Victoria Beckham has revealed she suffered from an eating disorder which she became good at lying about so she could hide it from even her closest family
In her much-anticipated Netflix documentary, Victoria Beckham, the former Spice Girl confesses how she ‘didn’t like’ what she saw when she looked in the mirror so began to control her weight in what she describes as an ‘incredibly unhealthy way.’
Fashion designer Posh, 51, shares for the first time her torment at being body shamed, something which started when she was at theatre school when she was a teenager but she was dishonest about even to her beloved parents Tony and Jackie.
Speaking on the three part series, Victoria says: ‘I really started to doubt myself and not like myself and because I let it affect me, I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror.
‘Was I fat? Was I thin? I don’t know, you lose all sense of reality. I was just very critical of myself. I didn’t like what I saw. I have been everything from porky posh to skinny posh, I mean, it’s been a lot and that’s hard.
‘I had no control over what was being written about me or the pictures that were being taken and I suppose I wanted to control that. I could control it with the clothing, I could control my weight. I was controlling my weight in an incredibly unhealthy way.
‘When you have an eating disorder you become very good at lying. And I was never honest about it with my parents.
‘I never spoke about it publicly, it really affects you. When you’re told constantly you’re not good enough. And I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.’
Victoria, who catapulted to fame in the mid-90s with the Spice Girls, also recalls a moment when she was weighed by live on television by Chris Evans on his Channel 4 show TFI Friday to see if she had lost her baby weight just months after giving birth to her eldest son Brooklyn back in 1999.
While at the time she was all smiles, today she reveals the toll that it took on her as a 25-year-old new mum.
‘I was weight on national television,’ says Victoria. ‘Get on those scales, have you lost the weight?’ we laugh about it and we joke about it but I was really, really young and that hurts.’
Victoria’s body confidence agony began when she was just a teenager and won a place at the Laine Theatre school in Epsom, Surrey – which she reveals her parents funded by remortgaging their house in Goffs Oak, Hertfordshire.
She tells how despite her hard work she wasn’t the best dancer, or indeed singer. But she also told how she looked different to her classmates.
‘I didn’t look like a lot of the other girls,’ she says. ‘That’s where I started getting a lot of criticism about my appearance, my weight.
‘I remember the principle of the theatre school saying to me, you know, at the end of the show we are going to just fly in. “You girls can be flown in” meaning that we weren’t looking as aesthetically pleasing as some of the others, “so we’ll just fly you in the back.”
Victoria’s mother Jackie also adds that the star was told ‘you’re overweight. You’ll be at the back.’
She added; ‘It must have affected her, it’s a very silly thing to say to someone, “you’re fat.”‘
The documentary follows Victoria in the run up to her Paris Fashion Week show in September 2024 – the biggest catwalk occasion she had ever thrown.
Viewers will see how the weather left her and the team at her label on tenterhooks as they feared they would have to postpone it.
But it also takes viewers on the former singer’s journey from a Spice Girl, to a WAG, right through to the present day as a fashion designer.
It is nothing if not candid, and at times Victoria’s voice shakes as she holds back tears about some of the more difficult times in her life.
Amongst them was when her VB label was millions in the red and was on the verge of closure.
After launching it in 2008, she was repeatedly bailed out by husband David which made her a laughing stock.
For the first time Victoria tells of her upset at almost losing the London-based firm and the ’embarrassment’ it caused.
‘This business is everything to me, it’s absolutely who I am but it has been a hell of a journey. I almost lost everything and that was a dark, dark time,’ she says.
‘I used to cry before I went to work every day because I felt like a fire fighter. We were tens of millions in the red.
‘Yes, I’m going home to my husband but I’m going home to my business partner as well and so I would talk to him about it, I had to. He was invested, and I hated it. I absolutely hated it.
David, 51, who makes various appearances as a talking head in the show, then reveals: ‘We both sat there and looked at what I had invested and I think part of that conversation broke my heart because Victoria is a proud woman.
‘When we met, she was a lot richer than me, she actually bought our first house in Hertfordshire known as Beckingham Palace.
‘So for her to have to come to me and say “can I have some, we need some more money, the business needs more money,” that was hard for both of us.
‘Because I didn’t have the money to keep doing this and eventually I was like “this cannot continue.”‘
Victoria added: ‘The entire house was crashing down, I was losing my business. I needed outside investment. I needed someone to help me.
‘I was so desperate to save this business. I was breaking down myself. I felt embarrassed but it’s fact. It wasn’t an opinion, it was at anyone being unkind.
‘I was in a whole, I felt like I was in quicksand. I was desperate. Really, really desperate.’
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