Lee Hwi-jae’s 3-decade diet

Entertainer Lee Hwi-jae said he has been dieting for 27 years, ever since he was in middle school, on the SBS talk show “Healing Camp” on Monday. He recalled how he started getting chubby when he was 11 years old, and his friends started to tease him and give him mean nicknames.

“I was not at all popular because I was getting fat in middle school,” he recalled. “I saw myself naked in a mirror when I was taking a bath and started to think ‘this is wrong.’?”

He said that in his first year of high school he weighed 69 kilograms, or 152 pounds, when he was 164 centimeters tall, or 5 feet 5 inches. But he started dieting and grew to 179 centimeters.

“People started to look at me differently,” he said.

His secret for keeping his weight down is to write in a food diary, work out and check his weight every day.

“The important thing is to keep balanced,” he advised. “If I ate too much the day before, I mostly eat vegetables the next day.”

By Lee Sun-min