Victoria Beckham has opened up about her struggles with an eating disorder in her candid new documentary.
In the new Netflix doc, Victoria Beckham, the 51-year-old designer discussed the body image issues that plagued her for much of her life, from drama school through her time in the Spice Girls.
“When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying, and I was never honest about it with my parents,” she said, per Page Six. “I never talked about it in public. It really affects you when you’re being told constantly that you’re not good enough and I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.”
The spotlight only contributed to her battle, as her weight was constantly under a microscope throughout her public career, especially in the 1990s and early ’00s when the media and culture was particularly cruel to famous women.
Beckham recalls being called “everything from Porky Posh to Skinny Posh” during those years, adding that she began to “doubt myself and not like myself” and started to lose “all sense of reality.”
“I mean, you know, it’s been a lot, and that is hard. I had no control over what’s been written about me, pictures that were being taken, and I suppose I wanted to control that, you know.…” she says in the doc. “I could control my weight and I was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way.”
Millennial women seem to have finally opened our eyes to the fact that our generation was caught in the crossfires of a uniquely heinous, fatphobic time in cultural history that's left us seriously screwed up. And we want to talk about it.
Though this is the first time Beckham has discussed her eating disorder openly, she’s discussed the media’s fixation on her weight in the past.
"I’ve had ‘Porky Posh,’ I’ve had ‘Skeletal Posh,’” she recalled in a 2022 interview with Vogue Australia, per People. “After I had Brooklyn, there was a picture on the front page of a newspaper pointing to every single part of my body where I had to focus on losing the weight.”
As her husband, David Beckham, put it in the new documentary, “People felt it was okay to criticize a woman for her weight…there were a lot of things happening on TV then that won’t happen now, that can’t happen now."
Once again, Beckham discussed being weighed on national television six months after giving birth to her first child, Brooklyn Beckham, in 1999. “We laughed about it and we joked about it, when we were on television,” she says, “but I was really, really young and that hurts.”
Prior to the documentary’s release, Beckham expressed concerns about discussing body image issues publicly.
“I’ve had so much said about me and I’m sure that has robbed me of some experiences. I never want to look like I’m complaining, but there were times in the past that I haven’t felt confident enough to sit on a beach and watch my children play,” she told Grazia in 2024.
According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, while 15% of women will struggle with eating disorders before their 40s or 50s, just 27% of them will seek any treatment, and many face shame and stigma.
If you or someone you know is struggling, contact NEDA.