Gary Barlow did not leave his house for about six months in the years after Take That broke up and his weight rose to 109kg (17st 2lbs).

The singer spoke emotionally at the Cheltenham literature festival of how good it was that the tide was turning and men could now openly discuss their problems. He also spoke movingly about the death of his daughter, in 2012, in the hope it would help others.

Barlow was living the dream until Robbie Williams left the boyband and Take That split up. “The thing that was more alarming than reading things,” he told the audience, “was on the street, you would have people shouting, ‘hey, how’s Robbie doing?’”

Barlow said the higher Williams got, the the further down he felt. It was a time “when cruelty was quite high on the agenda”, and there were two or three journalists who had it in for him. “I would love to be the person who says you read this stuff and it doesn’t bother you. Every word bothers you, every word.”

So he stayed in his house and did not go out for months at a time, with the longest spell being six months.

“The one thing I discovered was that I had put weight on … and a few less people recognised me. The more weight I put on, the more invisible I was and this happened over a two-year period and it was fantastic. By the time I hit 17st 2lbs I was unrecognisable and in heaven because no one recognised me.”

He recalled going to Chinese buffets and eating mountains of food. He would then go home, find the furthest corner of the house from his wife’s bedroom and be sick. “It was easy,” said Barlow, adding that this went on for a couple of years.

“The good thing about me is that I do have a stop button. I do at the right point, usually, stop. That’s why I’ve never had a problem with alcohol or anything like that. It just took me a little bit longer with this stop button than it normally did.”

Barlow got himself together, lost weight – he is 12st now – and made a successful career comeback.

He wrote about his weight issues in a book 15 years ago, he said, but was persuaded to take it out. Things have changed for the better now, he says, with men able to talk openly about these sort of problems.

“A lot of the things I talk about, we’ve enjoyed and watched women talk about for a long time. We’ve seen the way women have helped one other by talking about it and men haven’t but they are starting to, I feel that tide is turning and it is a good thing, it is a good thing.”

Barlow, whose second autobiography, A Better Me, has just been released, also spoke about his stillborn daughter Poppy.

He said he and his wife, Dawn, made the decision at the last moment to include their experience of her death in the book.

“The thing that made us decide was how it will actually help other people … People say things like, ‘You’ve got three other kids’, and people don’t really understand your pain, it makes it more painful.

“For us it was the chance to help all the other people who are not understood either. It just felt like the right thing to do and the right thing to be in this book.”