The story of the youtuber who gained 100 kilos by eating compulsively in front of the camera

Nicholas Perry, known online as Nikocado Avocado, is a youtuber who took his show and his success to the extreme. Like some who venture into this social network, he wanted to be the protagonist, and attract attention until he could live on it.

He felt he reached the top when he began eating large quantities of all kinds of food in front of the camera, a practice that became very popular in China, and from there to the world, and is called mukbang.

This caused him to increase the number of subscribers to his channel and earn a lot of money. But that triumph led him today to be a young man whose overweight makes him sick, he went from weighing 66 kilos to weighing 166.

According to a profile The country dedicated to this character, Nicholas has six active YouTube channels with more than 7.2 million followers and sells t-shirts and sweatshirts with his face on them. He also markets personalized greetings: a message costs 139 euros and a video call, 232.

In a recent interview he warned that what he does is a kind of “social experiment” and that his followers are “disoriented beings that roam the Internet looking for stories”.

YouTube’s formula is simple, the more followers you have, the more ads they consume, and the more a channel monetizes, so the social network begins to pay a percentage of the advertisements to its owner.

As youtubers know the rules of the game, there are many who show their audience an extreme character and title their videos in a tabloid way to achieve the so-called clickbait.

How to get attention and live from it

Nicholas was born in Ukraine in 1992 and as a baby was adopted by a family from the United States. According to what he told his YouTube colleague Trisha Paytas in a podcast, he did not have a happy childhood.

At the age of five, he found out that he was adopted and began therapy in the face of the desolation caused by his biological family giving him up.

As a teenager, he said, he was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention deficit disorder (ADD). At 19, he left Pennsylvania for New York because he dreamed of being a violinist and working on Broadway.

As he was vegan, he joined a group of people on Facebook who shared the same feed. There he met his partner, a young Colombian named Orlin Home. Together they lived in Colombia and in 2014, Orlin was the one who encouraged him to create a YouTube channel, since she had one too.

That was the start of Nikocado Avocado, the channel where he talked about the benefits of veganism. But in 2016, he declared himself non-vegan and even began to criticize those who chose that type of diet, calling them “unbalanced”.

The criticism from those who followed him did not take long, but he doubled the bet and joined the fashion mukbang. He began compulsively eating on camera huge plates of pasta and elaborate delicacies to junk food such as hamburgers, fried chicken, snacks, etc.

His followers sent him messages asking him to take care of his health, but he replied that he did not have a compulsive eating problem.

Also, the more he ate and the more weight he gained putting his health in jeopardy, the more his number of subscribers also increased. In 2017 the youtuber decided to start exposing what he claimed was his intimate life.

He recounted that Orlin, whom he had promised to marry, had attempted suicide. That was followed by many more stories, such as that she had cheated on her boyfriend with 12 men, that she had contracted a venereal disease and had infected him. The more stories with novelistic edges, the more followers he gained.

In his first videos, this is what Nicholas Perry looked like.

After marrying Orlin, he said that he was deported from Colombia because his marriage visa was not accepted. So they both moved to Florida. In his videos he continues to show how he eats extra large plates and his marital fights. Everything is still working great for him, his videos have millions of views.

This year, in an interview, he said that in reality what he does on YouTube is a character and that everything is false:

“I’m smart enough to know that drama sells. It is exciting to be a witness, to observe all these sick, unbalanced, disoriented beings, wandering the internet in search of stories. I feel like my life has positioned itself where I am, monitoring ants in an ant farm. One follows another. It is fascinating. Just look at all these consumers, all these lost and bored people who consume whatever they are told to consume. I am the villain.”

Although he is very clear that what he is doing is an amusing farce, the practice of showing how you binge eat is making you sick. As he himself said in an interview with Men’s Health that he has erection, stomach and sleep problems. That is why he assures that this May 19, when he turns 30, he will stop doing mukbangs.