I'm going to assume that you are already familiar with Joe Manganiello, as this is 2016. You may know Joe as Big Dick Ritchie, or as Sofia Vergara's husband who HASN'T tried stealing her embryos, or as Alcide Herveaux, the sexiest werewolf in Shreveport. But the Joe who matters to us today is this one:

has been an obsession of mine for a few years now. This is because I really like Joe Manganiello's face and body, and there are many pictures of said face and body contained within. This, for example, is a personal favorite:

However, it is also very very funny. Joe Manganiello is one of the most earnest humans who has ever lived. He believes in himself and he believes in you. He probably believes in you more than you believe in yourself. Once he read The Fountainhead, and it inspired him to go work at a quarry for a time. How could you fail to love the sort of man who reads Ayn Rand and takes it so literally that he takes a job moving rocks because he wants to make the most of himself? When it came time to prepare for True Blood, he watched hundreds of hours of footage of wolves in the wild. His craft is his life, people.

As a sidenote, here is an inexplicable, endlessly fascinating list of his heroes, which consists mainly of Jewish people AND people who notoriously hated Jewish people, though I do not for a minute believe that Joe Manganiello hates anyone, nor that such a capacity lives in his meaty, healthy heart:

Okay, now me. I am a 33-year-old mother of two. I have brown and gray hair. One of my eyes is 30 percent smaller than the other. I work out a lot, and have for the last few years. This is what I look like:

Courtesy Nicole Cliffe

(I took a significantly less flattering picture of myself a few days before, prior to starting this regimen, but I was PMSing and have chosen not to share this picture with you because my nips are too obvious in it. Just imagine it looks like the above image, but add 12 pounds of bloat. That'll do it.)

What Joe outlines in Evolution is, like it says on the tin, a six-week workout and diet routine. It purports to be the exact plan he followed to get in shape for True Blood. When it occurred to me that it might be fun to do a stunt journalism piece where I followed his plan to the letter for six weeks and wrote about the results, I was in the process of shutting down my website, The Toast, which I had started and run with my friend Mallory Ortberg for the last three years. As you can imagine, I had a lot of feelings about this, and sometimes the best thing to do with too many feelings is to embark on an extremely grueling six-day-a-week workout regimen and refuse to eat any carbs that aren't sweet potatoes, a starch I personally loathe in all its forms.

As you can imagine, I had a lot of feelings about this, and sometimes the best thing to do with too many feelings is to embark on an extremely grueling six-day-a-week workout regimen and refuse to eat any carbs that aren't sweet potatoes.

The first thing I did was throw my razor in the trash. I was a werewolf now. An animal. A creature of the night.

The second thing I did was retrieve my razor, having remembered that I find armpit hair poky and unpleasant, and also that razors cost money. I did stop shaving my legs, though. It helped. Rowr.

The third thing I did was go to the supermarket armed with the following list:

Courtesy of Nicole Cliffe

There are a few things that a trained observer will immediately grasp, looking at this list. One is that Joe Manganiello is a very tall, very large man, so he can put "cheddar cheese block" on his diet plan and assume that will work out just fine for everyone. Another is that this is a very specific list. Cherry-and-fig balsamic vinaigrette! Think Thin bars, but only the peanut butter flavor (this was a problem for me, as stores seem to now carry only the CHUNKY peanut butter flavor, which has a different nutrition profile from the OG peanut butter variety). There are no meal plans. There are no portion suggestions.

I am a woman in our society. I can do any stupid damn diet you can invent for six weeks. I could eat nothing but dryer lint for six weeks.

Now, I am a woman in our society. I can do any stupid damn diet you can invent for six weeks. I could eat nothing but dryer lint for six weeks. I can do keto standing on my head. Whole 30? A snap. Paleo? Of course. I can make bullshit ricotta pancakes and prepare steel-cut oats the night before and I know how many carbs are in an ounce of cashews. You want to know my macros? I'll add you on MyFitnessPal. The diet was not going to be a problem. There's a list, I will eat the foods on the list, I will eat no foods not on the list, done.

Alcohol is not on the list. Alcohol, Joe Manganiello says, is "the destroyer." No alcohol. Done.

Now we come to the workouts. This is where things start to go very wrong, very quickly.

