Actor Ahn Jae-hyun has opened up about the toll of his constant dieting, revealing that he once gained 17 kilograms — from 60 kilograms to 77 kilograms — for a drama role that included a bed scene, and that the on-off cycle of restricting food and then eating out now leaves him drained and dazed.
The remarks came in a video uploaded to his YouTube channel on October 26, titled “A Freelancer’s Unplanned Trip Home.” After filming that day, Ahn walked around Heukseok-dong in Seoul looking for dinner, saying he usually orders delivery at home but wanted to avoid traffic on his way home.
Ahn said he prefers eating alone and judges a restaurant by whether he can eat comfortably by himself. That day he chose pork belly, and the conversation soon turned to how hard he finds it to stick to a diet.
“I keep dieting, but when I go out, I think, ‘Let’s eat,’” he said. “If I keep living like that, I feel like I have no energy. There is one good thing, though: I become less sensitive.” When staff asked whether skipping food instead made him more sensitive, he said exhaustion left him responding with a blank “Huh?” and feeling dazed.
In the same video, Ahn also talked about the cost of living alone, saying he had dreamed of it since he was young. “When you live alone, everything costs money. It’s really no joke,” he said.
Ahn began as a model before breaking through in “You Who Came From the Stars,” followed by “You’re All Surrounded” and the film “Fashion King.” He has watched his weight since his modelling days, when he said he sometimes felt his hands shake from starving before fashion shows.
His divorce from actress Ku Hye-sun also played out publicly while he was filming the romantic comedy “Love with Flaws,” a period he later described as physically and mentally exhausting.
The video was presented as a personal vlog after filming, not as a project announcement. Whether his next role will again require a physical transformation remains to be seen, but Ahn has made clear that the dieting cycle itself is the part he finds hardest to live with.
