Sylvester Stallone Reveals His Struggles With Bulimia and Steroid Use.
Sylvester Stallone is being open about the demands of celebrity. The Rocky star talked about his turbulent connection with his body image, revealing that during the peak of his career in the 1980s, he battled bulimia and utilized steroids.
“I started to think: Design your body like a jaguar, a cat. Not big like Arnold [Schwarzenegger], but more feral and aggressive and very limber and athletic,” in a September 26 interview, Stallone informed The New York Times. “It became an obsession. Really bad. It got to the point where I became bulimic.”
“I got down to 2.6 percent body fat when I was doing Rocky III,” he went on to mention the drama from 1982, which was his third movie in which he played boxer Rocky Balboa. “I couldn’t hold anything down. Or I didn’t want to keep it down because I became so obsessed with staying at that point of fitness, literally an obsessive body-worship kind of thing.”
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The First Blood star claims that "nobody" reaches their fitness objectives "without additives and drugs, period."
“I don’t care what they say,” Stallone clarified. “It isn’t as though you’re a junkie, but if you’re going to work out and try to stay in shape for six months straight, and you’re eating yogurt and pudding, it’s not happening.”
However, the Expendables actor responded as follows when asked if his remarks proved he actually used steroids: “Oh, my god, you have to. But you do it in a sensitive way—six weeks on, six weeks off. People go, ‘Oh, you don’t get that way naturally.’ No, you don’t.”
Stallone said that using steroids "took a terrible toll" on his body despite taking precautions, and he shared that he didn't feel any relief from the pressure to appear a certain way until years later.
“It wasn’t until I did Cop Land, when I had to play the weakest guy in the room—partially deaf, overweight—that I felt somewhat liberated,” Stallone mentioned the criminal drama from 1997. “Then things went sideways and I just fell out of grace with Hollywood.”
The 80-year-old acknowledged that he had "abused my body" and that he had "had nine back operations, two shoulder operations, and three neck fusions" to fix the harm.
“Everything is held together with baling wire,” he revealed, “but I still want to stay in good shape.”
Stallone describes his previous actions as "very masochistic," but it doesn't mean he wouldn't approach his fitness objectives differently if he could go back in time.
“It’s come at a terrible price,” he acknowledged it. “If I could do it over again, I would say, ‘Let someone else carry the banner and don’t do your own stunts.’ I don’t know what it was about hurting myself all the time.”