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.”
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.”
