From bulimia to balance
Fitness competitor shares story of her transformation to a healthier life
With alcoholism or drug addiction, abstinence is possible. But someone recovering from bulimia can’t just stop eating.
“I ask myself, ‘Am I hungry?’” Aeryon Ashlie said. “Probably not. Am I hungry or am I sad? Am I upset and just trying to fulfil something with food?”
Ashlie, a fitness competitor and recovering bulimic, is sharing her story at the Calgary Health Show Feb. 3 and 4. It will be the latest of many public appearances she’s made since deciding to do something about her bulimia six years ago.
The 11th annual Calgary Health Show, which begins at 10 a.m. next Saturday and Sunday at Stampede Park, features all the latest health trends with tips on diet, exercise and lifestyle choices, with exhibitors and food sampling.
At the Burnaby home she shares with her daughter, Ashlie got rid of her trigger foods — cookie dough, ice cream, chips, popcorn — and makes exercising and cooking healthy food in an air fryer a daily event with Mekaella, 9. Ashlie’s Oprah moment, the moment she said aha!, came one day after a tiny knock on the bathroom door followed by an inquiring “Mommy?”
“My daughter was about three and we were on our own,” Ashlie recalls. “I was in the bathroom, I lifted the lid of the toilet and began to purge, then heard her little voice. I got up, saw my reflection in the mirror. I’d seen that reflection so many times, but this time that reflection caught me and I thought, ‘This could be my daughter someday.’ If I don’t do something drastic, if I don’t change my behaviour, that could be her in 25 years and that would kill me, knowing I influenced her to do that.”
Ashlie said she had tried every diet pill under the sun, every appetite suppressant and cleansing and fasting fad.
“I was basically dieting for 25 years,” the 43-year- old single mother said. “And, basically, selfloathing my body for 25 years.”
That’s when she removed the triggers. She enrolled in cognitive therapy, quit having a glass of wine for a while because she feared lowered inhibitions, started her journal and got the air fryer.
But just because the triggers are removed doesn’t mean temptation is. There are still times that, as Ashlie puts it, Bulimic Aeryon shows up unannounced.
Now, however, instead of indulging that side of herself, she takes the arrival as a warning. “I recognize now it means something is going on, something I’m not paying attention to.”