The following is an article by Jeremy Warren for the National Post

Filmmaker Starves Himself For Three months

D’Arcy Mann starved himself for 100 days–by choice.

He ate, of course, during the 100 days, but limited his food to 200 to 400 calories per day — half an apple in the morning, a can of tuna for lunch and the other apple-half before bed.

For more than three months, the 37-year-old filmmaker wasted away and ultimately lost 63 pounds — the size of an average nine-year-old boy — from a starting weight of 240.

He lost hair, shaving cuts would take three weeks to heal, and he endured lethargy and bouts of dizziness and fainting.

“I seem to have aged two years in 100 days — the wrinkles are deep,” Mr. Mann said this week after finishing the extreme diet. “This is something that will mark me, physically, for life.”

Mr. Mann started The Hungry I project, documented on his website, on April 5, when he began the starvation diet.

At midnight on July 13, Mr. Mann reached into a bag of ketchup chips and ended his quest to draw attention to such eating disorders as anorexia and obesity.

He readily admits the diet was a stunt, and one he compares to Morgan Spurlock’s 30-day McDonald’s diet in the documentary Super Size Me.

“If I just set up a website with basic information, who’d read it? Why would they?” Mr. Mann said.

“To get people to pay attention, sometimes you have to do something extreme.

“I’m the first to admit it’s a stunt.”

Mr. Mann is a filmmaker and entrepreneur and regularly works with models and actors. The industry is rife with dangerously skinny people, he said.

“I tried to tell them that this wasn’t healthy,” he said. “So I sort of fell back on ‘show, don’t tell.’ ”

He gained an extra 20 pounds before starting the diet to ensure the already-dangerous endeavour wouldn’t put him in the hospital.

“We’re talking about irreversible liver damage,” he said. “Didn’t want that–not a fan. So I put on the extra weight for safety.”

He blogged daily at www.thehungryi.org,where a worldwide following developed as he tackled nutrition and eating disorder topics. About 1.5% of Canadian woman ages 14 to 24 having an eating disorder, according to the National Eating Disorder Information Centre.

Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness — about 10 to 12% of sufferers die from complications, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association.

Reactions to his project weren’t uniformly positive. In the early days, Mr. Mann started receiving angry emails from the pro-ana crowd, a subculture that promotes anorexia as a positive way to lose weight.

But, as the days passed and pounds disappeared, Mr. Mann started to hear from people recovering from eating disorders. He shared their stories on his website.

Mr. Mann’s friends were equally split about the project. Some would buy and deliver food to his Saskatoon home when he felt too weak to leave. Other friends stopped talking to him.

“Some of my friends are larger individuals who didn’t believe in this,” Mr. Mann said.

On Tuesday night, he sat down with two friends and he opened a bag of ketchup chips. After five handfuls, he felt sick. He’ll gain back weight by adding calories every day until he can eat regularly again, he said.

At the end of the of the interview, he stood up from his chair, wobbled and leaned against the table.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “My body still isn’t right.”