For a public figure, Fiona Falkiner is pretty open about her dating life. She joined the online dating world at the start of this year as an eHarmony ambassador and has admitted she’d met someone but it was “early days”.
Now, the model has shared a less-than-happy moment from her dating past, where a guy she liked told her she was “too fat” to date.
“It was so soul shattering that it became one of the reasons I signed up to The Biggest Loser. But, when now I think about that incident and the person I was then compared to the person I am now and I’m so completely different,” Falkiner, who now hosts the show, told Body and Soul.
“I mean, that is a bloody outrageous thing to say. It’s mean and I knew that but… the old me, while angry, might have held onto that insult – which I did, I carried it with me.
“I felt ashamed about what he said but in actuality, he should have been the one who was ashamed.”
Ten years on from TBL, the 33-year-old has learned not to let negative comments affect her.
Watch: Meghan Ramsay on the effects of negative body image. (Post continues after video.)
“I’ve come to the conclusion that people who say mean things about other people’s looks are the ones who are truly ugly. And the ugliness they have inside them, while it might be directed at me in the form of an insult, actually has nothing to with me,” she said.
“They have that awful view of the world and it’s not my problem. I pity them, really.”
Falkiner has previously spoken about how, even after she lost weight, years of fat shaming continued to take their toll until she had counselling.
“The problem was that I thought that if I lost weight my life would be perfect. It was on the outside but on the inside I still had the same old insecurities. My body had changed but my mind hadn’t. I actually had some counselling to deal with it,” she told The Daily Telegraph last year.
