On her wedding day last June, Tally Rye looked and felt stunning in her bespoke gown. ‘I’ve never felt so amazing,’ she says.
And yet, at a size 14-16, she was the heaviest she’d ever been.
And cruel trolls seemed to take exception to her confidence as a bride; not merely that she had the temerity to be unashamedly content with her curves, but that her husband Jack – ‘conventionally good looking’ – was slimmer than she was.
‘We’re in a mixed-weight relationship,’ says Tally, 34. ‘People don’t believe my husband still loves me because I’ve gained weight during the ten years we’ve been together. I’ve gone up four or five dress sizes. They seem confused.’
Tally, an author and podcaster, is chatty, effervescent and, in minimal make-up, radiates good health and that brand of easy confidence that comes from being comfortable in her own skin.
Yet among her 136,000 Instagram followers, some sniped at her weight gain. ‘There were comments like: ‘You’re deluded if you think your husband actually loves you.’
Did she delete them and retreat to lick her wounds?
No! She actually re-posted some of them, conscious that the trolls who had been so spiteful might have partners who were shallow enough to value looks over personality.
On her wedding day, Tally Rye looked and felt stunning in her bespoke gown. Yet cruel trolls seemed to take exception to her confidence as a size 14-16 bride and that her husband Jack – ‘conventionally good looking’ – was slimmer than she was
‘I think it’s really important to show that the right person will love you regardless of your size,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t feel like a radical thing to say that you don’t have to settle for someone who bases your worth on your weight and appearance. If you asked someone who they’d like to spend their life with, most people would choose the person over the shell.
‘On occasions when I’ve felt that unkind messages reinforce my arguments, I’ve re-posted them. Jack and I have a favourite saying: ‘Hurt people hurt.’
‘Perhaps the people who send nasty messages are with partners who have not loved them when they’ve gained weight. It should be a red flag if they’ve issued ultimatums about it.’
That said, there was a time when Jack was judgmental. When they first met, Tally, a diminutive 5ft 2in tall, was a whip-slim size 6, and, trawling through her social media pages, he saw the teenage version of her and reacted with shock.
‘I was a size 12 then and he said: ‘You don’t look like that now. What happened?’ I felt a pang of self-consciousness, realising he was aware of my body. Even though the thought was unsaid, I felt he was being negative.
Tally Rye is now a size 14-16. She’s learned to reframe her weight gain in a positive way
When Tally, who is 5ft 2in, first met her future husband Jack, she was a whip-slim size 6
‘He didn’t intend to make me feel uncomfortable, but on one level I thought: ‘I need to maintain this weight.’ ‘
Today, however, Jack is her biggest cheerleader: ‘He tells me I look gorgeous. I feel much more comfortable walking around naked than I did when I was thin. And actually, we have more sex now than we did when I was so tiny, tired and distracted. Keeping thin totally killed my libido.’
Much more significant than her weight now is their friendship: ‘Jack absolutely is good looking,’ she concedes, ‘but much more importantly, he’s my best friend.’
Since her 20s when her size was so irrevocably bound up in her personality it actually subsumed it, she has grown to value character traits above looks. ‘I’ve learned to reframe my weight gain in a positive way. If someone asks you to describe yourself, far better to say, ‘fun, intelligent, witty’ than ‘slim, blonde, toned’.
‘When I was tiny I constantly monitored my body and its fluctuations. I felt guilty about every mouthful of food I ate. My body was small but my life was also small. It takes up a huge amount of time and energy to obsess constantly about how you look.
‘Now I’ve stopped checking my image in the mirror. I’ve stopped worrying about every roll of fat and comparing my body with others people’s. Now I’m so much more chilled and fun.
‘Because I feel so secure in Jack’s affections I am more confident about my body, too. That is more attractive than when I was obsessing about the size of my stomach.
‘Now I put much more value on who I am as a wife, daughter, friend than on what I look like. God knows what’s in store for people whose relationships are founded on physical attraction alone. Waists thicken, hairlines recede; our bodies continually evolve and change.’
She points out, however, that society still decries larger women. It also feels compelled to applaud as exceptional those men who publicly declare their continuing love for partners who do not conform to the slim stereotype.
So former James Bond Pierce Brosnan is celebrated for praising his wife Keely’s curves, for saying he ‘loves them’ and embracing the process of watching her change. They’ve been married for 25 years and he declares, ‘it’s the love in the heart’ that counts.
