People joke about actresses having to live on a diet of kale, dehydrated water, and intense fantasies of sniffing a single chicken wing, but maintaining a figure that looks incredible in a movie involves a lot more than just denying yourself every possible pleasure. So if you're feeling bad about skipping the gym this week/lifetime, you can console yourself with the knowledge that looking the way beautiful people do onscreen is really, really hard.

5 Rob McElhenney Has Put His Body Through Hell Twice For Always Sunny

Rob McElhenney put on 50 pounds for the seventh season of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia solely on the basis of "It would be funny." And if you can look beyond the health concerns of a man shoving 5,000 calories into his mouth daily to give himself a Santabod, it was. The month after the season wrapped, he dropped 23 pounds simply by not eating as much (click through to this interview if, for some reason, you want to learn about how all this affected his penis). Then, when the 13th season rolled around, it was time to innovate again, so McElhenney took Mac in the other direction and got jacked instead.

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All that Fight Milk is paying off. To accomplish his transition from cheese carving to marble statue, McElhenney says he cut all carbs, sugar, and alcohol out of his diet, ran three miles a day, lifted weights six days a week, and hired a personal trainer to guide him through the whole process. So all you need is the time, money, and other resources necessary to accomplish all that, and you too can have a bodybuilder look for your largely nonphysical job playing a character on a comedy about chronically unhealthy alcoholic substance abusers. Continue Reading Below Advertisement