"Actually, I wish that girls nowadays would have more confidence in themselves. A lot of magazines and models now are used to get girls to want to look perfect. But really, I think especially all our fans are beautiful no matter what. Girls should feel more happy about themselves. No one is perfect. It’s all about what your personality and heart is like. I’m not one the looks for appearance right away. I want to say a message to our female fans: You are beautiful and don’t let anyone tell you that you are not."

- EXO's Chen

Hello everybody, my name is Kristy.

I am a student at a university somewhere on the West Coast of the United States. Which means that I am at least old enough to drive, vote, join the army, have , serve on a jury, pay taxes, sign my own official documents, and move out of my parents' house. I won't specify my age further, but I can say that being an adult (at least for me) definitely rocks.

I am a theatre arts major with an emphasis in performance, and a music minor. In short, I plan on being a musical theatre actress. I take classes not only in acting and singing, but in theatre management, design, crafts, the whole shebang. And I love it. I've been a theatre person since high school, and followed my passion into college. I've worked on several university productions (both onstage and off), attended regional and national festivals, won a national award this past year, and have met some truly amazing people. I also intern as a script reader for an up-and-coming entertainment company whose name I will not mention, but I'm hoping it will take off. I can truly say I love my life and what I'm doing and what I hope my career will be.

I didn't always want to go into theatre, however. For a few years of high school, I didn't even want to go to college. I wanted to perform, to be sure, but the way to Broadway is a long and hard road, and even then nothing is guaranteed. Also, being Asian, I was painfully aware of the lack of Asian representation in the United States, both onstage and onscreen. I wanted more. I wanted to sing and dance and be beautiful, like the girls I saw on Youtube, those K-Pop groups like SNSD and AOA and Hello Venus and 4Minute and 2NE1 and...

So, around the end of my sophomore year of high school, I decided that I would audition for SM Entertainment. I chose SM because after some research, I realized that as hard as it would be to get into a Korean entertainment company while in America, it would be even harder to get into a smaller company, much less debut and even harder to succeed in the industry for a long enough time to establish a career. Therefore, I settled on the Big Three - SM, YG, and JYP, all which have global auditions. I chose SM to focus on because they're known for their vocals, which I primarily focused on as a performer (I'll be frank - I can't dance).

I was so determined to make it in, not just because I wanted a career, but because I was having trouble connecting with my peers at school, having difficulty with my parents and home, and (unknowingly) severely depressed. I believed that the problem was my environment, that if I made it into SM and went to South Korea to become a trainee and an idol, my problems would go away. I believed people didn't want to be around me because I was ugly and useless. If I became a trainee and then an idol, I would be beautiful with a career. It seemed simple.

So, I got to work. I got a part-time job to pay for vocal lessons in preparation for my audition. I spent six months studying Korean through online websites. What really grabbed my focus, however, was trying to look the part. At 16, I was a former athlete, which meant that I weighed a bit more than my friends of the same height and body type. To be honest, my weight factored in a lot with my confidence around other people and my insecurity. Another reason I thought people didn't want to be around me - I was fat, and nobody wants to be around fat people, was my way of thinking.

So for months, I set myself to the task of dieting. At first, it was simply cutting out "junk food" and sweets from my diet. Choosing the "healthiest" (ie lowest calorie) option at restaurants, saying no to dessert. I started working out at night using exercises I found on the Internet and cut out of magazines. After around 3 months, I was working out in the morning and at night, and walking on the treadmill during the day. I looked up SNSD exercises and read about how KARA's Hara got her tiny "ant waist" and tried them all. I cut out red meat, and then all meat, then anything with preservatives, to the point where I had a strict list of "good foods" and "bad foods".

My SM audition came and went. I sang too quietly, the judge lady had to gesture at me behind the camera to speak up. I obviously did not make it in.

I stopped learning Korean, quit my part-time job, but try as I might, I couldn't stop dieting. Food scared me more than anything. At the beginning of July, my food diary looked something like this:

Breakfast: Two egg whites
Lunch: One whole wheat rice cake with 2 TB of peanut butter
Dinner: whatever my family was having, only in a much smaller portion (usually 1/4 of a cup of rice, half a plate of vegetables, and at this point my mother straight up told I had to eat meat if I wanted to stay in the house)

On July 4, 2015, I ended up in the hospital with a heartrate of around 40 beats per minute. And my "K-pop idol diet" ended.

I am half-white, half-Vietnamese. A Mỹ lai, mixed. I believed that went against me in my "weightloss journey", that my genes were conspiring against me to make me short and fat.

The truth was, I was never fat. I was a severely sick person, not physically, but emotionally and psychologically. I was lonely and depressed and wanted to control something in my life when it felt like everything around me was falling to pieces. So I tried to control what I ate, what I weighed, to the point where it got out of control.

I won't go into detail in this chapter the reprecussions that starvation has on your body. When I do, I will be graphic, if only to discourage others from going down the same path. There is nothing beautiful about an eating disorder, or disordered eating. 

