Actor Manoj Bajpayee lost weight drastically to look like a sick man in the forthcoming film Gali Guleiyan. He says that what he did was not healthy, but it's one of the risks that one takes for a job that he or she is obsessed with.

Manoj will be seen playing a paranoid man struggling with his impounded psyche in the film, written and directed by Dipesh Jain.

Asked about his weight loss, Manoj said during a visit to the IANS headquarter here on Friday: "It was a massive diet chart. What I was doing was not healthy. Going off protein is not healthy. It can damage you forever. One takes a risk for a job that one is doing and is very obsessed with.

"I wanted to have that kind of a look of a sick man by losing weight drastically... So much so that the immune system got completely hampered. I started falling sick...sometimes viral and I am not somebody who catches fever so easily. I have been blessed that way. But in a month's time, I fell sick many times."

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He also started talking to himself.

"Talking to oneself had become a regular thing in my household. My wife used to wonder what I had just mumbled to her. She used to ask me 'Did you say something? Are you talking to yourself? That's not a good sign. Please take care of yourself'.

"You know running on a treadmill and feeling... suddenly coming back to senses. You realise that you ran for four to five minutes without really being there. Those were the dangerous signs that I went through while internally preparing as an actor.

"It is a tough task. It can damage you in many ways," he said.

Produced by Shuchi Jain of Exstant Motion Pictures, Gali Guleiyan will release on September 7.