The popular mukbang YouTuber told NBC News he hid his 250-plus pound weight loss from millions of subscribers by uploading recorded content for two years.
Nikocado Avocado has pulled off a yearslong prank.
The popular mukbang
YouTuber, known for eating enormous amounts of food on camera, fooled
the internet by completing a secret weight loss journey while uploading
old videos to mask his progress.
Nikocado Avocado, whose real name is Nicholas Perry, revealed his new look
— a drastically slimmer appearance compared with his look in his other
recent YouTube videos — to millions of subscribers Friday.
“Today,
I woke up from a very long dream, and I also woke up having lost 250
pounds off of my body. And just yesterday, people were calling me fat
and sick and boring and irrelevant,” Perry, 32, said in his latest
video. “People are the most messed-up creatures on the entire planet,
and yet I’ve still managed to stay two steps ahead of everyone. The
joke’s on you.”
The video, titled “Two Steps Ahead,” got
more than 26 million views over the weekend. It drew a flurry of
speculation around whether he could have achieved such extreme weight
loss in the months since his most recent uploads, all of which showed
him at a considerably larger size.
Perry said by email that it took about two years to lose the weight, going from 411 pounds at his heaviest to 158 pounds today.
“I
have been strategically posting pre-recorded videos for 2 years, on
both YouTube and TikTok. I edited the videos so that they would appear
recent, allowing me to focus on healing my body behind the scenes,”
Perry wrote in an email. “I shaved my head so that people wouldn’t
recognize me in public. A handful of fellow YouTubers also helped to
keep my secret.”
Opening the video with a giant panda
mask on his head, he called his quiet transformation the “greatest
social experiment of my entire life.” He told viewers that watching
internet users’ continual comments and speculation about him felt as if
he were “monitoring ants on an ant farm.”
The panda,
according to Perry, was meant to symbolize how the “world of social
media is not as black-and-white as it appears.” His aim, he wrote, was
to remind people not to take the internet so seriously.
“While
everybody pointed and laughed at me for over-consuming food, I was in
total control the entire time,” Perry wrote. “In reality, people are
completely absorbed with Internet personalities and obsessively watch
their content. That is where a deeper level of over-consumption lies —
and it’s the parallel I wanted to make.”
After the big unveil, Perry dived back into his usual mukbang content, finishing the video by clearing out a massive tray of spicy black bean noodles.
His video,however, shared many of the same lines from a similar monologue he uploaded in February 2022. That video, originally titled “The Best Burger I’ve Ever Had,” has since been retitled to “Two Steps Ahead • Original, 2022.”
Perry wrote in the email that he had scripted the clip knowing he was about to embark on his secret weight loss journey. It was a hint that amounted to an open admission, he said, but his audience didn’t catch on.
After that, Perry committed to the bit by continuing to share old clips of himself across his various channels. The latest, uploaded just days before he unveiled his transformation, showed him weighing in at 351 pounds after stepping on a scale.
In a video from three months ago, he announced that he was giving up on his weight loss journey entirely, lamenting through a black screen that he has managed “zero lasting results” throughout nearly two years.
“Oh, well, some people are fat. Get over it,” Perry said in the clip. “You think we’re plopped down on this Earth to just starve and count calories and restrict carbs? I’m over it; it doesn’t work. I keep trying; it doesn’t work. I have accepted that I’m fat. And I think most people just should, actually.”
He also underscored his non-interest in losing weight in a TikTok video from earlier this year, as he recorded himself dramatically slurping noodles from a baking sheet. His most recent TikTok video, uploaded a few weeks ago, also showed him playing into the caricature.
Now, Perry seems to be entering “a new era,” as he alluded to in follow-up video shared Friday on his second YouTube channel. He has made new Instagram and X accounts, where he posted several before and after photos over the weekend.
“I don’t know if people even like me anymore. I don’t know if people want to hear from me or like my content at all. I actually just don’t even know,” he said in the video after having finished a tray of spicy cheesy noodles. “At the end of the day, if just one or two people show up to watch me eat, I’m happy.”
