David Beckham caused a stir when he said on a podcast in 2022 that his wife Victoria had eaten the same meal ‘for 25 years’ – steamed fish and vegetables – and that they had only once shared a dinner. In interviews she sticks to the line that she is ‘disciplined’ in her eating habits.

However the Spice Girl turned fashion designer has bravely confirmed that she was in the grip of an eating disorder for years in a new Netflix documentary.

‘I suppose that’s been with me my whole life,’ she says of the feelings of self-doubt which have driven her issues around controlling food.

In the three-part show, titled Victoria Beckham and streaming from tonight, she doesn’t specify when her eating disorder began or whether she has recovered from it.

Recalling the period after the birth of her son Brooklyn, when her extreme weight loss led to a media furore, she admits for the first time that her behaviour around food was ‘incredibly unhealthy’.

At the time, in 2000, she said reports about her weight were ‘vicious’ and untrue: ‘They keep saying how thin I am, hinting I must be anorexic or bulimic or something. It is so upsetting. I’m not anorexic, I’m not bulimic and I’m not a skeleton. I’m 7.5 stone, very fit and I feel great.’

But now she says this wasn’t the case. ‘I really started to doubt myself and not like myself and really let it affect me,’ she says in the documentary. ‘I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror – was I fat, was I thin?

‘You lose all sense of reality. I was very critical of myself, I didn’t like what I saw. I had been everything, from porky Posh to skinny Posh. I mean, you know, it’s been a lot and that’s hard.

‘I had no control over what’s being written about, pictures that were being taken. I suppose I wanted to control that, you know. I could control it with the clothing, I could control my weight and I was controlling it 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 talked about it publicly. It really affects you when you are being told constantly that you are not good enough and I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.’

In the Netflix show she talks about being put at the back of the stage when she was at theatre school in Epsom, Surrey, because she was ‘less aesthetically pleasing’ than the other dancers.

Her mother Jackie Adams says she was told: ‘You’re overweight – you’ll be in the back.’ Obviously it must upset you. It’s a very silly thing to say to a young person isn’t it, ‘You’re fat.’

Victoria Beckham spends a perhaps surprisingly large amount of time during the documentary musing about her low confidence and inviting sympathy for the difficulties she has faced.

She doesn’t seem to feel she was lucky being part of the Spice Girls, the biggest selling girl group of all time. There’s no time devoted to the stupendous good fortune which saw a stage-struck teenager become globally famous and rich beyond her dreams.

Instead, she claims to have faced relentless criticism simply because of ‘where I come from’.

And what haunts her is that she felt she lost her status when pop fame ended. ‘I felt lost,’ Posh says, of those years living in Alderley Edge as a young mum and wife to Manchester United star David.

She was determined to have a second bite at stardom, first through her attempt at a solo career. When that flopped, ‘I thought, God, is anybody going to want to put me on a plane to do a photo shoot again?’ she complains.

‘Performing was all I knew how to do. I’d be lying if I said I was the best singer or dancer, but when people are mean and you are constantly told you are not good enough, that hurts and I became so self-conscious.’

And so she struck out to launch a career in fashion. ‘I loved fashion and I wanted to be in the fashion industry, and it was time to do something completely different. You know I buried those boobs in Baden Baden (the site of the 2006 World Cup),’ she says, referring to her then pneumatic anatomy as the most famous of the England football team wives.

‘I became a simpler more elegant version of myself and I went to work,’ she says.

She adds: ‘To make the dream become reality we had to kill the WAG.’

And yet, it’s a pity that the WAG was killed because this po-faced project lacks the fun of previous WAG-tastic documentaries like 2002’s Being Victoria Beckham or 2007’s Victoria Beckham: Coming to America.

There are few jokes, for example. The one crack at her own expense (‘I haven’t touched chocolate since the Nineties, and I’m not going to start now’) feels rather unsettling when – later – she discloses the eating disorder.

She returns to her famous aversion to smiling over and again, saying she doesn’t smile when posing with husband David because he always walks on her left and she only smiles ‘to the left’ because ‘I look unwell if I smile to the right’.

‘That’s why I look so moody. I’m smiling on the inside,’ she says.

Fans of Mrs Beckham often talk about her sense of humour, but there’s precious little of it on display in this documentary, which shoots her talking seriously and looking fabulously put together in immaculate interiors in Miami, the Cotswolds and London.

At one point she does make her team howl with laughter when, discussing David’s chicken husbandry, she remarks: ‘You should see his cock – it’s magnificent. I’m not kidding, it really is.’

