Maluma Breaks Silence at Billboard: Behind the Abs Was an Eating Disorder He Never Knew He Had

In the main hall of the Faena Forum in Miami Beach, Maluma arrived Wednesday not to perform but to say something considerably harder: that behind the Calvin Klein campaigns and the physique that moved a generation of fans, there had been an eating disorder — one he had been living through without recognizing it.

Behind the Campaigns, a Disorder Without a Name

The conversation was part of "Like Minded," Billboard's series on mental health, produced in partnership with BetterHelp and held on the third day of the Semana Billboard de la Música Latina on October 21 at the Faena Forum in Miami Beach. Maluma sat alongside therapist Patricia Artieda and Billboard's Latin content director Leila Cobo. The conversation moved directly toward what those campaigns had actually cost.

"I used to have an obsession with food," Maluma told the panel. "I had an eating disorder and I didn't know it." He offered no clinical diagnosis and described no specific treatment from that period — only the belated recognition that what he had been living had a name he had never been given.

He described the gap between the external finish of those Calvin Klein images — shirtless, sculpted, every defined line on display — and the internal reality. The physique was real. So was the mental fixation required to maintain it.

Eating disorders in men remain substantially underdiagnosed, a gap that researchers have tied partly to clinical frameworks and cultural narratives that have historically centered on women. For a male Latin pop artist with Maluma's global commercial footprint to name the experience publicly — and connect it explicitly to a fashion industry that profited from his image — disrupts a silence his industry has rarely permitted its headliners to break.

"I Still Feel a Lot of Anxiety"

Maluma spoke publicly about anxiety as early as 2023 and 2024, when coverage by Billboard and Infobae documented his stepped-back presence and his description of the "overwhelming pressures" that had accumulated over a decade of international fame. In December 2025, he formalized those conversations by launching the podcast Las cosas como son, a dedicated project addressing anxiety, depression, and the physical exhaustion that had built up across years of nonstop touring and image maintenance.

Wednesday's panel made clear that none of that work should be read as a resolved chapter. "I still feel a lot of anxiety," he told the Billboard audience, explicitly declining any version of his story that reads as a completed recovery. His morning practice, as he described it, involves waking up and asking what fears need to be confronted that day in order to build something good from them — a framing that treats anxiety as a daily negotiation rather than a condition to eliminate.

He confirmed that some form of therapy is now a daily constant and cited James Clear's Atomic Habits as a practical framework that has shaped the way he structures that work.

When Becoming a Father Changed the Equation

The arrival of Maluma's second child, Orión Londoño Gómez — his first son, born September 14, 2026, with partner Susana Gómez — shifted the shape of the pressure without removing it. He described entering Orión's birth with a sense of courage that had been absent the first time around.

That first time was the arrival of his daughter, París Londoño Gómez, in March 2024 — which he described at the panel as the most intense transformation he had experienced. There were persistent headaches. Stress climbed to levels that eventually pushed him toward professional support. Working with therapists and specialists, he said, was the intervention that finally gave him the framework to understand what he was going through. Orión's arrival, by contrast, he entered already equipped.

His album Loco x volver, released May 2026, maps part of that internal arc — a project Maluma has called the most personal of his career, built over two years of reconnecting with his identity as Juan Luis rather than as a stage persona and a sellable image.

Why the Timing of This Disclosure Matters

The Billboard Latin Music Awards ceremony closes the week on Thursday evening, broadcast live on Telemundo from Miami. Maluma's panel landed the day before, during the final stretch of industry programming — at the peak of Latin music's concentrated collective attention, in front of the labels, executives, and brand partners who have commercially shaped the image he was describing.

The male body in Latin pop has functioned as a commercial unit for decades: photographed by fashion houses, packaged by streaming platforms, rewarded on awards stages. Rarely does the person inside that image get to describe publicly, in an industry-facing space, what sustaining it actually costs. That Maluma did exactly that — inside Billboard Latin Music Week, the industry's most prominent annual gathering — is a disclosure with structural reach. Whether it becomes a reference point depends, in part, on whether an industry that has profited from that image is prepared to sit with what it heard.

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