That sue-happy hooker Victoria Beckham is giving her lawyers another workout today, fighting back against claims in a British tabloid that she uses diet pills to maintain her razor-thin physique.
According to her agent, Jo Milloy:
“The accusation is dangerous, defamatory and blatantly untrue.
“Victoria takes her position as a role model to young women very seriously and is horrified by this hurtful, fabricated story.
“It is now with her lawyers.”
Role model? For her health, really? Last year, when the Spice Girls were gearing up for their world tour, Posh was giving some crazy diet tips to the other girls. A source tattled to New magazine:
“Victoria has told the girls her secret to staying trim is 200 sit-ups a day and a diet of soya edamame beans, strawberries and lettuce.”
Sounds balanced. And she has repeatedly admitted that she stays so thin through a strict diet and she never exercises. I’m thinking that’s not really a prescription for health. Honestly it will just be a minefield if she wants to claim that she’s a role model for anyone but those scary pro-ana girls.
I don’t know what’s worse… the fact that there isn’t a hint of irony (or shame) in her claiming to take being a role model seriously, or the fact that she’s also probably right, and whether we like it or not, an untold number of teen girls do look up to her.
>_<
The idea of anyone looking to her as a role model for health is more disturbing than anything else about this story, even though it’s all pretty disturbing.
She actually used to be .. dare I say .. ‘chunky’. I caught some program the one day on BBC about the Spice Girls first forming, and what she has become now, and when she tried out, she was very, very frumpy. It’s actually hilarious to see what she was vs. what she is now.
Please take that pic down IMMEDIATELY. I just vomited all over the cat. And it’s not even my cat.
I will admit that at least we now know where she keeps all her body fat. In her mutant head.
As someone who was anorexic in my early teens, it seems entirely believable to me that she’s a role model in terms of “health” and appearance. Not a good one, but one nonetheless. I’m not saying (per the debate last week over J Lo Hew and whether or not her pictures qualified as fat) that we should make role models of the Rubensesque and unhealthy, but skeletally thin women who inspire growing teens to do the same are also encouraging - willingly or not - those girls to make choices that can lead to life-long effects. If you binge and then purge, you can have esophogeal and dental problems. If you use laxatives, you can have excretory system problems. If you simply cut back your food intake by force of will, you can recalibrate your metabolism at that lower rate - permanently. This happened to me. I have to eat a *lot* less than the “average” or normal intake to maintain my weight, and if I do eat normally for more than a few days, I put on weight very quickly. Losing it requires more effort than normal people. Some of that effort involves staying sane and not fainting while eating less than a thousand calories - ideally, 750-800 - a day, as well as exercising. Ironically, that kind of routine is what got me into this situation in the first place, more than twenty years ago. And I haven’t even outlined the effects of diet drugs. I tried them twice - one had the opposite effect and made me ravenous, and one made me so nervous I couldn’t function well. Long-term, they can have worse effects. I only even looked at them because of the difficulties described above at maintaining a healthy weight; difficult as it is, their side effects outweigh any possible benefits.
And then there are the psychological effects of trying to be underweight - if you break down and eat more than planned, you feel guilty, even if you’re actually starving and what you ate was healthy. It took me about 10 years to have a more or less normal relationship to food, but on occasion I still am susceptible to the old mindset that to eat anything at all is failure. It isn’t, it’s what we need to do to stay alive, but sometimes that gets lost.
I know I’m far from the only one who has experienced this and said these things. VB is clearly thin by diet rather than being naturally so (one common tell-tale sign of this is the Pez-dispenser look, where the head seems disproportionately large to the body; I have friends who are natually quite thin and this disparity doesn’t seem to occur), and with what really can only be plastic breasts in the bargain, therefore creating an unrealistic and unnatural body image, she projects an unreal and unrealistic image. That Relatively Posh inspires extreme and unhealthy weight loss in others is both likely and appalling.
i pity all of you who believes what the press a.k.a. tabloid said..even of what she eats in her strict diet! if she ONLY eats those reported..she would be dead by now! but of course all of you will be very happy! unfortunately..she is looking more healthy right now..her latest photos at when they arrived at LAX to fly to London shows she’s now in her way back to her teen/early 20s days a.k.a. more meat!
Sounds to me like she might be truly more mad that they are claiming she took the “easy” way out with pills, rather than starving herself as a result sheerly of will power. Reading that article on her, she seems so proud of her ability to control her eating…which of course leads to anorexia speculation.
I’ve heard that she has adopted a 900-calorie-a-day diet but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was eating less than that. My arms are bigger than her legs.
“unfortunately..she is looking more healthy right now”
Firstly, that’s news to me…
Secondly, why would this be a bad thing?
She chain smokes too, but that’s even more taboo than an open discussion on whether she uses diet pills or not.
Why do you have a picture of a 14 year old emo boy posted?
“Victoria takes her position as a role model to young women very seriously and is horrified by this hurtful, fabricated story.”
Yes, unfortuantely, she’s role model. But, she only cares about publicity that hurts her empire of the greed and deceit. She’ll always be a Poshtitute.
I wish that I didn’t hate being hungry so badly. I just don’t know how anorexic girls do it! Not that I want to be anorexic.
She has kind of slipped off the radar - she probaly clapped her scrawny hands in glee when the opportunity to get a little attention presented itself. Who cares.
this woman is WAY too thin.. and david beckham said they want more kids. HA! how can she even carry a baby?? i’m surprised she even had 3 healthy (they are cute, i will admit) boys because i always remember her being sooo thin. why would david want to do a sack of bones? like a coat hanger.. ew. she would look much better if she put on some weight.
That’s the sexiest, starving zombie corpse I’ve ever seen. She can eat me any time! RAWR!!!
She still looks like a stick-figure Wendy O. Williams to me. :-p
No way. Wendy O Williams was hot.
I’d hate to say it, but what do people expect?
I don’t think that anorexia is a good option and I don’t think that Victoria Beckham is a good role model in that sense, but it’s really hard to not focus on body image today when you can’t even be a few pounds overweight, or not even, and people compare you to a mammoth.
I have sympathy for people with eating disorders, except that Victoria Beckham appears to take pride in her non-eating habits. It’s quite apparent to me that she’s neurotic at best and that she has a mental disorder. It’s troubling in the first place why she was even considered a good role model in the first place.
Carrie Underwood’s shed something like 30 pounds since Idol and she looks wonderful though hungry and food obsessive at times I’m sure. Basically, I don’t think it’s anyone’s place to judge whether or not women should diet to extremes or not. Some women, in order to show results, need to. And hell, what does it matter that I choose to starve myself? Isnt it about time women set the bar for themselves and not men?
@ vitaminkid - If women set the standard for themselves (and by all means, I encourage them to do so!) then I sincerely hope, as a concerned non-female, that they’d opt towards discouraging dietary habits that shorten their life-spans, destroy their metabolism, and make other women feel degraded for not living up (or down?) to those expectations.
For some strange reason, I don’t think this whole skeletal thing was exactly cooked-up by forward-thinking individuals who only had the good of women and the general population in mind.
Neither do I - and believe me, they are discouraging these dietary habits - it’s called self-denial
It seems Vicky B has forgotten her pants in the above picture.
Such a common mistake to make, the poor thing.