Sian
Hello and welcome to BeBell podcast! So recently on our Instagram page I asked for people to send me through some new people that I should follow that they have enjoyed and this lady kept coming up: Aisling Daly from Thrive For Life. So I've invited her in today and I hope you enjoy it!
So Aisling, welcome. I’m excited that you got down here from Mallow today.
Bebelle, basically what we like to do is talk about our life history and how we've got to where we're at and so we start at the start. Where did it all begin for you? Where were you born?
Aisling
Born in Cork, in the ErinVille Hospital in 1986. I just discovered two days ago that I'm 33! I thought I was 32? I was at a wedding and they said anyone aged 32 and under put up your hands and I put up my hand and I was delighted with myself and then my husband, Andy, nudged me and said “no Aisling, you're 33”. So yeah I've gotten to the age where I no longer really remember my age.
Sian
Well give it 10 years and you’ll be wrecked! So did you live in Cork city or have you always lived in Mallow?
Aisling
I've always lived in Mallow. I lived in Cork City when I was in college and lived in Australia for almost a year back in 2011.
Sian
Oh wow so born Cork. Cork through and through. Do you follow all the teams?
Aisling
No, I follow golf, golf would be my sport. I have no clue when it comes to GAA.
Sian
So where did you go to school?
Aisling
I went to school in Mallow in the convent girls school, St. Mary's Secondary sSchool where I
currently teach as well. So I’ve come full circle.
Sian
You’ve done a complete Lion King. Circle of Life! And what was your first job?
Aisling
Probably babysitting was my first job. After that then I had lots of jobs in Mallow. I worked in the Hibernian hotel…
Sian
And when did you start working? And I suppose most importantly why?
Aisling
A little push from my parents I'd say! I don't think I was too keen to start myself. I was probably about 13 when I started babysitting happily myself and I was 16 when I started in the Hibernian hotel in the coffee dock waitressing.
Sian
Just waitressing? Or did you do the whole barista thing?
Aisling
No, no just waitressing!
Sian
So the Hibernian went into hospitality, and where did it all go from there?
Aisling
I had lots of part-time jobs growing up. I worked in a hairdressers for about three Saturday's That was a short lived job. I worked in Centra as well. I worked in a petrol station. I worked in Costell which is a factory just outside of Mallow.
I worked in Keanes Jewellers for several years during college and dropped out of a college course I also worked in Keanes full-time for a year so I've had lots of jobs very varied.
Sian
And how old were you when you went to college?
Aisling
I started college in 2004. I was probably 18, yeah. I did an arts degree in English and geography for three years and then I followed the crowd of other students who were all applying for teaching and went down that road without thinking about it. Without even thinking
“would I like to be a teacher?” I got accepted for Dublin started in UCD and lasted six weeks. Hated it and just dropped out.
Sian
And was it the course? Was it being away from home?
Aisling
It was a bit of everything. I'm definitely a homebird. I missed my family, I missed my boyfriend who's now my husband. I hadn't really thought about what I was letting myself in for and teaching is certainly not a job that you could go into half-hearted because the kids see through you. Yeah, just just the timing was wrong I think and my parents, my boyfriend they all said “oh you'll go back to teaching yet”, and I thought they were mad. I’d never drop out of a
college course if I had the intention of pursuing that, but they were absolutely correct!
So after dropping out of that which was a really big decision, I come from a family with two parents who were now retired teachers so education is valued and it wasn't an easy decision to make. After that then I started working Keanes Jewellers for a year and then I did a geography masters after that and then went back to Keanes for a year and
went off to Australia for a year.
Sian
And were you on a working permit or…?
Aisling
We were on a working holiday visa.
Sian
Is that one of the ones where you have to do that farm work?
Aisling
That’s only if you want to stay on for a second year. We left for that so my boyfriend (or my husband's) sister lives in Australia so we lived with her for what was supposed to be just a couple of weeks until we found our feet and thank you Pearl for putting us up for
almost a year! So we lived with her in Sydney and then travelled all of the east coast as far as Cairns and did Thailand on the way over and then I applied for teaching when I was there because I realised that's actually what I really wanted to do. I was accepted for Cork because I had the extra points from the Masters. So yes, I found my way and definitely having the little bit of extra life experience and some confidence that working retail and all the other jobs had provided me with...
Sian
And so were you were working when you were over there?
Aisling
I was childminding over there. My husband, he was working in several jobs…
construction and marketing the retail research, which basically was standing in Woolworths shopping center and and offering people $5 to answer a set of questions so we had lots of odd jobs that just kept just going. It was great experience.
Sian
I never traveled and actually I was talking about this on another podcast to someone the other day. I don't believe in regrets but actually if I had to have one it would be the not traveling at the time that I should have. But work kind of took over and I kept getting opportunities. I didn't think it was right for me at the time. What would you say it's people thinking about doing the traveling that may not have done it? What did you get from it?
Aisling
I suppose the teaches you independence. We didn't really find our own feet but yeah the experiences you have and the people you meet and even the way that people think in Australia is... they're very forward-thinking and I definitely think living in Australia and seeing the way people think and work definitely shaped me. It had a big influence on me. They're very much of the kind of attitude or mind says if the if a job that suits you isn't there for you, create it yourself.