The truth was, I was never ugly either. I was sad and I was hurt, but I got better. But I believe I have a kind heart, and I have always (for the most part) had a good heart, and so I believe that I have always (for the most part) been beautiful.

And so are you.

So, starting from today, I will be doing my own "K-Pop idol body blog". I will be posting food diary entries, workout reviews, here, as well as chapters of advice about nutrition, misconcpetions, and also maybe some fun tidbits I have learned about while working in the entertainment world. I want to show that it is possible to look how you want while still being healthy - not the kind of "healthy" that the industry promotes, but healthy in that your body and mind all works the way it should, and that you're happy.

This is also a bit of a check for myself as well. As a recovered anorexic, when I left treatment, I was given a 50% recovery rate. That meant I had a 50/50 chance of relapsing. I have had moments of relapse within the last few years, and some truly terrible times, but overall I believe I am recovered enough to choose to make this lifestyle change, as long as I set boundaries for myself. I have been truly healthy that last few years (in the next chapter, I'll clear up what I mean by truly "healthy" versus "unhealthy") and I don't feel the need to change the way I eat or look. I'm doing it because I'm curious, I want to see if I can do it and still remain healthy, and I want to provide an example for others. However, knowing that what I'm doing is near the equivalent of an alcoholic walking into a bar and ordering a beer after years of sobriety, I'm setting down rules for myself.

1) I will not weigh myself, nor put my lowest/highest/current weight on here. Eating disorders are obsessed with numbers, and I weighed myself nearly every morning when I was in the midst of my illness. I haven't weighed myself in two years, and don't plan on starting. It would only lead to disaster. Therefore, the only indication I'll allow myself of "weightloss" (which isn't really the goal here) is maybe a waist and thighs measurement every few months. Maybe. I have to think about it. 

2) I will not be doing any of the fad diets mentioned on K-Pop articles. When I was younger, I truly believed they were feasible diets and that if idols did them, so could I. I will be writing another chapter on misconceptions and myths, but the point is - even idols can't do them. They're not sustainable. Idols engage in crash diets in preparation for comebacks because they have a limited amount of time before they're in the spotlight. Once promotions are over, they often go back to eating a regular (though, probably still regulated diet). However, crash diets are unhealthy because they wreck havoc on your body for what ends up being a temporary aesthetic. In the worst cases, some idols have extreme trouble going back to normal eating patterns after a crash diet (such as what happened to me - in a later chapter I will explain exactly why that happens, and how eating disorders work). Crash/fad diets can trigger so many more problems than they're worth, and I know that although they "work" in that you do lose weight rapidly, in the end, they're nothing but evil. So, I will follow my own nutritional plan based on what I learned while in treatment, and I will share it with you. This is nonegotiable. 

3) I will be doing various workouts inspired by K-pop. I don't really see anything wrong with the workouts K-pop articles describe, as long as you're being safe. The problem with exercise is that too often it's used as a method of purging - gotta "work off the calories" or "work hard enough to earn dinner" instead of being a healthy thing. I overexercised constantly in the midst of my disorder, to the point where if I wasn't eating or thinking about food, I was doing something physical in the attempt to burn off the few calories I had consumed that day. Therefore, my rule for myself is that I will only allow (1) cardio activity and (1) strength activity per day. If the cardio activity is strenuous (like running), the strength activity must therefore be light (like stretching), and vice versa (like walking and weight-lifting). I also must stop if anything hurts, and must allow myself one rest day per week. Working out every day is not an option. This is nonegotiable.

4) I must post a diary entry here every other day and be honest about what I ate and what I did. Disorders thrive on dishonesty ("Of course I ate, Mom!" "No, I'm not hungry.") and if I want to stay healthy then I have to be honest, otherwise I run the risk of seriously falling down the rabbit hole. 

Those are my rules/guidelines, and if anyone else is interested in going on this journey with me, I highly recommend following them too, in order to stay healthy.

All that aside, some fun things about me:

- My friends call me Rapunzel, because I'm a little ditzy, high-spirited, self-critical, and I literally never stop singing
- I've been to the SM Monthly Auditions three times since my first one. The last one I went to, the judge actually said "I remember you" and that I was "pretty", which made me very happy.
- I'm a light-lyric soprano, and actually am planning on taking vocal lessons again
- I am an SM stan, with EXO being my favorite group, and Kim Jongdae (aka Chen) being my bias. Surprise, surprise!
- I also love SNSD's Taeyeon, Blackpink's Rose, Day6's Jae, and Davichi.
- Descendants of the Sun was the best drama ever and if Song Joongki and Song Hyekyo ever date in real life I will cry tears of happiness don't test me
- I played soccer as a center midfielder for ten years before getting injured and switching to theatre
- I also love musical theatre as much as K-pop. Lin Manuel Miranda is my idol. I loved Hamilton, and when I heard EXO's Chen was playing Benny in In The Heights I cried because my two favorite things in the world were coming together
- I'm a legal adult but people tend to think I'm somewhere between 14-16.

If you have any questions, please, leave a comment and I will get back to you! Next chapter is Myths and Misconceptions! :)