The answer is yes. Bruce Vilanch has indeed kept up with the heart-healthy regimen first laid out for him on VH1's popular Celebrity Fit Club. The show chronicled the weight losses and dramatic gains of a motley crew of music, TV and movie stars including Vilanch. The cheerful comic scribe didn't lose the most weight, but he did arrive at the show's finale 25 pounds lighter than his whopping starting weight of 315 pounds.

“It is something I'm still sticking to. I'm still working out, and I'm still on Zone food. I'm still losing weight,” Vilanch says, calling from his Los Angeles home.

The 57-year-old, openly gay entertainer indulged in daily hilarity as a late ‘90s Hollywood Square and also served as the show's head writer. His career was documented in the 1999 documentary Get Bruce!, and Vilanch makes occasional stops around the country with his one-man show, Almost Famous. He's also responsible for much of the funny in Bette Midler's career, having written material for her concert tours and television specials.

“I knew (Celebrity Fit Club) was going to be tough. I'd been on eight million different weight-loss programs. Exercise--I had a trainer and done that kind of stuff, but I hadn't done any kind of team sports or any of that kind of crap,” Vilanch says. “Every single other person on the show had, at one point or another in their life, been in shape. I had never been in shape. I was coming from way far behind, and I was also the oldest. I knew that I had all kinds of limitations.”

Fit Club offered viewers a peek at Vilanch's hilarious, often huggable, personality. Fellow Fit Clubbers Tempestt Bledsoe and Countess Vaughn poured on the drama; while Kelly LeBrock and Gunnar Nelson took on the challenge with admirable seriousness. Vilanch, however, managed a nice balance of humor and heart--and still lost an impressive amount of weight.

The “reality” of reality television, however, is something Vilanch isn't keen on revisiting anytime soon.

“The experience altogether--it was a nightmare,” Vilanch says. “The losing weight, the diet and the working out--it was great. It was reality television that sucked. Reality television is where they say to you, ‘That was great. Now can you do it again, but angrier?' I said, ‘No, that's called acting. I get paid more for that.'

“The whole goal of reality television is to heighten reality, is to set up a situation and then make it as ridiculous as they can. They want you to be angry. They want you to go to extremes. They're goading you into extreme behavior, and they're pitting you against other people with the hopes that they can get some good footage out of it. It's the exact opposite of reality.”

Vilanch says he wasn't a fan of the genre before Fit Club, and he has no plans to join any other reality-show circuses anytime soon, unless “they paid me more” or an elusive offer comes from Tyra Banks and America's Next Top Model. (“I wouldn't mind,” he jokes.)

“It's nerve-wracking to be part of the process,” he admits. “Nobody will tell you anything, and they basically want your reaction to things … on camera … as extreme as it can be. It's not particularly pleasant.”

More enjoyable for Vilanch was his stint as Edna Turnblad in the musical version of John Waters‘ Hairspray. He tackled Broadway and toured with the show for more than a year. He lost some weight then, and it first inspired him to appear on Fit Club.

“I knew as Hairspray was winding down, I would segue into couch potato. I just thought what can I do to keep up some kind of physical exercise, and that was when the Fit Club offer came along,” Vilanch says. “I said this was God's way of telling me, ‘You can get paid to lose weight.' Who am I to fly in the face of fate?”

The recently announced casting of John Travolta as the housecoat-wearing Edna in the big-screen musical version of Hairspray raised a few eyebrows, but Vilanch wasn't too surprised at the decision and thinks the Grease star will “do fine.”

“They want to have a big movie star in that role. I'm sure a lot of other people were considered. He wouldn't be anybody's first thought,” Vilanch says. “People forget that he has musical-comedy chops. He comes from musical theater, from Broadway. That's where he began, and so he has a sense of that style. It certainly is a great big acting leap for him. It's going to be interesting to see how he does it.”

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