These journal entries are reprinted from my actual hand-written journal and will be posted on the days I wrote them. Minor edits have been made to conceal identities and protect the innocent.
I’ve been reading a book called My Boring-Ass Life by director Kevin Smith. Smith is the director of Clerks, Dogma, Chasing Amy and a bunch more. I’ve followed his career since the release of Clerks, which was a pretty big deal to me at the time it came out. The rest of his movies have been somewhat hit or miss, but the guy is very talented and has done a great job of building a devoted fan base.
My Boring-Ass Life collects over a year of journal entries that Smith published on his blog. The book’s title is pretty appropriate because big chunks of the book are pretty boring. But, the book has sections that are pretty compelling and justify the whole thing. The real high-point is a multi-chapter recounting of Jason Mewes’ struggles with heroin. However, I was most intrigued by the sections of the book where Smith discusses his own struggles to lose weight. I’m sure this was only interesting to me because my own personal weight loss has been on my mind a lot lately.
Smith is definitely a food addict, and he admits it in My Boring-Ass Life. He even describes some of his eating binges in hilarious detail. When he decides to lose weight, he signs up for Optifast. He pays a visit to a clinic, does a weigh-in and gets some supplies. From what I can tell, Optifast is a liquid diet that consists of shakes. Smith goes on Optifast and does pretty good. He drops a lot of weight. He also mentions that he has been on Optifast before and had good results but had gradually put the weight back on. He does mention that he is pretty miserable and really wants food all the time.
Optifast is pretty appealing to me because it is something drastic and I need to take some kind of drastic action. I lost weight doing the Hacker’s Diet, but it was pretty slow going. I know that if I can get to my medically advised weight (189 pounds), I can stay pretty close to that. I’ve just been overweight so long that I don’t even remember the last time I was under 200 pounds.
I spent some time researching Optifast and you definitely have to visit one of their clinics to get started. The only problem is that there isn’t a clinic anywhere near me. The price sounds like something I can swing, but I need to figure out the logistics.
