If you’re tapped into the world of YouTube drama, you’ve likely encountered Nikocado Avocado.
For those in the dark, here’s the gist. Having started out as a YouTuber focusing on vegan recipes, daily life vlogs, and heath hacks, Nikocado Avocado pivoted towards the frightening world of mukbangs.
Mukbangs originated in South Korea, and they feature people eating extreme volumes of food. These people will often interact with audiences as they go, and online communities have sprouted around the phenomenon.
It goes without saying that it’s an incredibly risky practice. Beyond pushing their bodies to the limit in terms of what they can eat and process in one go, participants risk all manner of health consequences.
Diabetes, hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, disordered eating, and obesity are all on the menu, and there are concerns over how mukbangs may influence viewers to develop negative eating habits.
Nikocado Avocado became something of a poster child for mukbangs, with internet commentators sharing their concerns over his rapid and extreme weight gain, and the risks he was taking with his health for the sake of winning viewers.
Avocado himself had said he had fractured a rib from ‘forceful coughing’, had lost his libido, and was using a mobility scooter to get around.
Over a few years, it seemed as though Nikocado Avocado – real name Nicholas Perry – was forging ahead with mukbangs regardless.
Then came an unbelievable twist.
Out of nowhere, Perry shared a video with his 4.5 million viewers in September 2024 showing that he had lost almost all of the weight he had gained through his mukbang videos.
The video, titled Two Steps Ahead, saw Perry explain that his extreme weight gain and loss had been a social experiment. It seems as though he had pre-recorded dozens of videos before embarking on the weight loss journey to maintain an illusion that his health was still deterioriating.
Days after Two Steps Ahead, he unleashed fresh confusion with a new video showing him as clearly overweight again. He asked subscribers: "Who in their right mind does a social experiment gaining 250 pounds for five years in a row?"
Which way is up?
It turned out that Perry has indeed significantly cut his weight back down.
He explained that the body transformations by actors like Christian Bale (The Machinist and American Hustle) and Joaquin Phoenix (Joker) had inspired him to take on the project.
The Nikocado Avocado persona, he said, was just a character.
"I basically employed myself on my own terms here on YouTube by doing this character and spreading it out for so many years," he said.
"Something that I learned in my training in school was that actors who had to undergo the greatest physical changes - they lost a lot of weight for their role, or they put on a lot of weight - those actors tended to have the greatest impact."
By his own design, it’s hard to know what to believe where Perry is concerned.
"We need a Netflix documentary of this experience," said one viewer.
"He tried to warn us constantly, and we all still fell for it," said another.
"As a community theatre kid of eight years at a small theatre, I completely understand what you mean," a third added. "It's still so crazy how you played all of this, massive respect for you man."
A fourth said: "He told us in every single video, he identified as skinny... And he was literally telling the truth."
If nothing else, Perry has demonstrated an essential truth we all need to bear in mind: information on the internet isn’t always what it seems.
Perry has since shared how the transformation included various surgeries to deal with the excess skin he amassed during his experiment.
Featured Image Credit: Nikocado Avocado/YouTubeTopics: YouTube, Social Media, Celebrity
Rachael Davis