Tina Rahimi battled disordered eating ahead of the Olympics

Tina Rahimi still remembers the first time she was hit during a sparring session in a boxing group.
Rahimi dressed in the requisite protective gear and entered the ring with men and women.
”I would even spar them, and they would hit me, and I would just keep going,” Rahimi tells 9honey.
“I just wasn’t afraid. Everyone would just be watching us, and the little team’s just going hard at me and I would just keep coming forward and I would just keep going.”
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“It was just funny, I could definitely take it,” she recalls.
“It’s just something that you have within you that you feel like – we call it the heart – you have the heart to just keep going.
“I feel like with me, I never had that fear even to get hit. It just didn’t bother me, I guess.”
Rahimi first tried boxing at her local gym.
“I just absolutely fell in love from there, and I pretty much have not stopped ever since. It just became an addiction to me,” she says.
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At first she did it for fitness. Her Olympic dream would come later at the suggestion of her coach at the time, who told her she was good enough for competitive boxing.
Perhaps it was in her blood.
Rahimi’s father Michael’s dream to compete at the Olympics in Barcelona in 1992 was thwarted when he couldn’t raise the funds.
Thirty-two years later, his daughter was headed to Paris 2024.
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Rahimi was well-placed to represent her country.
With an established career as a makeup artist, she was able to schedule her work hours and finances to best suit a run at gold.
But first, she had to win all her fights.
“You sort of have to build a name for yourself first,” she says of her Olympic run, “but for you to actually qualify, you need to become State Champion.”
After that, you need to become Australian Champion, and from there you go to Oceana, and win.
“This is how we all qualified for the Olympics. We had 12 qualified athletes, which is the most that we’ve ever had for Australia for boxing.”
Rahimi describes the atmosphere at her first Olympics as “insane.”
“I loved it. I was a seeded boxer because I won gold at the Pacific Games.”
Rahimi put up a good fight, so to speak, but ultimately lost to Poland’s Julia Szeremeta in the first round of the 57-kilogram class.
If she competes again, the athlete plans to move to a higher weight category, to avoid the restrictive practices required to make it into the 57-kilogram class.
In 2023, Rahimi sought help for disordered eating, which helped her make this choice.
“Now I’m actually going up a weight division because it’s become really challenging,” she says.
“I’ve actually struggled with a lot of, I would say, disordered eating. So I had to speak to a psychologist about it, because it became really challenging for me to stay in my weight category.”
She’d already qualified for Paris 2024 at the time, so had to stick to the 57-kilogram weight class, but with the new knowledge of how to re-establish a balanced died afterwards.
She now focuses on health at size that is more natural for her.
“I still want to eat clean, but at the same time I want to eat a lot of it,” she says.
“I don’t want to restrict even my healthy foods that I’ll be eating.”
Rahimi has recently partnered with Aussie Apples, a collaboration that began after she shared her love of the fruit on social media.
”I think they’ve just seen all my food and TikToks and everything I’ve done on social media,” she says.
Aussie Apples recently released a No Snackgrets Report that revealed Australian snackers are twice as likely to regret having an unhealthy snack compared to chucking a sickie.
Rahimi can relate, saying she feels regret “every time I eat something that’s not beneficial for me.”
“I think it’s a real inspiration for other people and other Australians to show them that you can still enjoy food and still eat apples, but at the same time, it doesn’t have to be just an apple,” she says.
“There’s different ways to sort of stay on track, and I think that helps me specifically with fruit.”
If you or someone you know is in need of support for an eating disorder or body image issue contact the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673.
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