Victoria Beckham Details “Unhealthy” Relationship With Her Weight

The singer and designer born Victoria Adams married David Beckham in 1999 and was mom to 18-month-old son Brooklyn Beckham when the Spice Girls made what would be the last appearance of their original run at the 2000 MTV Europe Music Awards that November. But after the group went on indefinite hiatus (and officially disbanded in 2001), she was admittedly unsure of what to do with her life.

Her family was “amazing,” she explained in the 2025 Netflix docuseries Victoria Beckham, but life “felt quite slow. It felt really lonely. And I remember thinking, ‘God, is anybody going to want to put me on a plane and do a photo shoot again?’ And I just kept thinking, What am I going to do?”

David, who figured his wife could use rest, soon realized that what she really needed was purpose.

“My life didn’t change,” he acknowledged in the series, “because I continued along in my career and I continued to do what I loved. But it all changed for her and I think that, at the time, I didn’t realize how hard that was for her.”

Recalling all the scrutiny of her body, including being weighed on-camera six months after having Brooklyn in March 1999, “we laugh about it, and we joke about it when we’re on television,” Victoria said, “but I was really, really young, and that hurts.”

She continued, “I really started to doubt myself and not like myself, because I let it affect me. I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror—you lose all sense of reality. I was just very critical of myself. I didn’t like what I saw. I’ve been everything from Porky Posh to Skinny Posh.”

Meanwhile, looking too skinny was just as much of an offense as looking too heavy. And since Victoria couldn’t control what was being written about her, she ended up controlling her weight in an “incredibly unhealthy way,” she said. “When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying. And I was never honest about it with my parents. I never talked about it publicly. It really affects you when you’re being told constantly you’re not good enough. And I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.”

Victoria admitted in the doc that she injected herself into the spotlight to “stay in the conversation” after her young family moved to Spain in 2003 when David signed with Real Madrid.

Their time in Spain was dominated by their battle with tabloids intent on painting their marriage as doomed in the wake of allegations that David was having affairs (a scandal glossed over in Victoria Beckham but addressed in Netflix’s 2023 docuseries Beckham, which focused on the soccer star). And yet Victoria was really trying to find herself in the wake of her success with the Spice Girls.

“I felt incomplete, sad, frozen in time maybe,” she explained in the series. “I was appreciative of what I had, but I need a sense of purpose. I remember saying to myself, if I ever get an opportunity again, I’m not going to lose it again.”

Victoria recalled in the Netflix series how Anna Wintour was invited “every season” to her runway shows after she launched her eponymous label in 2008, but the Vogue editor in chief “never showed up.”

Anna finally RSVP’d yes in September 2013, sitting in the front row alongside David and then-2-year-old daughter Harper Beckham when Victoria debuted her spring 2014 collection during New York Fashion Week.

“I knew her as a Spice Girl and we admired her style and her sense of commitment to fashion,” Anna said in Victoria Beckham of not jumping on the VB train right away. “But most of the celebrities who get involved in our world are not true designers. I thought maybe this was a hobby. Didn’t quite believe it.”

Anna, who stepped down from the top of the masthead at Vogue in June 2025 but remains global chief content officer and artist director at Condé Nast, said in the doc she was “skeptical,” as she and her fellow fashion gatekeepers “can all be a little bit snobby and think, maybe this is a side gig.”

But, she added, “Victoria was one that totally proved us wrong.”

By 2016, Victoria was an award-winning designer, “but the reality was, it was slipping through my fingers,” she said in the series, comparing her fashion label’s trajectory at the time to “a snowball that was going down the mountain.”

David had invested millions of pounds in his wife’s business, but “never saw anything coming back,” he recalled. “We always agreed that we would support each other, no matter what. But it worried me. This isn’t sustainable.”

In hindsight, Victoria said, “There was a lot of waste. We were millions of pounds in the red. I didn’t know what to do.”

After years of defying her haters, reports that her fashion house was in trouble “wasn’t anyone being unkind,” she acknowledged. “It was a fact, and I had to just take it on the chin. I was in a hole, I felt like I was in quicksand.”

Meanwhile, she “absolutely hated” having to talk about her business struggles with her husband, but she had to because he was invested.

Noting that his wife was “a lot richer” than him when they first met in 1997 and she bought their Hertfordshire home known as “Beckingham Palace,” David knew how painful it was for her to ask him for more money.

“Part of that conversation broke my heart,” he said in the series, “because Victoria is a proud woman.” And, he noted, “That was hard for both of us, because I didn’t have the money to keep doing this.”

As remembered by David Belhassen, whose Neo Investment Partners bought a third of Victoria’s business in 2017 and helped turn it around financially, he was initially a hard no on the prospect of getting involved.

“It was a disaster,” he said in the series. They “never made a profit. Frankly, I’ve never seen something as hard as that to fix.”

Belhassen said he changed his mind after complimenting his wife one night and finding out she was wearing Victoria Beckham—and she loved the brand.

To be able to help though, he explained, “I needed her to understand if she was really capable of accepting what had to happen. For years she had people telling her what she wanted to hear.”

Unnecessary expenses included “70,000 a year” on office plants, Belhassen said, and “someone was coming to water the plants for 15,000.”

Victoria admitted in the doc that her “entertainment background” led to overindulging.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but the waste was mind-blowing,” she said. “I had 15 different linings for the insides of the outerwear…Bizarre things like flying chairs from one side of the world to another. I hear it now and I’m horrified, but I allowed that to happen. And I think part of the problem was, people were really afraid to tell me no.”

Per Fashion Network, Victoria Beckham emerged from the red in 2022.