Freddie Flintoff: Living with Bulimia review – batting away stigma around male eating disorders

It is estimated that 1.5 million people in the UK suffer from an eating disorder. They cause more deaths than any other mental illness. There is a misconception that anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders only affect women, but this is far from true: 1 in 4 sufferers are male and 60% of them don’t seek professional help.

Unexpectedly, one man trying to change this misconception is Andrew Flintoff, also known as England cricket hero Freddie Flintoff. In a new BBC One documentary Freddie Flintoff: Living with Bulimia the athlete revisits his history with the bulimia, explaining why and how he hid it from the public and those around him for over twenty years.

Flintoff won the hearts of the nation through his cricketing skills and party boy behaviour in the early 2000s, but behind the success and smiles, he was battling a serious eating disorder throughout his career.

Like many young men, Flintoff was tall and skinny when he debuted as a professional cricketer in 1998 aged just 21. As he grew older and gained some weight, the eagle-eyed press took note and began to equate his performance with his size. A good game would result in comments such as “whatever his new diet consists of seems to be working”, and bad performance would lead to ruthless body shaming. Upon winning the Ashes’ “Man of the Series” in 2005, one clip shows Flintoff telling a presenter, “yeah I played alright for a fat lad.”

“I became known as a fat cricketer,” today’s 42-year old ex-athlete tells the BBC, “that was horrible. That was when I started doing it,” he says, referring to making himself sick after meals.

According to eating disorder charity BEAT, “people with bulimia are caught in a cycle of eating large quantities of food (called bingeing), and then trying to compensate for that overeating by vomiting, taking laxatives or diuretics, fasting, or exercising excessively (called purging).” Having never sought professional help for his eating disorder (he admits to having purged this year) Flintoff educates himself on his disorder along with the viewer. “Apart from my own experience I know nothing about it,” he says, “and part of me doesn’t want to know.”

There are a million ways to praise Flintoff for this documentary, it is truly one of the bravest pieces of celebrity television I have seen. But, it is his battle with the part of himself that does want to stay in denial about having an eating disorder that must have been particularly hard to tackle. The hour-long documentary forces Flintoff to confront difficult truths about the difference between coping and healing; it isn’t a process of catharsis and closure, but one of accepting terrifying vulnerability and starting a journey seeking help.

Throughout the documentary your heart aches for the 42-year-old. He refers repeatedly to his preoccupation with the size and shape of himself and the people around him. He works out 9 to 10 times a week and candidly tells a baffled cameraman “I will always be overweight.”

Flintoff meets other young men who are suffering from eating disorders and is taken aback by the similarity of their stories to his own. When dieticians and therapists tell him this is something he can get treatment for Flintoff becomes visibly defensive, crossing his arms, welling up and admitting that he has accepted bulimia as the cross he has to bear in return for the success of his career and happiness with his family.

Many years ago Flintoff tried to share the extent of his eating disorder with a dietician specialising in athlete fitness. As he mustered up the nerve to admit he was throwing up after most meals, she jokingly referred to the prevalence of eating disorders in female athletes, sharing relief that there would be none of that in an all-male cricket team. In that moment he decided to keep his suffering to himself.

Male athletes are sixteen times more likely to suffer from eating disorders than other men.

The dietician’s comment was extremely damaging but not necessarily malicious. It speaks to a wider issue on poor education surrounding mental health, in particular eating disorders. When Flintoff finds out that bulimia encompasses over-exercising and binging as well as purging, he is taken aback; “I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, on and off, and I didn’t even know what it was,” he says.

There are so many tough moments in this documentary, from meeting the family of a 24-year-old man who died of a heart attack after years of battling bulimia; to Flintoff showing a dietician pictures of him “fat”, disdain and self-disgust painfully contorting his face; to Flintoff’s repeated mantra “I can deal with this” and the response that repeatedly falls on deaf ears, “you don’t have to though”. At times it is not an easy watch.

The moment that exemplifies the truly insidious nature of an eating disorder, however, is Flintoff recalling his pursuit of boxing after he retired from cricket. He tells the camera he took up boxing “not least because I knew it would involve losing weight.” He admits disliking the punching and being hit, but “the punches in the head were with it to lose weight,” he says.

The documentary ends four months later when the camera turns up at Flintoff’s home where he lives with his wife and four children. They find him pedaling furiously on an exercise bike in his garage, drenched in sweat. In between pants he tells the camera he has to do an hour on the bike, fasted, each morning, to feel good.

Thankfully, later that day Flintoff is on his way to see a dietician he met earlier in the episode. After over 20 years he is seeking help. He worries that there have been too many years of disordered eating to ever regain a normal relationship with food and lose the impulse to vomit after a meal, but the dietician reassures him that recovery does not mean he has to stop working out or eating “healthy”. Swaddled in anxiety he agrees to the first steps of treatment.

As soon as I finished the episode I texted and told many family and friends about the documentary, the response from everyone was almost identical, along the lines of: “Really, Freddie Flintoff? I never would have known.” And that is the truly important message from this documentary, he is breaking the taboo and mould of what “someone with an eating disorder” should look like. This documentary is likely to reach an audience that might never have seen eating disorders in people that look like them before, and the impact that could have on boys and men who are struggling with disordered eating is immeasurable.

If Freddie wasn’t a national treasure already, he truly is now.