PHASE ONE: INCORPORATE (Weeks 1-2)

For my first session, I dragged my husband along. "Maybe I'll do this with you," he said cheerily. The workouts are in the book, I'm not going to outline them in great detail, but that first day will be burned on my brain forever. It was a chest and back day (werewolves do chest and back on Mondays and Thursdays, legs and triceps on Tuesdays and Fridays, shoulders and biceps on Wednesdays and Saturdays), and it began, like every day for the next six weeks of my life, with Joe's Dynamic Warm-Up: 20 lunges per leg, 15 squats, 15 push-ups, 30 seconds of side-to-side jumping, and 30 seconds of front-to-back jumping.

The first circuit was a combination of barbell bench pressing and lat pulldowns. That's fine. What wasn't fine was the rep count. You have never seen these reps before. No one thinks this makes sense.

20, 15, 12, 10, 5, 8, 16

Let me repeat that:

20, 15, 12, 10, 5, 8, 16

This means you press 20 times and pull down 20 times, then press 15 times and pull down 15 times, and so on. It means that, as you get tired, you do fewer reps, which makes sense, but then, for no reason, you start going back up. This is not normal. This is not what people do. Much of the next six weeks will involve you saying "I don't....what?" and then doing something and it making you stronger but you not understanding why or how.

Then there were more exercises. There were always more exercises.

PHASE TWO: INTEGRATE (Weeks 3-4)

Like pregnancy, the middle part is the best part. You're getting stronger, you spend less time swapping out your weights for different ones, and you're seeing enough results that you're willing to play along with Joe "Mad Genius" Manganiello's bizarre philosophy of lifting. Cardio is added, and you accept that. People do cardio. You get used to precisely timing 60 seconds or 50 seconds of rest between movements, as per his instructions.

During this phase I remember watching "The Battle of the Bastards" episode of Game of Thrones and saying "...pussies" dismissively as men were gored to death by bayonets. I do not think this was a defensible thing to say, I just want you to understand what sort of person you become on your way to achieving werewolf-ness.

PHASE THREE: IGNITE (Weeks 5-6)

This is when the wheels really start to come off in your brain. Fasted cardio was added to the plan. Daily, fasted, cardio. I no longer spoke at the gym, a place where once I shared confidences and humorous ripostes with my friends and trainer and loved ones. Now I just muttered things darkly and rolled my eyes. Everything was a drop set. So many drop sets. Things hurt less as I did them, but parts of me would just stop working. I wouldn't say "I don't think I can do any more push-ups." I would just lower myself and then fail to get back up again. I looked beautiful, but took little pleasure in it. These two weeks had to be endured.

I wouldn't say "I don't think I can do any more push-ups." I would just lower myself and then fail to get back up again.

Food lost its appeal almost completely. My cheat meal came, and I grimly opened a can of corned beef hash and ate it, cold, with a spoon, pausing only to dump in a bunch of hot sauce after being told it looked revolting. I was Yoshimi, battling the pink robots. In the morning, my eyes would open and I would take a quick inventory of my body and which parts were sore. (All the parts.)

The last few days were like that video of the guy pooping and falling at the end of the marathon. There was no majesty in it, only the tired satisfaction of it being over. I had two glasses of wine and a tuna noodle casserole to celebrate, and woke up with a massive hangover, as my new, leaner, werewolf physique was not used to breaking down ethanol.

This is me now, sporting Star Trek underwear, a smaller sports bra, and with my dog occupying the exact same foot of space she did six weeks earlier:

Courtesy of Nicole Cliffe

Numbers bum everyone out, so I will tell you only that my weight remained basically flat over the six weeks, while my strength went up rather impressively along all metrics and muscle groups. I don't know why it worked, or how it worked, and the reps make no sense to me, and many of his choices remain a mystery, but it certainly put me in the best shape of my life.

COURTESY NICOLE CLIFFE

Should you do this workout plan? I don't know, I'm not your mom. It made me forget, for six weeks, that my website had ended, and that I needed to find something else to do with my life. It was nice to know what I had to do every day to win at something, after having lost at something that mattered to me. It was nice to open my fridge and put something in my face without making any decisions. The glorious specificity of cherry-and-fig balsamic vinaigrette was a balm to my soul. It was a transition tool between something and the unknown. That might be something you could use. It also gave me cum gutters.

The glorious specificity of cherry-and-fig balsamic vinaigrette was a balm to my soul.

I cried only once, during the first week, driving from the gym to the grocery store, when Sleater-Kinney's "Modern Girl" shuffled up on my phone. I don't think it was because I couldn't buy a doughnut, but maybe it was. The body-mind connection is mysterious.