Sylvester Stallone, his absurd (and dangerous) diet for Rocky III: “It made me lose my memory” Cook

Sylvester Stallone had to undergo a really drastic (and highly harmful, as he himself admits) diet to slip into the part of Rocky in the third chapter of the film saga dedicated to the iconic boxer. In an interview recently given to the American newspaper The Wall Street Journalthe actor – that he just turned 77 – told what he was forced to eat to get “in shape” and return to the set of Rocky III. “My entire breakfast consisted of two oatmeal cookies made with brown rice and 10 cups of coffee, because I wanted to keep my body fat at 2.8%. I was only eating tuna», he told the American newspaper. And he warns against such diets, which today he considers highly harmful, harmful and unbalanced: «My memory was destroyed, it was completely gone. I was getting all kinds of debilitating physical effects. But it was for the cause.” Stallone at the time willingly sacrificed himself for that “cause”, as he defines it, since in his case it was his choice: no director has imposed on him the drastic diet for script needs. Or rather: no director outside of him… The third act of the Rocky film epic (released in 1982) was in fact interpreted, written and directed by him. The same happened for Rocky II, from 1979, which saw the protagonist as a writer and director. Probably when a film feels so much yours, it’s easier to give up in order to see its success. However there is no acceptable renunciation if it goes to affect health, and indeed the Hollywood star admits that he risked a lot with that kind of crazy and dangerous diet. No one should ever subject their body (and their mind, which is also heavily damaged by an unbalanced diet such as the so-called “Rocky diet”) to such stress, because the consequences could turn out to be very serious. There is no film, Oscar winner, red carpet or box office that could justify anything like this: even if, in the case of Sylvester Stallone, we are talking about an entire saga that the star feels is his, given that even the first film – the progenitor of 1976 – was born from a subject and a screenplay signed by him. Thanks to Rocky, Stallone became the third man in cinematic history after Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles to receive Oscar nominations as both screenwriter and actor for the same film.