Sian
Do you think that's a big city attitude or do you think that's an Australian attitude?
Aisling
I think it’s an Australian attitude. I came across a lot of inspirational people. Andy’s sister, Pearl, is definitely one of those people. She brought us along to a talk by Dr. John Demartini who I'm a huge fan of and yes it opened my mind to a different way of thinking. It really stuck with me.
Sian
Amazing. So you came back and..
Aisling
Came back and did my dip which is teacher training. I was starting in UCC and I did it in St. Mary’s Secondary school in Mallow and I’ve been there ever since except for one year when I was teaching in Bantry for one year and yeah, I never looked back.
Sian
So what brought you to Instagram and starting your Instagram page?
Aisling
You know my story, I struggled with binge eating massively for half of my life and I decided I was getting married last year last July and last January I decided that I needed to fit into my wedding dress. That was a big issue. It was a little bit snug but I really didn't want to go down the dieting route because I tried every diet under the sun and I started to realize that every diet worked for a period time and ultimately would leave me back in a cycle of bingeing and then restricting and then binging and restricting and it was all just feeding into feeling really crap about myself. I was getting married in Lanzarote so we were going to be going away for two weeks and I really didn't want to be thinking about dieting and food and be worrying and
stressing while I was there so I decided that it was time to just try a different approach and just keep things a little bit more simple and stop putting so much pressure on myself. So exercise is always something that I’ve loved. It has always been a consistent part of my life but I decided to take a new approach when I came to food and just keep it really simple. I kind of worked on it myself and just said right I'll stick to three main meals two or three healthy
snacks and just keep it really simple.For me chocolate was my binge food and so I decided to cut that out completely and get that out of the house. That really helped me and that worked for me then but I knew eventually that I had to reintroduce that because I don't think it's healthy to restrict something completely.
Sian
I think if you say you can't have something that's when the need for it becomes much stronger
Aisling .
Absolutely! A lot of people message me on Instagram asking me about cravings and honestly since I've stopped putting anything off limits I don't get cravings anymore. You would still fancy a piece of cake or a bit of chocolate but it's not that intense feeling that I need to have it. I definitely think that comes from restricting or putting things completely off limits.
Sian
Oh 100%. And wanted to lose some weight. You're not a big girl for example in comparison to me, so in your head, you wanted to get to from where?
Aisling
Well I suppose for me I when I was probably about 14 or 15 I put on about three and a half stone. It wasn't from binge eating back then it was purely from just probably laziness and
I think I knew what was right and wrong but I just liked eating junk food and that was it. I wasn't moving a whole lot. Then I started Weight Watchers and I lost about three and a half stone very quickly within less than a year.
Sian
So what size would you have been, Aisling?
Ailsing
I would have been probably a size 16 when I was about 15 years old and I went down to probably a 10 or a12.
Sian
And that's hard at that age. I know from dieting at that age and I still have the memories from it because it's difficult when your friends are all going out as well and you want to go to Mackey D's and I remember like trying to mix of milkshake of sorts at that age and it's difficult
Aisling
It is but I think once I started seeing results I got very driven on seeing the results and I wouldn't say I was eating very healthily. I was working out points and yeah you know maybe one morning I ate too many curly wurly bars or whatever which were 3 or 5 points, so then I wouldn't eat anything or eat something really small in the evening. Then came the days when eventually I started to restrict too much and I started eating under the points. I remember eating green granny smith apples till the cows came home and pointless tomato soup, and drinking Bovril because it was zero points, disgusting! Loads of beetroot anything that was zero points. My poor gut health definitely suffered at that time and it became an obsession definitely. I think my binge eating started as a result of that dieting. That's when my problem with it began. So after that then when I lost all the weight I struggled with binge eating and every time I put on weight I tried the next diet or the next diet so I would have tried meal replacement shakes and everything else. Slimming world all of them and all diets work for a short time and that's the problem because you see the results and you get exciting you think
“this is the one and this is the one I'm gonna stick to forever”, and then naturally your body is screaming saying give me more food. Then the binging starts.
Sian
Information as well I find...you know like yeah my husband will come home and say “oh I just listened to the radio and one glass of red wine and a bar of chocolate everyday is really good for you”. No it’s not, it's good for this one thing it's not good for you in general, you know? Just these mad studies come out and people hook on to them.
So when did you make the decision to try something new? Did you do it all yourself or did you speak to somebody about how you should do it?
Aisling
Well I started person training in with Dave Hurley in Cork in Blackpool in January of last year and for the first time ever I was just brutally honest about what I was eating and he wasn't judgmental. He was just like “okay and did you want to do that?” and I just said “no” and he's like “okay, well we’ll move on from it”. That really helped me to just be totally real for the first time ever. I think any time before whenever I'd done any personal training or worked with trainers I would have just said “yeah my food is fine sometimes I'm bad you know and most of the time I'm very good”. They’d be like “okay well it's just this simple you just eat chicken and you just eat broccoli” and and I don't think they had any understanding. And I wasn't being real and yeah you're setting yourself up for failure then. It definitely helped just speaking to someone. I didn't go into too much detail or get deep or emotional about my binge eating problem but it was just like these are the facts, last night I ate about three and a half thousand calories on just chocolate and sweets. So just saying it out it kind of took the emotion out of
it and that definitely helped me to move forward as well.
