Jeff Garlin: How Meditation Helped Curb My Appetite!

Curb Your Enthusiasm star and executive producer Jeff Garlin is best known as Larry David's roly-poly manager and sidekick in the award-winning TV sitcom, but in London this month, where he is starring in a run of stand-up comedy shows, Garlin surprised UK comedy fans and media with a lighter, healthier look.

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The 49-year-old star of Toy Story 3 and Wall-E told the Guardian that he had struggled with compulsive eating and obesity all his life and, at his worst, had weighed 23 stone.  He developed diabetes and heart disease, and during the shooting of the first series of Curb Your Enthusiasm had a stroke, but no matter how ill it made him he could not stop eating.

The stronger his resolve to stop, the worst he got. In his 2010 memoir, My Footprint: Carrying the Weight of the World, he described "an astonishing run of gluttony triggered, ironically, by his resolve during the filming of the eighth series of Curb Your Enthusiasm to lose weight and go green at the same time," reports the Guardian.

His turning point in realising both intentions, however, was learning Transcendental Meditation, which seemed to naturally change his relationship with food.

“Food has had a history for me of numbing feelings.  The first bite of a doughnut, the first bite of a cookie, the first lick of an ice-cream cone, I'm gone. Now I do Transcendental Meditation, it's over. My goal is to be a wise man. And the only way to be a wise man is to be open to learning.”

The veteran stand-up of 29 years now has a leather recliner for meditating in his LA office, and has gone two and a half years without fast food and sugar, losing over 4 stone in weight. He has also gone some way in achieving his goal of lightening his carbon footprint, as described in My switch to word Footprint. His new live show is duly titled No Sugar Tonight, and to keep his London tour ‘green’, Garlin is to be seen walking  the mile from his hotel to the Soho Theatre every night.

Read more:  the Guardian