"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 celebrity news today, former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has spoken for the first time about the 1999 interview where presenter Chris Evans forces her to weigh herself live on air.
Trigger warning: discusses themes of weight loss and eating disorders
Victoria was appearing as a guest on Chris’ Channel 4 show TFI Fridays when he began to publicly scrutinise her about her weight loss post-birth live on air.
She had given birth to her first child, Brooklyn, just two months earlier.
Now, the singer-turned-fashion designer has lambasted the presenter and media for both the interview and, further, the intense scrutiny on her weight over the course of her career.
The clip has been doing the rounds on social media and can still be seen on YouTube. During the interview, Evans asks, “A lot of girls want to know, because you look fantastic again, how did you get back to your shape after birth?”
Victoria replies by saying that she’s “really lazy” and “hasn’t been to the gym at all.”
Yet Chris keeps going, persisting with his line of questioning and asking: “Is your weight back to normal?”.
When she confirms that it is, he pulls out a scale and asks if he can confirm, live on air, that she’s telling the truth.
“Can I check, do you mind?,” he says. When she does reluctantly step on the scales, he remarks: “Eight stone’s not bad at all, is it?”
Now looking back on the interview, Victoria shared with Vogue Australia that she can’t even imagine it happening nowadays.
“I went on a TV show with Chris Evans many years ago and I’d just had Brooklyn and lost a lot of weight after.”
“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 doing that nowadays?”
She continued: “I’ve had ‘Porky Posh’, I’ve had ‘Skeletal Posh’. 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.”
The interview serves as a shocking reminder of how relentless the pressure can be on women to look a certain way – even if it means risking their health to do so. The obsession with losing weight – especially post-birth – is thankfully changing, but must have been incredibly triggering for the star at the time.
Here’s to calling out harmful scrutiny when it happens and moving past the obsession with weight rather than health.
The post Victoria Beckham speaks about the Chris Evans interview where he forced her to weigh herself on live TV appeared first on Marie Claire.
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