But never mind cocks – there’s an elephant in the room. Missing from the show, of course, is eldest son Brooklyn. He’s seen in a brief behind-the-scenes video from their 1999 wedding, as a baby, and also on the football pitch with father David as a tot and dancing on stage with Victoria during the 2007 Spice Girls reunion tour.

There is just a glimpse of Brooklyn and wife Nicola Peltz arriving to attend her fashion show in Paris in September 2024, which is the key ‘event’ covered by the documentary.

His name, though, isn’t uttered and he’s not seen speaking.

I understand that this comes as a relief to Brooklyn, as he and his wife have been greatly hurt by the reporting of their family rift, which began after Brooklyn’s wedding to Nicola. Brooklyn, however, won’t give her up, saying ‘I choose you baby’ in a since-deleted Instagram post from May this year.

Because of the feud he and Nicola famously didn’t attend any of David’s 50th birthday celebrations this spring.

Beckham sons Romeo and Cruz feature briefly, with Cruz trying on a suit and Romeo discussing a sandwich. Daughter Harper, who is 14, is shown making a TikTok video with her mum, and presenting her with an award at a Harper’s Bazaar event. She’s seen asking why it’s called Harper’s Bazaar and on being told it’s the magazine’s name, she says: ‘Oh I thought it was after me.’ It seems rather unfair to offer up this naïve gaffe to the world.

Another non-person in Victoria’s world is her ex manager Simon Fuller, who was an early investor in the Victoria Beckham fashion brand and remains on its board – but is in Victoria’s ‘deep freeze’.

He introduced her to designer Roland Mouret who Victoria credits in the show with teaching her how to be a fashion designer.

Last night Fuller declined to comment on the documentary or the snub. Indeed he appears to have fallen out with David and Victoria Beckham completely, even though he put in place the string of commercial deals which founded Brand Beckham.

The Netflix series, a co-production with David Beckham’s Studio 99, is very much the authorised version of the Victoria Beckham story. There is no mention of any marital ups and downs. David’s time playing in Madrid, during which there were allegations of an affair with his PA Rebecca Loos (never confirmed by the Beckhams), is skated over in seconds.

Instead Victoria paints a portrait of herself as a striver who has finally been rewarded with success. ‘When I first started this fashion business 18 years ago I didn’t know a lot about the industry. I was scared because I loved fashion – it was always my dream – but I knew what people would think: she was a pop star, she’s married to a footballer, who does she think she is?’

In curious scenes, designer Victoria is seen telling other creatives how to pin up the fabric or what she wants changed about the cut – she cannot sew, cut patterns or even draw designs.

She’s also plainly hurt by some controversy-seeking barbs that have been lobbed in her direction over the years.

The late art critic Brian Sewell is seen exclaiming on a chat show in 2009: ‘Madam comes along and steals the occasion and she’s just a common little bitch.’

That has not aged well. A lot of screen time is given to David Belhassen, the founder of London-based private equity firm NEO, who invested £30 million in the fashion brand in 2017.

The way she tells it, NEO saved the business because husband David said he couldn’t keep funnelling money in. Belhassen uncovered waste including £70,000 a year on plants and another £15,000 to water them.

Victoria says: ‘We were millions in the red and I was so desperate to save this business that I cared so much about that I felt, if I’m being honest, that I was breaking down myself.

‘I felt embarrassed. But it’s a fact, it wasn’t an opinion, it wasn’t anyone being unkind, it was a fact, and I had to take it on the chin. I felt I was in a hole. I felt I was in quicksand.’

David says: ‘We always agreed that we would support each other no matter what. But this isn’t sustainable. There was no way of her business surviving. We both sat there and we looked at what I’d invested and I think part of that conversation broke my heart because Victoria is a proud woman and when we met she was a lot richer than me.

He adds: ‘She actually bought our first house known as Beckingham Palace. For her to come to me and say we need some more money, the business needs more money, that was hard for her. I had to say I don’t have the money to keep on doing this. Eventually I was like: “This cannot continue.”‘

Victoria believes the business has turned a corner. Despite a three hour running time, there isn’t space to include the actual figures in the documentary.

But the filing to Companies House in August shows losses have widened to £4.8 million and the firm has had to be propped up by yet another loan from David and Victoria and NEO of £6.2 million. It’s true, however, that sales were up by 26 per cent.

And she has what she craved – the approval of Anna Wintour, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue. Wintour says: ‘I was sceptical. I think we can all be a little bit snobby, but Victoria was the one that totally proved us wrong.’