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Dr Anthony Lim, the medical director of the McDougall Program, has responded to Nikocado Avocado’s dramatic weight loss.
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The YouTuber – real name Nicholas Perry – made headlines across the world this week after revealing he’d lost 250 pounds, much to the surprise of his fans and followers. Over the course of around eight years, Perry had become known for his “mukbang” videos, which see him consuming vast amounts of food at a time while speaking to camera.
Dr Lim, who specializes in lifestyle medicine and nutrition, said that he “congratulates” Perry for the weight loss. Speaking to Plant Based News (PBN), he added that, if he were to speak to Perry, he would be “asking him a lot about how he’s changing his life around” and “maintaining a healthy weight” with lifestyle changes.
Nikocado Avocado’s weight loss
In a video posted over the weekend to his 3.9 million subscribers, the YouTuber unveiled a drastic change to his appearance to his millions of subscribers. The video, titled “Two Steps Ahead,” has 38 million views at the time of writing.
“I am always two steps ahead,” he stated at the start of the video, while wearing a large panda mask to conceal his face (he later confirmed that this was to symbolize that social media “isn’t as black and white as it appears”). Perry then added: “This has been the greatest social experiment for my entire life.”
After removing the mask, he said: “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. 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.”
Read more: Stanford Professor: ‘Doctors Don’t Get Any Nutrition Education’
How did Nikocado Avocado lose weight?
The video attracted huge amounts of attention and speculation, due in part to the fact that the weight loss appeared to have happened over a very short period of time (videos from just a few months earlier showed him at a much larger size).
Perry has responded to the speculation by confirming that it took him two years to lose the weight, and revealing that he went to huge lengths to conceal this from the public – including uploading pre-recorded content throughout that time.
“I have been strategically posting pre-recorded videos for 2 years, on both YouTube and TikTok,” he told NBC News. “I edited the videos so that they would appear recent, allowing me to focus on healing my body behind the scenes.” He added that he shaved his head so that people wouldn’t recognize him in public. He also had help from fellow YouTubers to conceal his plan.
Speaking about the reasoning behind his social experiment, Perry said: “While everybody pointed and laughed at me for over-consuming food, I was in total control the entire time. 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.”
Nikocado Avocado and plant-based diets
It may come as a surprise to some that Perry used to follow a plant-based diet. He famously added animal products to his diet back in 2016, and has since posted countless videos of him eating large amounts of meat and dairy-based dishes.
PBN founder Klaus Mitchell has expressed hope that he will move back towards a more sustainable animal-free diet. “I met Nikocado Avocado in 2015 when he was thriving on a plant-based lifestyle,” he said. “Let’s hope this recent transformation gets him back to the positive and happy person I remember and I sincerely hope he considers adopting a vegan lifestyle again.”
Read more: Dr Peter Attia: ‘You Don’t Have To Eat Animal Protein’