Nobody comments about James Corden being much bigger than his slim wife Julia Carey, says Tally. Mixed-weight relationships are only noteworthy, then, if it’s the women who are larger than their spouses
‘Yet nobody comments about (actor) James Corden being much bigger than his slim wife Julia Carey,’ she says. Mixed-weight relationships are only noteworthy, then, if it’s the women who are larger than their spouses.
Tally, who grew up in Surrey – where she and Jack now live – was raised in a home with no diet books and where no one counted calories.
She first started obsessing about her appearance when she was at the Performance Preparation Academy drama school in Guildford. There she discovered a passion for fitness and nutrition which escalated into an all-consuming fixation.
‘In my early 20s I developed digestive problems and I thought changing my diet would cure them. I cut out gluten to start with.
‘Naively I was led down a weight-loss path. I lost a lot of weight very quickly and it became my identity. I started tracking everything I ate and exercising every day.
We’re in a mixed-weight relationship, says Tally. People don’t believe my husband still loves me because I’ve gained weight during the ten years we’ve been together. I’ve gone up four or five dress sizes. They seem confused
‘I’d compulsively read the ingredients list on the back of every food packet because I wouldn’t eat anything that I thought was unhealthy.
‘If I went out to dinner, I’d heavily research every item on the menu to see if there was anything suitable for me to eat.
‘If friends ordered takeaways, I’d insist on making my own food instead. I started to withdraw from social situations so I could control completely what I ate.
‘I was really boring. Food and exercise became my whole identity. I weighed out ingredients for my meals. I became increasingly isolated. I wouldn’t go out with friends because I had to go to the gym.
‘It became completely obsessive. I was doing dance classes every day at drama school, then going to the gym five or six times a week. I went quickly from a dress size 12/14 to a size 6.’
Because none of her friends seemed interested in her obsession – in fact, her housemates and drama school tutors were increasingly concerned about it – she began to share her ‘clean’ eating and exercise regime online.
There she found approbation. ‘People said, ‘You’re amazing! You look great.’ ‘ She accrued a following and posted updates and photos every day; in fact, that became her career. After finishing her degree, instead of pursuing drama and musical theatre, she became a personal trainer.
Arsenal footballer Declan Rice (left) robustly defended his partner Lauren Fryer when photos showing her, after the birth of their son, unashamedly bearing her baby weight gain, provoked horrendous trolling
Just as she was graduating she met insurance broker Jack Miller, 32, on Tinder: ‘It definitely began as a physical attraction. He was sporty and active, funny and witty; a real gentleman, too.’
Tally’s compulsion to exercise and diet – which she now recognises as orthorexia, an eating disorder which fixates on ‘healthy’ eating – continued. ‘I was working long hours, six days a week, as a personal trainer and trying to fit preparation of my special meals round that.’
She also began to feel a tension between her desire for physical perfection and a growing yearning to have a normal life. ‘I wanted to do fun things, go out for meals, and my body was telling me, ‘You’re not meant to be a size 6.’
‘But my tiny body felt like the currency of my success. I constantly compared myself to other girls. I remember going to a yoga class and obsessing that my tummy wasn’t completely flat.’
She did not – quite – tip into anorexia, and now she believes meeting Jack saved her from this.
The change in her happened incrementally. When she was in her late 20s, and by then living with Jack in London, she recalls thinking: ‘ ‘I’m fed up with feeling rubbish about myself.’
I didn’t make a conscious decision to gain weight but I started to realise diet culture was making me feel insecure; a massive profit was being made by this industry at the expense of people’s self-esteem.
‘I also started to realise that dieting is really selfish. It is all about you and your body. You become really self-absorbed.’
She has talked about it since with Jack, who now admits he had concerns – although he didn’t voice them at the time – about her lifestyle: ‘I was exhausted all the time; I’d be at the gym by 6.30am, stagger home and do my meal prep. There was no relaxation or fun.’
She recalls that he was ‘polite’ when she made him protein pancakes (which he didn’t manage to finish) and lean burgers with lettuce instead of buns. Much later – after he’d dutifully slogged through hours on a treadmill with her – he confided: ‘Actually, I don’t like going to the gym.’
A holiday in Barbados was a turning point: she allowed herself to eat a pudding. ‘I thought: ‘This is really enjoyable.’ ‘ From there she progressed to bread and cakes: ‘They contained gluten and I was fine. I realised my ‘intolerance’ was psychological rather than physical.’
