“I can’t keep food down for some reason. It creates some stupid a– hiccups. I’m hiccupping all day long and half the night. Any time I try to eat, even drinking water, it comes back up. Nothing wants to stay down.”

He went on to say that the issue had been troubling him for weeks and panned the camera to show a tabletop brimming with various tablet containers.

“My bathroom is full of medicine. The s— that I’ve been taking, nothing was really working,” he said.

In an effort to stop his hiccups, McMillan said he stuck his fingers down his throat to make himself gag.

Chris Lewis, a body transformation coach, said that he saw this first hand: “I guess about five or six weeks ago, I was having a conversation with Cedric at my gym and I witnessed him going to the bathroom and making himself throw up to get rid of his hiccups.”

However, McMillan’s health had been deteriorating since a bout of coronavirus in 2020. Although he said he did not suffer while infected, he was admitted to hospital months later with pneumonia and placed on life support.

“I was nearly dead,” he said afterwards. 

In an interview with Generation Iron, a bodybuilding news website, he revealed that the hospital phoned his family to tell them there was a chance he would not make it. 

While it could not be confirmed, it was suggested that McMillan’s lungs had been filling up with liquid for months after his Covid infection, causing him breathing difficulties.

“I’ve been battling back and forth with myself, not really knowing what to do next,” he said in his last Instagram video.

“I’m feeling like, is it over? Does this mean I’m supposed to retire when I’m sick all the time?”

The near-death experience and ongoing stomach problems forced him to postpone a comeback to professional bodybuilding last month, but he had targeted the end of the year for a return.

He said he still wanted to do “the thing I love”.