Victoria Beckham: a former Spice Girl's battle with food and celebrity image

Former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham, flikr.com

April is Emotional Overeating Awareness Month. Today we will examine Victoria Beckham who has surprisingly admitted that she’s no stranger to “pigging out”.

Americans more than ever are feeling a ton of emotional stress due to job loss, increased work loads due to downsizing, job uncertainty, home foreclosures, increased debt, lack of personal time, lack of quality time to spend with family and friends, less money to spend on recreation, and more. So how do most of us deal with this? We eat, and for many of us overeat! We eat compulsively to try to relieve our anger or frustration. We eat because we feel a lack of love or appreciation. We eat because we feel increasing loneliness. We eat because we are bored. Not only do we eat for emotional comfort, more often then not we make unhealthy food choices which cause us to quickly pack on the pounds.

Former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham once said, “I eat like a pig! I just eat what I eat and this is the way I am”. As a Spice Girl, however, Victoria was under a lot of pressure from her management to lose weight and stay slim. Dieting became a preoccupation as a result of the pressures of being a celebrity in the spotlight .

After her days of being in the spotlight as a Spice Girl, Victoria she started to turn to food and binge eat. In her autobiography "Learning To Fly” she describes eating 10 bowls of cereals at once. Before moving to LA, Mrs. Beckham spent few years in Spain while her husband David played football there. She was lonely, bored, homesick and dealing with rampant rumors of a failing marriage. Although it has been speculated that she developed an eating disorder to deal with her weight, apparently Victoria avoided the gym and went hungry pretty much every day in efforts to stay slim. The truth of the matter is, without seeing a doctor’s diagnosis, we can’t confirm what eating disorders may have been in Victoria Beckham's history. But it's clear that she loves food yet her weight and obsession with appearance has led to plenty of anguish over the years.

Now Mrs. Beckham, who is a size 4, is just making better choices and is executing more control to keep her figure thin. During an appearance on the BBC Radio program "Gordon Ramsay's Perfect Christmas Lunch" Victoria shared, "I eat really healthy. I love Japanese food, lots of fish, any sort of fish, any sort of vegetable, lots of fruit, that kind of thing. She also told The Sun Magazine, “I run four miles, seven days a week.” Victoria confessed, “I feel energized and healthy”.

We’re glad to see the former “Posh Spice” happy. She looks great and is truly staking her claim as one of today’s great fashion icons.