Back home, she also had therapy and learned that her compulsion to control her eating was a ‘trauma response’: her father had died prematurely of cancer when she was 17 and, instead of processing her grief, she developed an obsession with eating and exercise. It was a revelation.
She began to recognise, too, that the exercise she felt compelled to do was a form of punishment, not care: ‘I realised I didn’t like spending hours on a treadmill any more than Jack did – but I did love tennis, spin, dancing, and walking our black labrador Dave.’
She started to practise intuitive eating, an approach that shifts the focus from calories, willpower and dieting, to a healthier relationship with food. Allied to this came intuitive movement, which encourages exercises you enjoy and want to do, rather than those you think you ought to do to burn calories.
Now she works as an intuitive movement and eating coach, imparting this philosophy to her clients.
She and Jack, who had started living together 18 months after they met, were engaged in 2022. By then, she had put on more weight through lockdown but also gained an equilibrium: ‘I’d realised, if you ask a man who he wants to spend his life with, it will be the fun woman who goes out to eat, hangs out with him, enjoys a pint now and then, slobs out on the sofa.’
But she admits that, just as she prized her excessive slimness when they first got together, Jack put a high value on it, too, telling her he’d worry if she piled on pounds.
When, early on in their relationship, he spotted those old images of her as a size 12 before her dramatic weight loss, he was taken aback: ‘I still felt I had weight to lose. We both shared naive assumptions about our bodies then.’
Tally’s 10-year transformation from 2017, when she charted her weight loss on Instagram
But actually, as she started to gain weight Jack – who is genetically slim and very sporty – recognised a simple truth: she was actually happier. ‘When I was thin, I was constantly comparing myself with my peers in the health and fitness world. I’d have meltdowns. I didn’t feel good about myself.
‘But as I became more curvaceous, Jack could see I was also becoming more positive about my body image, and healthier. I was getting to the weight where my body naturally sits.
‘His attitude changed incrementally, as mine did. We’d both been ignorant. We went along with the prevailing way of thinking about weight at the time.
‘Physical attraction brought us together, but our marriage is based on the fact that we love each other and we’re best friends. We’ve learned such a lot since the early days and the conversation about weight is much more nuanced now.
‘But we do ourselves a disservice if we sugar-coat it. We need to address this bias towards being thin. Jack has been willing to change.
‘He believes in what I do. He’s read my books, listened to my podcasts and he sees that I’m much more self-confident now. The slim me was insecure. I didn’t feel comfy walking round naked. Now I am. He has evolved. And he’d be angry if anyone said anything derogatory about me. He’d try to educate them.’
We talk about Arsenal footballer Declan Rice, who robustly defended his partner Lauren Fryer when photos showing her, after the birth of their son, unashamedly bearing her baby weight gain, provoked horrendous trolling.
The couple on their wedding day. Jack is Tally’s biggest cheerleader: ‘He tells me I look gorgeous. I feel much more comfortable walking around naked than I did when I was thin’
Rice called her ‘the love of my life’ and said he didn’t need an ‘upgrade’, in the distasteful language of her critics.
Such men should be recognised as lodestars for today’s youth, we both conclude.
We return to Tally’s made-to-measure wedding dress and the glorious confidence she felt on that special day because she was wearing a gown that was designed for the fuller figure nature intended for her.
‘I was never meant to be tiny,’ she says. She remembers, however, the presumption that she would strive to be. After I went for my first dress fitting I got an email saying, ‘If you are losing weight for the wedding, please let us know.’ The assumption was that most women do, and that the dress would need altering.
‘I replied saying, ‘Don’t worry. I’m really happy with the size I am. I just want to find a dress that fits me now,’ and they said it was refreshing to hear that.
‘And I’ve never felt so amazing as I did on the day I got married. I felt my boobs had never looked better, it was not too corseted round my tummy; I could breathe easily and eat my meal.
‘We took our vows in the rain. It was like a romcom.’ What’s more, Jack could not have been prouder. ‘He told me the other day: ‘I think about the moment you walked down the aisle and I cherish it. You just looked so beautiful.’
- The Train Happy Journal: 30 Days To Kick Start Your Intuitive Movement Journey by Tally Rye (£11.99, HarperCollins) is out now.