Sian
And from obviously from an emotional side of things, did you deal with that yourself or with help?
Aisling
I did that by myself but I'm not saying that that's the best way to do it because obviously I struggled with binge eating for 15 years and if I had spoken to someone sooner maybe I wouldn’t have struggled with the issue for such a long time. But as I said last year I cut out chocolate and I used kind of distraction techniques to help me any time I felt like I was gonna have a binge. I'd pick a spot in the house and just start cleaning for 10 minutes.And that's great. I was distracting myself from feeding myself with too much food yeah but ultimately I suppose I wasn't dealing with whatever emotion was coming up that was triggering the sensation that I wanted to binge eat. I think this year has been about dealing with the emotions last year was about let's stop the binge eating in any way that we can and I did that and this year is about dealing with the emotions.
Sian
And you're doing some self development on that yourself at the moment?
Aisling
Absolutely, so yeah I don't need to use the distraction tools anymore and I'm better able to check in with myself. I think last year I don't know if I'd have been ready for that because the emotions when you feel like you're going to binge it can be triggered by different emotions. It could be stress, it could be loneliness, it could be being overwhelmed by workloads, lots
of different things would trigger it. I don't think I was ready to deal with “how do I cope with those emotions?” last year but now I'm better able to check in with myself. I'm much more self aware and I do check in with myself because the feeling does come off now and then and I just say “okay what’s making me feel this way? Am I stressed? Okay if I'm stressed what's causing me stress? And what can I do about it?”
That's definitely helpful and it's self coaching yourself. So I'm pursuing a life coaching course starting this October and I think your mess becomes your message and yeah and for me when I started the Instagram page it was all about food and exercise and all of those things but what I really learned over the last year...I think I've learned a lot through my Instagram page is that for me everything comes down to self-worth. I think because my self-worth was low that's why I struggled with binge eating and I think working on my self confidence my self-esteem and my self-worth has been the greatest achievement and the greatest thing that can help me going forward to not fall into issues like binge eating. Yes I think it's all stems
from that so self-worth is what I'm all about now. I'd love to help other people to realize their self-worth because I think it's really empowering when you do that and then you feel like you know you can achieve anything that you want.
Sian
Absolutely and it's amazing actually the amount of people we meet that don't have it and it's a worry that they don't have it but I also think it's a much more honest conversation these days. People are struggling with it but they're more likely hopefully to talk about it.
That's the really important side so I think you'd be an amazing coach. How long is that course that you're doing and when are you doing it?
Aisling
It's starting October and finishing in May.
Sian
So do you see yourself staying as a teacher and this will be your side hustle?
Aisling
For now anyway. Why knows down the road? You never know where life will take you. You can’t really plan too much for life, you know?
Sian
And your travelling is done do you think?
Aisling
Yeah I think the big stints of traveling definitely but there are definitely lots more places that I'd like to see.
Sian
Where's the best place that you've ever visited on your travels?
Aisling
There have been a lot of places... the Blue Mountains in Australia were incredible. I'm just back from a holiday in Barcelona for nine nights. It's a beautiful place. Then we traveled up to north of Barcelona to for a wedding there as well it was just spectacular stunning. That's a good question. I’m kind of stumped as to where is the most beautiful place I visited. I think it's really hard. I think that there's just so many amazing places to visit. In terms of a city I recently visited Krakow and I was blown away by it. It's beautiful.
Sian
So Bebelle is all obviously about being Belle and what that means to us whether that's external or internal internal and what does being beautiful mean to you to others?
Aisling
I suppose being authentic. I think there's nothing more beautiful than someone who's being truly authentic and being themselves and I think it kind of shines from the inside out. So authenticity and being comfortable in your skin.
Sian
I would like you to take a couple of questions left by your predecessors. Just any old one read it out loud because I don't know what’s in there.
Aisling
Who was your biggest inspiration growing up? That's a very good question. My biggest inspiration growing up I'm going to say my mother. My mother had five of us growing up and she gave birth to six children. Her first babies were triplets and one baby passed away within a very short space of time so she raised five children with my father, who's also a great inspiration of mine, and managed to cook a home-cooked meal every evening for us, packed lunches go out the door, and just a really positive, go-getter woman. She’s always on the go and always takes care of everyone and she was a total inspiration to me growing up.
Sian
Mine is the same. Grab another one.
Aisling
One saying or tip that you try to live your life by? The saying I suppose would be “what you think about and thank about you bring about”. It is one of my favorites. That's one of Dr. John DeMartini. I just love it. It’s about the power of thought and the power of the mind but also the power of gratitude. It just sums it up really nicely and it's a really easy one to remember and that's something that I live my life by.