Victoria Beckham is opening up about a difficult time in her life in her new docuseries. On Thursday, her three-part documentary, Victoria Beckham, premiered on Netflix, and she revealed that after the Spice Girls split, she spiraled into “incredibly unhealthy” habits around eating that gave her a sense of control at a time when she felt like she didn’t have any.
On the show, Victoria explained that she had to be so secretive about her eating disorder that she eventually got good at lying — even to the people she is closest with.
“When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying, and I was never honest about it with my parents,” she admitted. “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.”
Things really ramped up for her after the Spice Girls broke up in 2000, which is when she said she lost “all sense of reality.”
“I’ve been everything from Porky Posh to Skinny Posh,” she said. “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, control it with the clothing.”
And not just with her clothing — Victoria also felt like her weight was one of the few things in her life she had control over, even if she “was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way.”
Though she’s tried to “laugh” about that time in her life, she said it still stings. “We laugh about it and we joke about it, when we were on television, but I was really, really young and that hurts,” she said.
Husband David Beckham then chimed in, “People felt it was OK 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.”
Victoria Beckham is now streaming on Netflix.
