Actors often put on and lose huge amounts of weight for film roles, thinking that it is okay because it is for the sake of their art. There is a difference, however, between suffering
for your art and putting yourself through physical changes that may cause you real harm.
    Celebrities often choose to go on crash diets or crazy weight gains that involve things such as eating ice cream and olive oil mixed together every day. Some of the most famous cases include Tom Hanks dropping pounds for his role in Castaway, Renee Zellweger putting on pounds for Bridget Jones’s Diary before rapidly shedding it for Chicago and Matt Damon losing 40 pounds for his role as a heroin-addicted soldier in the 1996 movie Courage Under Fire.
      Christian Bale went from 185 pounds to a frightening 121 pounds for his role in The Machinist before going up to 190 pounds six months later for his role as Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins.
     The most recent news in weight change for a film role would have to be Taylor Lautner, who put on 30 pounds to play the werewolf Jacob in New Moon of the popular Twilight
series. He has been going to the gym 5 times a week and eating a diet consisting of 3,200 calories a day. He has commented that it wasn’t the exercise that was the hard part, but the constant eating.
    These “quick fix” diets that celebrities think are only temporary will hurt their health in the long run. The no-carb diet has been a popular one for those wishing to lose weight fast, but, as soon as you go off the diet, you may gain even more weight than you had been trying to lose.
     Suzanna Gluchy, who teaches kinesiology and heath to high school students at the Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto (CHAT), explained in a recent interview with Excalibur that it is a common misconception that carbs are a good thing to get rid of.
    Carbohydrates are an important source of energy. When you cut them out, your body needs to use something else for fuel, which cannot sustain you in the same way. Fifty-five to 60 percent of what one eats in a day should consist of carbohydrates.
    What actors should realize is that they should be eating complex carbs, the healthier, whole-grain ones, rather than none.
   If actors feel the need to play a role that they need to go down in weight for, they must give themselves enough time to do it in a healthy way, or else it is going to have an adverse effect on their health. If they are putting out more energy than they are taking in, they are not doing themselves any good. Gluchy stressed that combining exercise and healthy eating is the only way to properly lose weight.
    Zellweger has actually refused to put on weight a third time for the next instalment in the Bridget Jones series. Instead, she is choosing to wear a fat suit for the role. These types of options are available, and more actors should think about taking advantage of them.
    No matter how great the film will be, actors should start thinking about the consequences of what they are doing to themselves and the alternatives to losing or gaining weight in a short span of time. No matter how many starving artists are still remembered today, maybe they should be thinking less about being van Gogh and more about living long and healthy lives.

- With files from popcrunch.com