My childhood feelings of hatred for my heroin addict dad, by Joe Wicks
... and why my mum’s OCD meant I had to hoover my room twice a day, aged four
HE IS a lockdown hero to millions of families, but fitness guru Joe Wicks tearfully reveals today how his own childhood was blighted by feelings of hatred for his heroinaddicted father.
The 33- year- old body coach also tells of his mother’s mental health struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder that meant he was asked to vacuum his bedroom twice a day from the age of four.
Wicks talks about his tough childhood during a candid interview for BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, choking with emotion when he recalls his feelings of anger towards his roofer father Gary while growing up.
‘I remember being in secondary school and I just remember somebody said something about t my dad and I was just so angry, , because again he’d relapsed. I was disappointed and let down. I can just remember thinking I don’t want to talk about my dad. I hate him.’
Wicks tells presenter Lauren Laverne that he had kept his feelings a secret until now. ‘I’ve never really admitted that. I’ve never really admitted that to my dad.
‘I didn’t hate my dad. I just hated what drugs were doing to him, doing to my family. It was an angry thought and I suppose I let it out and I felt instantly bad. I remember just thinking what a horrible thing to say about your dad.’
Wicks, who now enjoys a close relationship with his father, recalls how his parents’ rows would escalate until his father punched holes in the wafer- thin doors of t he family’s council house in Epsom, Surrey.
‘It wasn’t like I saw it but I saw the effects,’ he says. ‘ I was too young to really understand addiction and why he couldn’t be there for me. When I was a teenager I found it difficult. I was angry. I don’t remember seeing drug use around me but the after-effects, seeing my dad stoned or high.’
Wicks’s father is now drug-free with help from Narcotics Anonymous, and Joe reveals that meditation has helped him deal with his feelings of anger. ‘Now I love my dad. I’ve had that anger and that’s completely passed. The antidote to addiction is connection and love, that’s what I’ve learned.’
Wicks also recall show his OCD sufferer mother Raquela, a social worker, would repeatedly play Van Morrison’s Bright Side Of The Road, her favourite song, in the house.
Yet he chooses the track as one of his castaway discs for helping him cope with her extreme behaviour.
He says: ‘My bedroom carpet was pitch-black so every little speck of dirt and dust would show up and my mum would want me to hoover it twice a day. I was like four, fi ve, si x years old. She wouldn’t let me use the big bit, she wanted me to use the little bit, the bit you do the stairs with, because she’d want to see the lines. I also remember playing this song over and over again in my head.’
Despite his family’s problems, Wicks says, he always felt loved growing up. ‘I’m not someone who dwells on the past and has resentments,’ he says. ‘I’m the man I am today because of what my dad’s been through and because of what my mum’s been through.
‘I always had love. I remember my mum and dad saying we’ll love you whatever you become.’
And he pays an emotional tribute to his mother for helping him and his two brothers turn out like ‘nice gentlemen.’ He says: ‘She is amazing. I love her to death. I can’t believe what she’s been through.’ Wicks has sold millions of healthy eating books and become a keepfit superstar through his 90-day Body Coach fitness plans. His Body Coach business empire now employs 50 people and he is reportedly worth £15 million.
Last year, he married his model wife Rosie, 29, and the pair have two children, 22-month-old Indie and five-month-old Marley.
And now his career and profile has been transformed by offering the nation’s schoolchildren free PE lessons via YouTube during the coronavirus crisis.
His classes have notched up more than 60 million views in just eight weeks, with advertising revenue from the shows being donated to the NHS. He says: ‘I’m not sure I’ll ever do anything in my life that will be more meaningful than the PE With Joe during lockdown.’
‘I was too young to understand addiction’
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 today at 11.15am.