What you need to know
Victoria Beckham has opened up about her eating disorder and detailed how it affected her life behind the scenes.
In the Netflix documentary series Victoria Beckham, the 51-year-old former pop star turned fashion designer broke her silence about her experience with the disease.
“When Brooklyn was six months old, I was weighed on national TV,” she explains, recalling some of the widely publicized comments about her image in the media after giving birth to her first son.
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“‘Go on the scale’…’Have you lost any weight?’ We laugh about it and we joke about it when we’re on TV, but I was really young and that hurt,” Victoria recalls. “I really started doubting myself and didn’t like myself anymore because it affected me. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see what I was seeing. I lost all sense of reality. I was everything from ‘Porky Posh’ to ‘Skinny Posh.’
Victoria, who also touched on the issue in her 2001 book Learning to Fly, admitted that her disability made her “very good at lying” and “couldn’t be honest” with her parents about what she was going through. All the while, she felt like the media’s criticism of her image was “controlling” her in an “incredibly unhealthy way.”
“When you’re constantly being told you’re not good enough, it’s really a reflection of yourself. And I think that’s probably been going on all my life.”
In another confessional, husband David Beckham looks back at the woman of the early 2000s under a microscope. “People felt it was okay to criticize women’s behavior, whether it was their weight or what they wore. There were a lot of things happening on TV at the time that wouldn’t happen now, that wouldn’t happen now.”
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“The Victoria that I knew was sitting at home with her jersey on, drinking wine, laughing. It started going purely because of the criticism she was receiving,” the former athlete recalls.
In 2021, Beckham spoke about his eating habits on the Lucy’s Table 4 podcast, describing himself as a “very picky eater” who “likes things cooked in a very simple way. I don’t like oil or butter or sauce, so I’m probably most restaurants’ worst nightmare.”
She revealed that when she joined the Spice Girls, she “adopted a very healthy diet”. Because, “I’m on tour and I expect a lot from my body. So from that point on, I decided I was going to eat in a really clean way. Lots of vegetables, lots of fish. I don’t eat any dairy. I haven’t had red meat since I was about 7 years old.”
“I’m very disciplined when it comes to how I eat,” she said. Note that she is not “denying” herself anything. “I expect a lot from myself as a working mother with four children. I exercise a lot and eat very healthy. That’s who I am.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, The Alliance for Eating Disorders offers a fully staffed helpline at 1-866-662-1235 and free therapist-led support groups.
