So here I sit, less than a week shy from one full month of being on the all-liquid diet OptiFast. Chewing food is all but a distant memory at this point.
Though I did have a small turkey meatball last night.
Gail (Jen’s Mom) is the cook around the Smith/Schwalbach/Stanley household, and last night was no exception. For the past few weeks I’ve been avoiding the kitchen/dining room around supper time. But last night, I felt like chilling with the family around the dinner table, so I sat in for the meal, and managed to not succumb to the call of the spaghetti and garlic bread. But the turkey meat balls… that shit was calling me. So I caved and ate one. Didn’t beat myself up about it; I just swapped one meatball out for the sixth drink box I would’ve downed that night instead.
Lemme tell you something: that turkey meatball tasted like it was made from the most delectable ingredients liberated from God’s own kitchen. I don’t normally use words like this, but I gotta be honest: it was scrumptious. Fucking divine. I would’ve stepped on my own kid’s neck to eat another one, but I was able to reinstate discipline and simply push back from the table.
Who knows if it was even, truly, a very good meatball. Gail could’ve made it out of dog food and I’d have hailed it as world-class cuisine – based largely on the fact that I’ve not eaten anything in nearly a month, so anything would taste good right about now. All I know is this: I ate it, and it was awesome. I’m owning it. I take comfort in knowing that, were this a month ago, I’d have eaten twelve of those sonsabitches, slapped between a giant ciabatta loaf that I pressed on a panini grill. As it stands, I ate one.
But heading into the weigh-in today, I was haunted by that fowl sphere. I was pretty nervous that the lone turkey meatball would be my un-doing; that I’d step on the scale only to see that I gained weight – a cosmic punishment for giving in to dinner table temptation.
Mercifully, I gained no weight. I’m down six more pounds.
That’s a grand total of 21 pounds for our hero, since starting this new, life-changing regime, back on January 2nd. That’s good enough to keep me committed another week. One Day At A Time, as the alkies say. There will be turkey meatballs in my future; just not in my immediate future. And when I do allow them back into my life, I’ll make do with two, not twelve. Moderation is the key.
So next week this time, I’ll be ready to add exercise into my regime. I gave myself the first month to acclimate to a lack of food indulgence. Now that the month’s nearly done, it’s time to insult my body even further by – *gasp* – getting physical. Christ, is that gonna suck ass…
In other good news, I went in to do some ADR (looping) on “Manchild” – that pilot for Showtime I shot right before Christmas. And while there, I got to watch most of the show.
Holy shit, is it fucking good.
I loved it. This is a show I’d watch, having nothing to do with acting in it. Big congrats to the Cullen Brothers and Stephen Gyllenhal (the director of the pilot), as well as my three co-leads (Corbett, Purefoy and Hipp): everyone involved did an awesome job. Showtime would be silly not to pick it up. Even if it meant re-casting my part, I’d still vote big on the pickup. It was laugh-out-loud funny, a bit touching, and very real. I walked out of there proud to have been involved at all. Fingers crossed that we get the pick-up.
An odd side-note (well, maybe not that odd): I’m fucking huge in the show. And I don’t mean that as some kind of industry euphemism for “genius”; I mean huge as in fucking rotund. Fatter than fat. I make the me in “Catch & Release” look thin. Thank God I’m dropping weight now.
And on the subject of “Catch & Release”, despite the lackluster reviews which they’re even puzzling over at Entertainment Weekly’s “Reviewing the Reviews” (reviews that I largely dodged a bullet in), the flick did a nice bit of business: $7.7mil, on 1,622 screens. According to Box Office Guru: “Jennifer Garner generated respectable results for her latest film Catch and Release which was not given a very wide release, but still sold $7.7M in ticket stubs. Averaging a solid $4,722 from 1,622 playdates, the PG-13 film about a woman rebuilding her life after her husband’s death played heavily female.” Hopefully, word-of-mouth spreads and the flick continues to earn for Susannah (the director) and Sony (the studio).
Next week: Week 3 of Fat-Fuck vs. Food, in which, God-willing, I’m not struggling with turkey meatballs any further.
