TV personality and personal trainer Tiffiny Hall has opened up about the “intervention” staged by her family after she welcomed her son Arnold in 2017.
During an interview on the Ash London Podcast, the 37-year-old said her wake-up call came after a debilitating postpartum experience with chronic fatigue syndrome.
She revealed to Ash that she worked herself to the bone after giving birth to Arnold and only took a break when it came time to breastfeed him.
“I fell apart,” the trainer confessed. “I really thought I could do it all, even In a postpartum body I was filming 40, 50 workout videos a day.
“My mum would drive Arnold to me for breastfeeds – that was my break. I didn’t even give myself a break. My break was feeding my child.”
Tiffiny said that soon after, her parents and comedian husband Ed Kavalee staged an “intervention” in order to show her the damage she was causing to herself.
“I thought I was just rundown, burnout, whatever. We ran the gauntlet for a while,” she admitted. “But I still couldn’t drive, I couldn’t function, I couldn’t bath my own child, I couldn’t feed my own child.”
The founder of fitness program TXO also told podcast host Ash that it was her family telling her “there is no business if there is no Tiffiny” that made her realise she needed to change her lifestyle.
“When they said ‘you’re not mothering…your Mum is’, I’m like… there’s nothing else that matters in this world. I wanna be a mother.”
She also added that she “wouldn’t be here without Ed”, who was there to support the struggling first-time mum every step of the way.
Moving Forward
These days, Tiffiny is working on practicing self-care and mindfulness to look after herself.
“I do all the things I should have done as a health professional and I know what to do, but I never did for myself,” she confessed on the podcast, which was released on September 20. “I looked after everyone else’s health but ran myself into the ground.”
In August, Tiffiny told News.com.au that she can no longer maintain the gruelling fitness regime she used to complete prior to Arnold’s birth. She told the publication that she is only able to train ten minutes a day since being diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis in 2020.
As if that diagnosis wasn’t enough, she found out at the same time that she had Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, a condition that affects blood flow and causes people to feel lightheaded or even faint.
Australians will remember Tiffiny as the pocket-rocket personal trainer on The Biggest Loser Australia: Families in 2011, following up with the Singles series in 2012.
Get the tea first! Follow So Dramatic! on Instagram, and tune in on Mondays to get your reality tea fix with the So Dramatic! podcast with Megan Pustetto.
