Victoria Beckham has disclosed that she struggled with an eating disorder, and became adept at concealing it, even from her closest family members.

In her eagerly awaited Netflix documentary, the former Spice Girl opens up about her dissatisfaction with her reflection, which led her to manage her weight in what she describes as an “extremely unhealthy way.”

The 51-year-old fashion designer, known as Posh, speaks for the first time about the distress of being body shamed, which began during her teenage years at theatre school, a fact she hid from her cherished 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 weighed 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.’

Victoria later found David Belhassen whose company Neo Investments invested £30 million in Victoria Beckham in 2017.

The mother-of-four doesn’t address her feud with eldest son Brooklyn, 26, but he and his wife Nicola Peltz, 30, are seen in the background in footage filmed from the Parisien fashion show last year, and there are several poignant photographs and video clips of him as a baby and young boy.

Her other sons appear a couple of times, while there is a scene when daughter Harper, 14, teaches her mum to dance to Chic’s Le Freak at their US apartment for a TikTok video in what is one of the funnier moments.

For Posh though, she insists she has never forgotten where she has come from and she details her devastation at the Spice Girls ending back in 2000 when they went on hiatus following Geri Halliwell leaving.

She tells how despite she and David being both newlyweds and relatively new parents, she was lonely.

‘When the Spice Girls finished it was so extreme. One minute I am spreading the word of girl power, and the next minute I’m a wife, in a flat in Manchester, not really having any friends, living a long way away from my family and I found that transition really, really difficult.

‘I was so blessed to be married to David, I had this amazing relationship, this amazing little baby, but it felt quite slow, it felt really lonely I remember thinking, ‘is anyone going to want to put me on a plane and do a photoshoot again?’

‘And I just kept thinking ‘what am I going to do?”

Victoria went on to launch a solo career – something which she reveals made her feel conscious about.

‘I’d be lying if I said I was the best singer or dancer but when people are mean and hear things, and you see things and you’re constantly made to feel you’re not good enough, that really hurts. 

‘I became so self-conscious. People thought I was that miserable cow that never smiled, and they’re not wrong.’

David adds: ‘When I first met Victoria she was smiley, she was confident but that started to disappear.’

Victoria also makes an astonishing confession about the 2006 World Cup when she and her fellow WAGs ran riot in the spa town of Baden Baden where the footballers’ wives were staying.

She, along with the likes of Cheryl Tweedy and Coleen Rooney, were seen shopping and partying while the England team trained and played.

Victoria says it was a moment of clarity for her, and that in fact it was when she decided that she was going to achieve her dream of launching a fashion label – something she did two years later.

‘I buried those boobs in Baden Baden and became much more simple,’ she reveals.

But despite appearing happy when she talks about her trip to Germany, it is tinged with sadness.

‘Us ladies were shopping and we were owning it,’ she says. ‘I look at those pictures and I smile but when I look back and think ‘why’, I suppose there is an element attention seeking if I’m completely honest.

‘It was at a time when I didn’t feel creatively fulfilled. So it was how I stayed in the conversation, from Spice Girls, to WAG. I didn’t realise it at the time but I was trying to find myself. I felt incomplete, sad, frozen in time. Maybe.

‘I was appreciative of what I had, I need a sense of purpose and I remember saying to myself if I ever get an opportunity again I’m not going lose it. I’m not going to lose it again.’

Victoria Beckham is released on Netflix on October 9. 

See all the pictures from the premiere here – as Victoria is a vision in white