Gary Barlow shares never-seen-before photos at 17st during devastating bulimia battle
Topics: TV and Film, Celebrity, Health, UK Food
Ella Scott
Featured Image Credit: Kate Green/Getty Images for Universal Pictures
Topics: TV and Film, Celebrity, Health, UK Food
Warning: this article contains discussion of disordered eating which some may find distressing.
Gary Barlow has shared his experience with bulimia alongside never-before-seen images which were taking during the ‘excruciating’ 13 month period.
On Wednesday (28 January), Netflix dropped its latest docuseries charting the rise, fall, and eventual reunion of famed 90s boyband, Take That.
The mini-series draws on previously unseen footage to trace how Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, Robbie Williams, Jason Orange, and Howard Donald reached global levels of stardom.
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Barlow, who turned 55 earlier this month, used part of the three-episode show to discuss his bulimia battle, which began after the band split in 1996 and his solo career took a dip in 2000.
At the time, he was dropped by his record label after his second solo album, Twelve Months, Eleven Days, failed to reach commercial success.
Bulimia nervosa is an eating disorder in which a person has regular episodes of binge eating followed by periods of vomiting or laxatives to eradicate the guilt and loss of control over eating, as per Medline Plus.
Beat Eating Disorders estimates that around 1.25 million people in the UK are living with an eating disorder, with around 33,500 males aged 11 to 34 living with bulimia.
In the Take That documentary, Barlow said that he didn’t leave his house once for over a year and developed the eating disorder due to his flailing solo career and mockery by the British public.
He said began to think: "What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Because that's it with music now. I can't even walk down the street now without someone shouting something about Robbie to me.
“I also started to put weight on. And the more weight I put on the less people would recognise me.
“I thought ‘this is good, this is what I’ve been waiting for, living a normal life’. So I went on a mission,” the ‘Patience’ singer explained.
"If the food passed me, I’d just eat it… and I killed the pop star.”
Barlow, whose weight reached 17 stone in 2003, said that he would ‘go off to a dark corner of the house and just make himself sick’.
“You think it’s only once and all of a sudden you’re walking down that corridor again and again – is this it? Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?”
The Take That show isn’t the first time that Barlow has publicly platformed his bulimia journey.
In his 2018 memoir, A Better Me, the father-of-three said that it took him ‘15 minutes to get the job done’ the first time that he purged, but that it quickly reduced down to ‘30 seconds’, as per The Express.
“I'd go back to bed and lie awake... my heart racing, sore throat, worrying and overstimulated. I can never sleep after I've done it.”
After months of this practice, the icon decided one day that he was ‘not having it anymore’.
“I'm going to change. I want to change and I'm determined that this is not who I've become',” he lamented.
“It only took a few years to get that low, but it took me years to get back to who I wanted to be. 10 years probably.”
If you've been affected by any of the issues in this article and would like to speak with someone in confidence, call the BEAT Eating Disorders helpline on 0808 801 0677. Helplines are open 3pm-8pm Monday to Friday. Alternatively, you can try the one-to-one webchat.