Much like Victoria Beckham, Su Hobson developed a disorded relationship with food back in the ’00s, which mirrored the distorted era of fad diets, ‘heroin chic’ and damaging pressures
Like many women her age, Su Hobson could relate all too well to the darker aspects of Victoria Beckham’s new Netflix documentary.
Glamorous Victoria remains one of the great icons of the ’90s and ’00s. Being one-fifth of The Spice Girls, Posh Spice represented Cool Britannia and Girl Power, and then married one of the most successful footballers and bedroom wall pin-ups of all time, David Beckham, forging a power couple brand that endures to this day.
However, in her new doc, fashion designer Victoria, 54, doesn’t shy away from discussing the grimmer aspects of this era, including the alarming body image pressures that triggered a devastating eating disorder.
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Opening up about this period of her life, the legendarily stylish WAG told viewers how her mental health plummeted following a 1999 appearance on Channel 4 show TFI Friday.
The then 25-year-old had only recently given birth to her first son, Brooklyn, and host Chris Evans asked her to hop on some scales to see if she’d dropped the weight.
Victoria recalled: “I really started to doubt myself and not like myself, because I let it affect me. I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Was I fat? Was I thin? I don’t know. You lose all sense of reality.
“I was just very critical of myself. I didn’t like what I saw. I’ve been everything from ‘Porky Posh’ to ‘Skinny Posh’. It’s been a lot, and that’s hard.”
This self-doubt is all too familiar to longevity coach Su, who, at 54, came of age at around the same time as the Spice Girl. This was an era when perfectly healthy-looking women were considered to be ‘plus-sized’, while those with curvier frames were regularly mocked and shouted at on weight loss shows. The message was clear: Lose weight, or lose your right to respect.
Reflecting on this culture, Su, who runs Su Hobson Coaching, told the Mirror: “[Victoria] was obviously in the public eye and all these comments about her being podgy and all of that, you know, comments would be made. It seemed to be okay.
“My family would say it, people who knew you would say it. I think they still do to women now, to be honest, but you know it’s like, ‘Oh, you put on weight’, ‘Oh, look at your thighs’. Since when did society think it’s okay to make unsolicited comments about women’s weight? I was getting comments all the time, and it makes you insecure, and then you’re seeking to do something about it, you end up going to extremes.”
Su was around 13 years old when she first started to feel self-conscious about her body. “[Victoria] is of a very similar age to me. So we’ve grown up in that era of, ‘You should be smaller’. It was all about being lighter, smaller, and to do that, you should diet. And when it came to exercise, you should do ridiculous amounts of cardio, kind of punishing exercise. So that was the message we grew up with.
“As a teenager, and thank God there wasn’t social media then, I was very, very self-aware of my own figure and comments that people made at school stuck with me. Like, you know, you’ve got really big fat thighs and awful comments like that.”
Throughout her 20s, Su’s life became “mad” and “out of control”. She was drinking a lot, and by the time she reached her early 30s, she’d gained weight and wanted to do something about it and regain ‘control’. Unfortunately, popular health wisdom at the time was often anything but healthy.
She explained: “I felt that pressure to be skinny and to look amazing, I was looking for a partner, I guess, at the time as well. You know, [Victoria] talked about this. This is the bit I resonated with: her life.
“There was nothing in her life within her control, and she started to control her food because it’s something she wanted to control, and this is really common with women. They do it because it is something they can control, and I guess that’s why I did it as well. My life wasn’t going where I wanted it to, but I knew I could control how I looked through controlling my food.”
For two years, Su obsessively stuck to the Atkins diet, a controversial yet popular low-carbohydrate plan. During this time, Su, who goes by the Instagram handle @su_longevitycoach, refused to eat carbs and didn’t exercise – her goal was purely to lose weight. “I think one of the reasons I didn’t exercise, not just because I thought I didn’t need to, I didn’t have any energy to exercise,” she says.
“I wasn’t in a good headspace, self-esteem-wise, back then, and you know, I was losing all this weight, but it’s so surface-level, you think, and again, I deal with this with women now, they think if they get to a certain size, they’re going to be happy.
“Well, obviously you’re not because it’s a lot more deep-rooted than that, so you know you chase this look, you get really skinny, you get obsessed with it, but it doesn’t take you anywhere good. In fact, it damages your health, and I’ve spent a lot of years now strength training to try to build not just muscle but get my bone health back.
“We didn’t have scans back then, but I know full well that not eating carbohydrates for two years must have damaged my bone density. Being that underweight has so many negative effects on the body.”
At the time, however, Su didn’t realise just how serious her disordered eating was. She revealed: “I got really, really skinny. There was a moment, and I remember it clearly. I was living in a house in Manchester, and I remember looking in this full-length mirror, and my hip bones were quite dramatically protruding. And I thought, ‘That looks really good’. And I look back now, and I know that that absolutely was disordered eating and a disordered relationship with my body.”
In her mid-thirties, Su met and married her now-husband and welcomed two children. Finding herself wanting to lose weight at 41, this time she realised she needed to make her health a priority and launched a career as a personal trainer.
Nowadays, her work is focused on helping women in midlife navigate their fitness journeys, and she often still comes up against deeply ingrained issues from the ’90s and ’00s, with this particular generation left “massively” affected.
Su said: “So a client will come to me and their first thing is I want to lose weight, and I desperately try and get people to stop thinking about what they weigh. It’s absolutely irrelevant, and it doesn’t help when you start lifting weights because, if anything, you can put on weight.
“They say, I want you to look like you, for example. And then I say, ‘Well, okay, how many calories do you eat a day?’ And they tell me, I’m like, ‘Well, you’re going to need to eat more than that. You’re completely under-eating, and you need to start lifting some weights and stop those hours on the treadmill or hours on the stepper’.
“And they’re horrified because that’s all they’ve known and they know that it’s not working anymore because they’re starting to put on weight, and they’re thinking, ‘Hang on a minute something’s changing’, but when you tell them what they need to do it’s a complete unlearning of everything that they’ve heard their whole life.
“Some struggle with it, and the ones that do do it are the ones that are successful and you know healthy and happy and stronger and more confident, but women just aren’t used to that message, and to tell them to eat more is like, ‘What? No, no, I can’t eat more!'”
If you are looking for support, contact eating disorder charity Beat Eby visiting their website here.
Do you have a story to share? Email me at julia.banim@reachplc.com
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