The 40-year-old is opening up about her struggles.
Tammin Sursok has been transparent about her battle with an eating issue and how she is teaching her girls to accept and value their physical appearance.
The former star of Home and Away claims that despite no one noticing, she still suffers from Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) related to her eating and attractiveness issues.
She remarked on the Vulnerable podcast, “I was neglected in the sense that no one said anything when I had a really severe eating disorder, and I was really sick and it was looked at as, ‘Well she looks great.'”
“I think to myself, ‘I look like a sack of bones, I don’t look great.'”
Throughout her career, young girls have sent notes to Sursok, a mother of two daughters, expressing that they “want to be you” and that “I also didn’t eat very much because I wanted to be as thin as you.”
She claimed that “it was just a different time” when she was a child.
She vowed to avoid passing on her warped eating habits to her children, saying, “Now that I know what it looks like.”
Phoenix, age 10, and Lennon, age 4, are Sursok’s two children with her husband, producer Sean Ewan.
“The only thing I do well is that I never, ever examine my physique in front of my kids.
“I don’t criticize myself.” I never try to make myself appear less wrinkled by looking at my face.
“I never act that way in their presence.”
She says that to overcome an eating disorder, “awareness is the first step”.
Today, Sursok also attends therapy weekly, along with couples therapy, to ensure her relationship doesn’t become “broken”.
The actress said that when she was a child, she was bullied for her weight, which is what she believes sparked her obsession with her body.
“I was bullied about my weight, I was very overweight … and then I lost weight (and) that became my identity,” Sursok said.
“I was like, well, if I stay thin, if I stay small, people will like me.
What transpired after that? My weight loss led to an appearance on a TV show.
By sharing her experience on social media, Sursok has been transparent about her past of “hating my body” and has been working to alter the way other women see themselves.
For International Women’s Day in March, she posted a number of sorrowful tales on her Instagram account. The first one dates back to Sursok’s 15-year-old days spent hanging out with “newly pubescent boys.”
She wrote in the essay, “I wanted to be lusted over, to be wanted.”
Meeting one particular boy, she said that, after he said hello, she “stared blankly, paralysed in fear and lust”.
“’Hi,’ I said, ‘My name is Tammin’,” she recalled.
“’Hey Tammin, I’m Steve. And I want to tell you something’.
“My heart stopped. I had daydreamed for years that this moment would come.
“’You need to go to Jenny Craig’,” he told her in reference to the weight loss program.
Two years later, in Sursok’s second story, the main character sits on the bathroom floor while visiting Italy.
The story seems to be about the eating disorder bulimia, which causes sufferers to binge eat and then purge through vomiting, however this is not made obvious in the Instagram post.
“I had been forcing my raw and chapped knuckles down my throat for the past forty minutes.” I was familiar with this routine. I had gotten rather good at lying,” she said.
Six bright brace bands swirled around the basin, resembling tropical fish in motion. My fingertips penetrated the greasy water, causing them to sting. That was insignificant, though, because secrets kept me warm at night.
My eyes appeared to be bleeding as I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I gave my mirror a meek grin. I reasoned that since I had gained 100 pounds (45 kg), everybody would suddenly adore me.
Leaping forward to the year 21: Sursok was having a deep and prolonged kiss with a man in his thirties who “smelt like sweat and promise.”
“He would bring me back to his parent’s-financed home and allow me to share a space for my toothbrush,” she recalled.
“I was taught in school that guys who like you make fun of you, so I ignored the fact that he chose to talk about how my huge forehead and flapping arms made me seem like the Olsen twins.
When he would go off for days on end to discover himself, I would wait up for him. He would finally come back and ask me to remove my clothes.
Sursok claimed that she “always obliged” since she “was taught it was the right thing to do” once more.
Then, as he was taking advantage of me, he would occasionally stop to comment, “Your stretch marks are getting better.”
Sursok also talked about her difficulties with body image following the birth of her first kid with husband Sean McEwen, a producer.
Observing the “grooves on my stomach that looked like a map of Venice,” she asked if her body was “deformed.”
She writes, “I shed plump, salty tears.”
She said in her post’s conclusion that she had been misled for more than 30 years “that other people’s perception of my body as good enough was the only way to happiness, worth, and love.”
“I had let my body be objectified by the hands of men; I had let my worth be valued by the headlines of the media; I had let other people’s opinions, bathed in hate, define the way I viewed myself.
“For too long. Not anymore.”
Sursok said for the “good part of 35 years” she “hated” her body – now realising that, although she can’t get the time back, her children can.
“To all my fellow women warriors that have ever struggled with self-worth, body image and the fear to break free of old belief systems, I see you,” she said.
“May we all love ourselves.”
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