Overview

• In the series, Beckham says she controlled her weight in an incredibly unhealthy way and had not previously discussed her eating disorder publicly.
• She links her body-image struggles to criticism at theatre school and recalls being weighed live on TV in 1999 shortly after giving birth.
• Former Emmerdale actress Gemma Oaten, now 41, says her anorexia stemmed from bullying, describing 13 years of illness and 21 hospitalisations as a teen.
• Oaten, CEO of the eating-disorders charity SEED, stresses that the illness is a serious mental-health condition in which food is a symptom rather than the cause.
• Warning that pressure to be thin is resurging, Oaten cites the 1990s ‘heroin chic’ aesthetic and the current popularity of injectable weight-loss drugs.