Victoria Beckham hid her eating disorder from everyone around her, including her husband David Beckham.
The former Spice Girls member, who first opened up about her decades-long battle in a recently released Netflix documentary, detailed the secrets of her “consuming” illness on Wednesday’s episode of her “Call Her Daddy” podcast.
“You said[in the documentary]’When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying.’ Have you confided in anyone at this point in your life?” host Alex Cooper asked, to which Victoria replied: “No, no one.”
Victoria, 51, asked David when she felt “ready to open up” about her struggles, and David said he always knew she was “very disciplined” about the way she ate.
“I was too scared to talk to anyone. I didn’t feel like I could trust anyone,” she lamented, later boasting that she had been able to “transform an unhealthy obsession with food into a healthy relationship.”
Victoria admitted that her way of healing was finding “balance” and credited the former footballer, whom she married in July 1999, for helping her break out of the “aerobic, aerobic, aerobic” cycle.
“David was the one who changed my workouts,” she said, admitting that “all[she]wanted to do was burn, burn, burn calories.”
“He was the one who encouraged me to start weight training,” the fashion designer said, adding that David, 50, “was always very supportive.”
Victoria has remained “very disciplined” with both her diet and exercise, but claimed she has been in a “healthy” state lately.
Before the documentary was released earlier this month, the mother-of-four told Cooper that she sat down with her and David’s only daughter, 14-year-old Harper, and told her about her experience “in a way that she could understand.”
Victoria reflected on her unhealthy relationship with food, which began in the ’90s when “everyone was obsessed with ‘fat-free, fat-free, fat-free.'”
She then developed a “horror” of eating foods containing fat, and as a result became “really mindful” of everything she ingested.
(The documentary also featured how she was body shamed by her dance teacher as a preteen and teenager.)
“That was confusing enough for me. So I guess that’s why I then went into the Spice Girls and had people talking a lot about me and my weight. And, like you said, one minute I was ‘Porky Posh,’ and the next minute I was ‘Skinny Posh.’ It’s making fun of you,” she explained.
“When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I had no idea. You lose all sense of reality. And it’s very draining. It’s very tiring. And it controls you. It really controls you.”
Victoria confessed that she felt “miserable” and “alone” and “didn’t really exist” for many years.
“It’s really hard,” she told Cooper. “We have to talk about it.”
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please call the National Eating Disorders Alliance at 866-662-1235.
