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I'm A Celebrity Australia 2017: Kate Fischer, now Tziporah Malkah, tells of eating disorder

Aja Styles

She won't answer to Kate Fischer, the once model engaged to James Packer, but Tziporah Malkah has another reason for shedding her former childhood name.

On Wednesday night's I'm A Celebrity .... Get Me Out of Here!, the once wealthy socialite revealed how she suffered from an eating disorder since she was an eight-year-old Adelaide schoolgirl.

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Tziporah opens up about James Packer
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New arrivals on I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!

How will the original celebrities react when model Kris Smith and T'ziporah Malkah, formerly known as Kate Fischer, arrive at camp unannounced. Vision: Network Ten.

The 43-year-old aged care worker and charity supporter told the campsite how she grew up taller than the boys and "I felt like Shrek or something".

"I felt like all the girls were little and blonde and here was big Tziporah."

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Earlier former Miss Universe Australia Tegan Martin and ex-MKR contestant Ash Pollard discussed Malkah's confidence and her "decorum" in walking around the campsite nude.

"Tziporah is really ecclectic; she's a very unusual creature. She's actually lovely to talk to but I don't know if she's hard to gauge," Pollard confided to the solo-cam. 

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It then cuts to Martin raising Malkah's need for a meal plan from a nutritionist.

"I won't eat for two or three days and then I would eat a whole Dominos pizza," Malkah said. "It was not about being naughty. I just have had an eating disorder since I was eight years old.

"I started being an overeater, bingeing, because my parents separated and that's when I started overeating and then I started to ... just not eat. So then I had bulimia and all that kind of stuff. So by the time I started modelling I had already had, had a chronic eating disorder for five years."

As the daughter of Doctor Alastair James Fischer and NSW minister Prudence Jane Goward, Kate Fischer won a Dolly covergirl competition at the age of 13 and embarked on a modelling career to New York at the age of 16, which eventually included some acting and TV presenting but retired from the spotlight after 21 years.

Now she is back in front of the cameras (for the next six weeks at least) as long as she doesn't shout "I'm A Celebrity .... Get Me Out of Here!"

Malkah described it, to the camera, as a life long condition that spanned 35 years, "it's a very difficult thing to kick".

It shocked former Olympian Lisa Curry: "To hear Tziporah's story about having an eating disorder at the age of eight was horrific".

James Packer

Earlier Malkah told The Project's Carrie Bickmore about her transition from a billionaire lifestyle to ending up homeless in a Melbourne women's shelter and her relationship with Packer.

"I was a princess in an ivory tower and I just didn't see what it's like to really, really suffer what it's like to be frightened about having nowhere to live and since I've had this experience it has made me want to come back [to television]."

At the pinnacle of her wealth she was living in Los Angeles with fiance Packer and planning their children's names.

"I hate talking about him, I hate being defined by him... I also had a very promising career, I felt like a bud snapped off the vine before I had time to bloom and that's fine, you make sacrifices for love," she said.

When quizzed by Bickmore why she didn't continue her career, she responded: "Oh no I had to stop work, 'It's tacky you're going to be my wife and it's tacky that you should go out and you need to work'... I was allowed to do a play at the Sydney Opera House because that had some substance to it. I just went shopping and just had coffee with friends."

But where the relationship fell apart, in her mind, was from being shut out of his life.

"He was under so much pressure and so much stress, he would come home and sometimes not talk to me," she described to Bickmore. "I was quite needy – I'm not saying I'm lilywhite in this whole situation, it takes two – but we would always go away on holidays with like 30 people or something or 10. And the mates were nice enough but they were always entertaining him ... [so] it was just like: 'Could you just let the man relax for 10 minutes'.

"And so it was Easter time and I said, 'We're going away alone', and it was very intimate and it was lovely and he actually said to me, 'You know what I'm really glad we came alone, this is the most relaxed I've felt in years'.

"But the mates they just all turned on me and there was so much pressure just from his work that within about six months I was out of the loop."

"He really, really loved me and it was exciting and everything. But then all that changed," she added. "It was like it was too hard to have him in my life. 'You can be Mrs Packer, you can have all the credit cards, you can do whatever you want but you have to let me do what I want.' That's not a marriage, that's not the sort of marriage I want."

Malkah said that she didn't give Packer much thought anymore but "he did change the course of my life and then didn't really properly compensate me".

"The tabloids just felt like they could have a real go at me. I had no protection and I was the laughing stock. I looked like this really horrible woman who ran off with the Packer money, my ill gotten gains. And he didn't give me $10 million," she told Bickmore.

Instead, she said, he gave her a $1 million house and "a few hundred thousand dollars".

Fall from grace

So she went to Hollywood to pursue acting and starting dating a Jewish man who enlightened her to faith.

She then met a businessman, who she got engaged to, and he had a wife and child in Israel and he took all her money, forcing her back to Australia.

"I was pretty numb, I was in a lot of shock, I just sat down on my bed and wept... it was pretty overwhelming. I had sort of tumbled from a great height, I had just moved back from Beverly Hills where I had my two-bed apartment and my Lexus and it was all very nice and suddenly I was totally broke."

She said she felt "so ashamed and so frightened" about having to explain her change of situation when people recognised her on the street that she went into hiding. She didn't tell her mother she was living in Melbourne and homeless.

She instead went to TAFE and became an aged care worker. But it was a paparazzi shot published in Women's Day that forced her out of hiding.

Malkah remains barely recognisable as the Fischer Australia saw on the arm of Packer, having reached up to 118.5kg last year and admitting to New Idea that she has become "morbidly obese".

"I'm going to lose at least 20kg, hopefully much more. I'm way too heavy and it's time to trim down," she told the magazine at the time.

"This is doctor's orders — he says I'm morbidly obese. My blood pressure is way too high and I'm likely to die prematurely unless I lose weight. So my life depends on this. I'm ready!"

Her name

On Monday night's I'm A Celebrity episode, Pollard asked Malkah about her name, which turned out to be a family name meaning "bird" in Hebrew.

"I was given a gentile name to be in the street, but at home I've always been Tziporah. I've just decided to reclaim it," Malkah said about her Jewish background.

"If anyone calls me 'Kate', 'Zippy' or 'Zip', they've got three strikes and they're out. I'll let them know."

On her Facebook page she explained the renouncing of her birth name, Katherine Helen Fischer, in favour of Tziporah Atarah Malkah – "my legal name for several years".

"Since Tziporah is a traditional name on her matrilineal line, passed down from Grandmother to first born Granddaughter, Katherine/Kate/Katie was no longer," the page reads.

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