NRL WAG Tahlia Giumelli shares heartbreaking details of eating disorder

Tom Burgess’ fiance Tahlia Giumelli has shared heartbreaking details of her “desperate” battle and shed light on the horrors of the modelling industry.

Tahlia Giumelli has shared details of her “desperate” past battle with an eating disorder in an emotional post to Instagram.

The 29-year-old model – who has two daughters with her fiance, South Sydney Rabbitohs player Tom Burgess – revealed that her unhealthy relationship with food and exercise began when she was just a teenager.

From there, as her modelling career took off, she developed “significant issues” with her body.

“When I was in my teen years at school I would limit the amount of food I would eat and would make sure I did so many sit ups and squats a day. I was 15,” she wrote.

“When I was 19 I would train twice a day 5 days a week and would take before and after photos, I would weigh my food and skip meals.

“When I was 22 I was so desperate to loose (sic) weight overseas I did a tea detox only to end up months later with a diagnoses (sic) of Crohn’s disease because it had set off a flare up (I had the gene but I had set it off by upsetting my insides).”

Giumelli also detailed one particularly horrible moment on a shoot that left her feeling “gutted and ashamed”.

Tahlia Giumelli has shared details of her ‘desperate’ past battle with an eating disorder in an emotional post to Instagram. Picture: Instagram

“I constantly stood on scales and pulled out tape measures. I was once pulled off a job late one night by a client (a pretty big name client) because a friend of theirs had seen me on a previous shoot and said it looked like I had put on weight and my face was chubby,” she recalled.

She added that “there was no one to blame for this”, saying that her modelling agency had been her “biggest support” since she was 18, and had sat their models down to “explain how to eat well and eat healthy, to care for our bodies, if only I had listened”.

It was the industry overseas “that shaped and encouraged my negative body image”.

“In London I was pulled in regularly measured with a tape measure, in LA I was made to stand on scales and constantly reminded to stay thin,” she wrote.

“The industry has changed for the better over the years.”

Giumelli with her fiance Tom Burgess and their daughters Elodie and Sophie. Picture: Instagram

Since having her two daughters, Sophie in 2019 and Elodie in 2020, Giumelli said she now has “so much respect for my body and I’m much kinder”.

“I now train because I want to feel stronger. I eat because I want to nourish my body and give it the strength and energy it needs to care for two children,” she said.

“We should have so much respect for our bodies. They are powerful. Be kind to them.”

Giumelli and Burgess announced their engagement on New Year’s Eve 2019, after three years of dating.

She shared the “sad” news in July that “after almost two years of planning”, they’d been forced to postpone their wedding because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“With another wave of Covid hitting NSW our priority is and always will be the safety of our family and friends,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.

“I have no doubt when it happens it will be just as amazing. Really feel for all the brides who have had to do the same. But right now a wedding didn’t seem like a number one priority.”