Three out of five Spice Girls…
…have now spoken outwardly about their battle with eating disorders.
Posh Spice broke her silence in 2001, when an excerpt of her autobiography was published in the British newspaper The Mail. In it, she said that she had been "obsessed" with her appearance and that "in the gym, instead of checking my posture or position, I was checking the size of my bottom, or to see if my double chin was getting any smaller.”
Although she had been accused (why people “accuse” others of an eating disorder, I just don’t get – accusations are for crimes, not psychiatric issues) of being anorexic for many years – and she still is – the future Mrs. Victoria Beckham (*sigh*) engaged in not just calorie restriction but binge-eating, over-exercising and liquid meal replacements. The last two dieting mechanisms were taught to her by songmates Geri Haliwell/Sexy Spice and Mel C./Sporty Spice. Sounds like these girls were under a wee too much stress, no?
Recently, Geri and Melanie, part of the current superhot Spice Girls reinvention, have opened up about their personal struggles with bulimia. All of this, they say, chaos occurred at the height of their fame.
In a recent TV documentary about the ladies who taught us to scream, “I’ll tell you what I want, what you really, really want!” Sporty revealed, “My biggest, biggest fear and it made me feel nauseous just thinking about it was that the papers were going to say I’d put on weight. All through the Spice Girls I was terribly in control of what I was eating. I wasn’t eating properly and I was over exercising. I was very skinny. I found having an eating disorder really embarrassing.”
Keep in mind this was SPORTY Spice – she was “supposed” to have an athletic, fit body. Of any of the Girls, she should have been made to feel especially good about having strength and ripped arms. Instead, the limelight got to her and she felt so pressured to be skinny, she actually started throwing up from it.
Some of the other Spice Girls knew about the disordered behavior but kept mum. Says Scary in the new documentary, “Even though we were that close, there were certain things you just don’t talk about unless you feel there’s a window in there.”
This reminds me of the US Weekly column “Celebrities – They’re Just Like Us!" So many women remain silent, even when their closest friends stop eating, run for hours, drink to excess or start cutting themselves. Celebrity or not. But all of these harmful actions are mechanisms for gaining control over an overwhelming amount of stress and if you see someone you care for hurting themselves, you need to say something. It's like that anti-drug commercial where one girl stands on a pier and watches as her friend gasps for air, drowning in the lake. You would never stand idly by then...so why do we so frequently turn the other cheek when a friend is bingeing, purging, starving or overdosing at the gym? I know there have been times when I stayed silent for too long because I was afraid my friend would take offense. But now I know how to speak up in a loving, supportive, non-confrontational way.
That said, we can't make it our total responsibility to stage an A&E Intervention when an adult has decided not to heed our concerns. At some point, a grown woman can't be told what she needs to do - she'll get help for her ED when she is good and ready to. I've witnessed this in girlfriends and in myself, too.
Sorry - this post started out all "Girl Power!" and ended up Debbie Downer. Wa-waahhh.
Comments
This is so wrong but I totally want to jump up and down and scream "I knew it!!!" I remember having an argument with a fellow middle-schooler about whether or not Sporty Spice had an eating disorder, just because she was so thin we could always see her hip bones poking out. I guess I took it as a given that Posh did.
Okay, now that I'm over feeling vindicated, I am really sorry that public pressure encourages this kind of bad behavior in celebs and us regular folk. Our photoshopped standard of beauty is the epitome of ridiculousness and would be funny if it weren't making us so ill...
I wrote a bit about my own relationship to THEIR eating disorders in my blog a bit back after I went to their LA reunion. I think it is a fantastic example of how nobody is completly immune to society.
wasn't it "Ginger Spice" rather than "Sexy Spice"??
Sasa - Ginger Spicy IS Sexy Spice! She had two names.
Twisted Barbie - I'd like to read it..can you post the direct link?
Charlotte - don't feel bad. There's a little schadenfraude in all of us. Just keep dedicating goat milk blogs to me and we're even steven.
Leslie it was never sexy spice. she did not have two names. none of them did.
http://twistedbarbiesrevolution.blogspot.com/
Its the last one on the page...
I lived in a house once where there was 4 of us and 3 of us had some kind of ED. In fact, it was kind of like a buffet of EDs. And not once did any of us speak of it to the other. You would think that 4 women living together would talk about everything, and we pretty much did except for "that." "That" was to remain an unspoken I think because if we talked about it then we'd feel that we'd have to go do something about it like, oh, get medical help. I don't think any of us were ready for that yet. We were also very young, and I know I thought (very naively) that I could fix it on my own or grow out of it somehow. I know now that you cannot handle something like an ED on your own, but this is part of learning and growing, and the healing.
Wiki says that actually leslie is right (sort of) - it's not that she got to have names, she started out w/ sexy spice and then it got changed:
"Geri was named "Sexy Spice" (quickly changed to "Ginger Spice" due to issues with the word "sexy" on children's television." (Wikipedia)
I guess you'd have to be a fan right from the beginning to know that one!
Well said Leslie, well said.
I spent years abusing my body: I've been bulimic, an overeater, an undereater, a chronic dieter, a sugar addict and a food nazi. Through it all, I loathed my body unless it was perfect. Making peace with my body changed my life. Every Thursday I post a tip on learning to love your body on my blog, firstourselves.com, in my Love Your Body Series. Here's a link:
http://www.firstourselves.com/first_ourselves/the-love-your-body-series.html
Best,
Karly Pitman
www.firstourselves.com
