Michael Parkinson Asks Victoria Beckham About Anorexia in 2000 Interview

This is the shocking moment Michael Parkinson asks Victoria Beckham if she is anorexic during a chat show appearance in 2000 – as she reveals her lifelong eating disorder in her new Netflix documentary. 

In the series the fashion designer, 51, spoke for the very first time about controlling her weight in an ‘incredibly unhealthy way’ and how she hid the eating disorder from her family. 

Now in an unearthed interview with Parkinson, he is seen asking her incredibly personal questions about it.

He pries: ‘As far as you’re concerned, this thing in the press about you being an anorexic, now are you anorexic?’

She immediately replies: ‘No I’m not!’ to which he hits back: ‘How do you know?’

Victoria responds: ‘I know that because I eat, anorexics don’t eat! I have a perfectly healthy diet. And what upset me the most when all of that was in the press was that I know I’m fine, my family know I’m fine…

‘But there are lots of young children out there who look up to the Spice Girls and think goodness you know are you meant to be thin you know I mean I look at the way I look now and I used to be a lot bigger and I lost a lot of weight after having Brooklyn but this is just the way that I look now… but it did worry me…’

Parkinson then interrupts to say: ‘Did you go to a doctor? Did you think you might be anorexic?’

Victoria then says: ‘I did go as it worried me because I started to get paranoid, and I asked is there anything wrong with me. I wanted to be totally checked out as I was eating perfectly fine and they said it was what happens when you have children.

‘My mum lost three and a half stone after she had my brother so it’s hereditary. I eat and this is what I look like. I have breakfast, lunch and then I have dinner.’

She then recalled that is sometimes ’embarrassing’ that people monitor what she eats when she is in a restaurant as Parkinson asked her: ‘do people think you’re going to chuck up or whatever?’

She replies: ‘Yes the other day we were out and I was busting for the bathroom and it’s sad to think you can’t even do that now.’

Speaking on the three part series, Victoria confesses how she ‘didn’t like’ what she saw when she looked in the mirror so began to control her weight.

She also shared for the first time her torment at being body shamed.

She said: ‘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 Parisian 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.