Bam Margera Reveals How He Overcame Bulimia And Alcoholism


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PARIS - OCTOBER 27: Bam Margera attends the premiere for 'Jackass 3D' at Cinema Gaumont Opera on October 27, 2010 in Paris, France. (Photo by Francois Durand/Getty Images)


“Jackass” debuted on MTV on October 1, 2000, and since then Bam Margera has had a wild ride of magnificent highs and gut-wrenching lows. Vice’s website Munchies interviewed the reality star and Margera revealed his struggle with eating disorders, alcoholism that included years of Margera mourning the death of his best friend Ryan Dunn’s death by sitting alone in his basement drinking vodka and Riptide Rush-flavored Gatorade, skateboarding, and eating frozen pizza.

Bam revealed his daily drinking habits during the darkest times of his life:

At its worst, I would probably just wake up around 11 AM and instantly start drinking vodka and purple Gatorade; by the end of the night, I would probably have ten pints worth of it. It was pretty bad. It was weird, because there would be times where I would go on a three-day bender of drinking and then five days of not drinking. When that five days ended, I would go on a two-day bender.

Anything with alcohol in it was Margera’s drink of choice:

No, it could be a red wine bender, it could be a vodka bender, a beer bender, Jack and coke. I don’t really have a favorite drink. I just liked getting drunk. I never thought beer was delicious, you know?

Margera’s diet wasn’t exactly healthy either:

It was pretty much the worst diet ever. It would be calories straight from booze all day and then, by the end of the night, when I was borderline blacked out, I would open my fridge and just stuff my face. One time, I ate a frozen pizza. I was so hungry I didn’t even wait to cook it, I just ate it frozen. I woke up the next morning just regretting the shit out of it, because for all those calories from pizza and cheese it [should] taste good, obviously. It was just a frozen block with no flavor.

Bam suffered from bulimia to help with the weight issues:

What happen with me was that I was on the Steve-O tour and we had to do this stunt called the “Tequila Stuntman.” You sniff a line of salt, squirt a lime in your eye, and take a shot of tequila and then throw everything up after. There would be like 5,000 people in the audience at time, so I had to learn how to barf on command. Once I figured that out, it was all over, because whenever I felt like I ate too much or drank too much, I could just barf instantly on command without even putting my finger down my throat. If it was bread, I couldn’t do it, but spaghetti easily. Spaghetti is really easy to throw up on command. Pizzas and subs were harder.

Margera, who is now 38-years-old, said he doesn’t drink any alcohol now. He weighed 230 pounds and then went to Estonia to bike and hike in hopes of losing the extra weight so that he could finally return to skateboarding. Once he got down to 200 pounds he started skateboarding again and did it in Barcelona, Spain because he didn’t want to be recognized while he was getting back into it.

Read the entire interview over at Munchies. Good luck to Bam on his road to recovery.