Reading the NHK manga for the first time back in March/April of last year helped me lose weight, begin exercising everyday, and immensely improve my diet, oddly enough. I watched the anime years ago and while it was OK, it didn't leave a huge impression me. The manga seemed to give all the characters a few more layers (especially Misaki herself) which made it a much more interesting story. Personally though, I think the anime had the better ending, since Satou hadn't really done some unrealistic 180 like in the manga, but more just had to do what he needed to do to get by and to avoid starving to death and is still basically the same person he always was.
Anyway, I don't know. I guess reading it somehow spurred a Daesu-Oh style transformation in me, to engage in something different with my time, regardless of the additional health benefits and more out of the inherent novelty, as I'm locked in my own particular space. I'm also not ashamed to admit that a part of me wanted to embody Satou in a physical sense, as being a slim, bordering on emaciated at certain intervals, stick figure and have Misaki cheer me on in my own head as I do it. Almost as if, that if I could somehow enter that world, I'd need to be as slim as Satou, otherwise it just wouldn't "work" & the continuity would be missing (for lack of a better way to describe it). The decision for me to eat only one meal a day for a few months there, actually came from one of the later chapters of the manga where Satou is starving himself, which I've now forgotten the context for. Hell, there were multiple times where I even imagined Joey from the Blackwell games encouraging me to keep doing what I was doing, for whatever random reason. It all seemed rather arbitrary in the end, whatever I conjured in my head to keep me on task, but enh. I guess that's how it goes.
I also ordered some Phoenix Tears which I took alone in my room (THC concentrate) a couple months prior to my shift in routine, and before reading the manga, after having never tried a drug of any sort before, not even alcohol, and I'd have to say that also played a not so small part in it all. It was a deeply unpleasant experience filled with palpable doom & anxiety, laced with moments of profound insight, that eventually led to me suffering from bouts of recurring derealization, which thanPost too long. Click here to view the full text.