Crossing the line. Victoria Beckham is recalling all the outrageous things she was asked to do as a celebrity in the ‘90s — including weighing herself on national TV after giving birth to her son Brooklyn.
“I went on a TV show with [host] Chris Evans many years ago and I’d just had Brooklyn and lost a lot of weight after,” Beckham, 48, told Vogue Australia in an interview published Tuesday, June 28. “It happened to my mum after her pregnancies. It doesn’t mean you have an eating disorder. And he made me stand on the scales to be weighed. Can you imagine that nowadays?”
The recently resurfaced interview, which was conducted in 1999, involved talk show host Evans, 56, asking the former Spice Girl about her fitness routine after welcoming her and husband David Beckham’s first child.
“A lot of girls want to know because you look fantastic again, how did you get back to your shape after birth?” the radio personality asked the model, to which she replied, “I’m really lazy. I don’t go down to the gym or anything.”
After refusing to take her word for it, Evans requested the singer to step on a scale to “prove” her weight loss, to which Victoria proclaimed, “This is horrible.”
“Eight stones [112 lbs.] not bad at all, is it?” Evans said to the audience after the fashion designer reluctantly weighed herself in front of them.
“I’ve had ‘Porky Posh,’ I’ve had ‘Skeletal Posh,’” she revealed to Vogue regarding the conversations surrounding her weight that occurred at the time. “After I had Brooklyn, there was a picture pointing to every single part of my body where I had to focus on losing the weight from.”
In May, the England native opened up about how her own relationship with her body had changed over the years, telling Grazia that “wanting to be really thin” is “an old-fashioned attitude.”
“I think women today want to look healthy and curvy,” Posh Spice explained. “They want to have some boobs — and a bum,” she said, adding, “I personally want as good a bottom as I can get.”
Victoria, who also shares sons Romeo, 19, and Cruz, 17, and daughter Harper, 10, with the 47-year-old athlete, just hopes that her children will look at the healthy body images of today and follow in their footsteps.
“There are a lot of really curvy women in Miami, and they really own it, you know?” The “Wannabe” singer told Grazia. “They walk along Miami beach with not a lot of clothes on, and they look fantastic. They show their bodies off with such confidence. I found both their attitude and their style really liberating.
She added, “As a mother, I loved that Harper was around women who were really celebrating their curves and enjoying how they look.”
For the “Spice Up Your Life” it’s not “about being a certain size,” but “knowing who you are and being happy with who you are.” While her younger days were focused on maintaining as slim a figure as possible, she explained that these days “I have found my own balance between wanting to have fun and being disciplined about eating healthily and working out.”
Victoria has previously been open about her struggles with body image. In a September 2016 essay for British Vogue that she wrote to her 18-year-old self, the Spice World star revealed that she felt “too plump” as a teen. “I know you are struggling right now. You are not the prettiest, or the thinnest, or the best at dancing at the Laine Theatre Arts college. You have never properly fitted in, although you are sharing your Surrey school digs with really nice girls.”
In the piece, the style icon noted that she often looks back on her teenage self with a lot of affection. “You are going to have so much fun with your clothes — PVC catsuits; chokers that say absurd things; weird spiky blonde hair … But I look back at you and smile,” she wrote.
