Nikocado Avocado, a YouTuber who rose to internet fame for his mukbang content, posted a video the other day that wasn’t quite like others he had shared over the last several years.

Before returning to his regularly scheduled programming, in a video titled “Two Steps Ahead,” the vlogger, whose real name is Nicholas Perry, removed a large panda mascot head and revealed what appeared to be a dramatic weight loss.

“Today, I woke up from a very long dream, and I also woke up having lost 250 pounds off my body,” Mr. Perry, 32, said in the video to his more than four million subscribers.

In an interview with The New York Times, he said he had spent the past several years fooling viewers as part of a plot he wanted to pull off, partly as a way to play with their expectations.

“I have been strategically posting prerecorded videos for two years, on both YouTube and TikTok,” he wrote in an email.

Wait, back up. Who exactly is Nikocado Avocado?

Mr. Perry, who is based in Las Vegas, began recording mukbang videos — the food-video genre popularized in South Korea (“mukbang” loosely translates to “eating show”) — more than a decade ago. His content took off as he regularly filmed himself consuming mega portions in a single sitting, like 10,000 calories’ worth of Cheetos.