industry, where she's worked as an executive at Goldman Sachs for over a decade, when she decided three years ago to try her hand at designing and decorating the 10,000 sq. ft. Connecticut mansion she and her fiancé planned on living together in.
"I was based in Florida but met him when I was in New York for a work event. And we fell madly in love, got engaged, and got our dream home in Connecticut, where he was from," Alix, 29, recalls to PEOPLE. "The home wasn't ready to move into just yet, so I said to him, 'Hey, I'll work on making this house perfect over the next year. I'll manage the whole thing from Florida and commute up here every weekend to get it done. And then when it's complete, I'll resign from my job, move here and we can get married and start our life together.' "
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It was the perfect deal for Alix. But little did she know, it would unlock an entirely different future for her.
When she couldn't find the right contractors or designers to help her, she decided to do the work herself. Over the course of a year — between working her full-time job, planning a wedding, and taking 52 round trip flights from Florida to Connecticut — Alix taught herself about construction and design, learning how to do tile work, cut wood, install lighting and more. And wanting to impress her husband-to-be, she began filming her progress and posting it to Instagram. "I just wanted him to be proud of the work I was doing," she says. "I thought, 'This will be a cool way to show off the transformed spaces.' "
But with so much pressure on her, Alix ended up getting "really, really sick."
"I've long struggled with a very severe eating disorder, both anorexia and bulimia. And I also battle perfectionism, which is its own disease — kind of autonomous from the eating disorder, though I do think they often hold hands," she says. "So during this time, I was running myself ragged trying to get everything perfect, and it had a dangerous effect on my eating."
Alix, like many with anorexia or bulimia, kept her struggles to herself. "Eating disorders, as I've learned, thrive in secrecy," she says. "Part of the disorder is that they convince you that everything's okay and you're just doing a little diet to just be better. It's not something you need to tell anyone about, you tell yourself. It's very shameful. And secrets make you sicker."
Right before their wedding — and a week after resigning from her job and moving to Connecticut — Alix finally reached her breaking point and opened up to her fiancé, confiding in him about what she was going through and admitting that she needed to find a therapist and get help.
Her fiancé? He broke up with her.
"He told me he did not want to marry me anymore because I had been dishonest with him by hiding my struggle," Alix remembers. "So that day, I moved back to Florida with my dogs, but without my fiancé, without my career, without my health, and without the home I had just worked so hard on. It was by far the lowest point of my life."
Knowing she needed to focus on her mental health, she immediately deleted Instagram from her phone, leaving behind the 800 followers she had amassed over the year to begin work with a therapist and nutritionist. "I felt hopeless," she says. "And I needed help."
Months later, feeling strong enough to face the humiliation of her breakup, she logged back into the social media app expecting to answer a slew of questions from friends and family about where her wedding photos were.
Instead, she found she had tens of thousands of new followers, many writing messages begging her to design their homes.
"My videos went viral while I was away," Alix explains, still in awe of the situation. "Before, I would be lucky if one of my videos had 100 views. Now, I'm talking, 30 million views! I was floored. And all of these people wanted to hire me for something that I didn't even think was a skill I had."
Rather than staying home and feeling sorry for herself, Alix, she says, "turned around and just started saying yes."
By that point, she had gotten her job back at Goldman Sachs and felt a responsibility to stay. So instead of taking on clients and transforming their homes over the course of months of construction, she spent weeks measuring, planning and ordering supplies before kicking the homeowners out of their house for the weekend and bringing in a team to get all the work done in just 72 hours.
It's a strategy that will be familiar to viewers of her HGTV show Home in a Heartbeat, as the series — which she also executive produces — is structured the same way. The style makes the series a unique offering in the network's lineup, even if it is a little exhausting for Alix. "I don't think we sleep at all those three days," she laments. "It's just non-stop."
To make things easier, Alix doesn't consult with clients on design. "In three years of doing this, I've never once told them what colors I'm using, materials — heck, I don't even tell them what rooms I'm doing," she says. "I want it all to come as a complete surprise. And I don't want to put the homeowner through the pain of dragging them to stores, asking which 10 fabrics they like, which tile. It's also why I don't want them living in construction for four months with a bunch of random people walking in and out of their house. This is about making things as simple and painless as possible."
Helping her is a group of friends, all of whom, like Alix, work day jobs. "They're a team of just incredible, kind, passionate people," she says. "I seriously couldn't do it without them. And what's ironic is that part of my devastation in losing my fiancé and the house in Connecticut was that I thought I was losing the family we were trying to build together. I thought, 'I'm never going to have a family now. We're not going to get married and have kids; this life is over for me.' But what I didn't realize is that by losing that potential family, I gained a whole new family in building this business."
"There's eight of us, including myself, and I'm not lying when I say I would risk my life for every single person on my team," she says. "They're everything to me. So I don't feel that sense of loss anymore because of them."
She's also found love again, in boyfriend Dale Moss of The Bachelorette fame.
"We're been together a little over a year now," she says. "My dad always gave me one piece of dating advice my entire life, he said, 'Never listen to what a man says. Just watch what he does. Anybody can say words and tell you things to make you feel a certain way, but his actions will tell you exactly who he is and how he really thinks about you and cares about you.' And the thing that has just blown me away about Dale is his actions could not be more perfectly in alignment with his words. He says, 'I love you,' and every action he does every single day is of somebody that loves me."
Looking back on it all, Alix says she's "grateful" for her journey — even the rocky parts — and hopes that others can find strength in her story.
"I didn't know the life I had waiting for me," she says. "Sometimes you think it's so dark, and you are just getting buried under the ground, but you might not realize that you're actually a seed being planted. You have to be willing to let some light in and nourish yourself, but believe me, you can grow, get stronger and blossom."
"Starting over saved me," Alix adds. "And if there's one thing I hope it's that others hearing my story won't compare themselves to me and feel less-then; I want them to compare themselves to somebody who has struggled, who has had a lot of internal battles, who has not won or succeeded in everything she went after, and who is doing the best with what they have. I want them to know, it's possible for them too."
Home in a Heartbeat airs Wednesday on HGTV.
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