In a courageous and deeply personal conversation for the podcast Chingonamente, hosted by life coach Adriana Gallardo, actress and former beauty queen Alicia Machado opened up about one of the darkest stages of her life.
She shared that she struggled with an addiction to amphetamines and suffered two suicide attempts, following her crowning as Miss Universe in 1996.
These revelations have moved his audiences, especially those who value honesty and recovery as part of the U.S. Hispanic public narrative.
Machado described how, between the ages of 18 and 30, she faced a decade plagued by eating disorders, image pressure and emotional crises.
She related that addiction was not a search for recreational escape, but a desperate avenue to fit in with imposed physical standards: “I was addicted to amphetamines, which are diet pills. I never used drugs for fun. I would spend a week drinking only coffee and eat an apple a day and water.”
At the most critical point, her weight went as low as 48 kilos, while during the reign she weighed 55 kg, an aspect that emphasizes the extremes to which she went in her obsession to stay slim.
The pressure of her image, public scrutiny and media harassment unleashed devastating episodes. Alicia said she tried to take her own life on two occasions: the first a few months after her coronation, and the second at the age of 22, while starring in her second telenovela.
“I went through two suicide attempts…a tough decade for me,” Machado recounted, noting that these memories are still very present despite her healing.
Alicia confessed that it was the arrival of her daughter Dinorah, now 17, that gave her a new purpose and motivated her to heal. She described that moving forward meant rebuilding her relationship with herself and her perception of her image.
Today she shows herself as a strong, resilient woman who transformed her crown of thorns into a symbol of empowerment, and uses her experience as a platform to speak truthfully about mental health, aesthetic pressures and recovery.
Here you can watch the interview with Alicia Machado.
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