Here's something you don't often see: an actress publishing her actual body composition numbers

Here's something you don't often see: an actress publishing her actual body composition numbers.

Not "I feel healthier." Not "the dress fits better." Numbers — the kind a machine prints out while you stand there holding the handles, slightly judged.

I'm doing it because for the next three months, this blog is going to follow a project I've just started. And because the last time I dieted seriously, I did everything wrong, told no one, and paid for it with my health. This time I'm doing the opposite: moderate methods, in public, with receipts.

Let's start with the uncomfortable part.

My Numbers, For the Record

Measured mid-July 2026, on an InBody scan:

	Now	Goal (early October)
Weight	55.1 kg	52.8–53 kg
Body fat	27% (15.0kg of it)	23–24%
Skeletal muscle	21.6 kg	21.6 kg — not one gram less

The receipt.
Note the machine's verdict at the bottom
— we'll get to that.

I'm 165.8 cm, so my BMI is around 20 — the low end of normal. Which is exactly why this is not a weight-loss diet.

The Part I Have to Say Out Loud First

The "before" photo.
I know. Stay with me.

Let me say the awkward thing before anyone else does: by everyday standards, I am not overweight. Not even close. If we passed each other on the street, "she should lose weight" would occur to exactly no one.

So why does this project exist? Two honest reasons.

One: I'm an actress, and the camera is not an everyday standard. The lens flattens, widens, and photographs the difference between 27% and 23% body fat even when the bathroom mirror can't see it. Staying lean for the screen is part of my job description — the way a marathoner's body is part of hers. This is a professional cut, not a medical one.

Two — and this is the part the mirror does show: my ratio is off. Normal weight, high fat percentage, low muscle. My InBody scan literally stamps a label on this body type in Korean: 표준체중 허약형 — "standard weight, frail type." A machine looked at my body and chose the word frail. Not thin, not fit — frail. That's not a weight problem; it's a composition problem.

And if you're at a similar weight and you're not paid to stand in front of cameras: you don't need this project. I mean that. The distinction matters to me, and you'll see why in a moment — because to explain the rest, I have to tell you about 2018.

The Diet That Broke My Body

In 2018, I was cast in a film called Juror 8 (배심원들), and my character needed me thinner. So I did what actresses do: I lost the weight. From around 55 kg down to 48–50, and I stayed there for four years.

Still from Juror 8, 2019 — image
© the film's production

That's me back then, in the photo. 

Losing it was so brutal that I made myself a vow: never gain it back. And I kept that vow the only way I knew how — by eating like a small bird. Tiny portions, many times a day, for years. I was never not hungry. There was a constant, low-grade craving underneath everything I did, and at some point the strangest thing happened: even when I allowed myself to eat, food wouldn't really go in anymore. My body had stopped trusting the offer.

Then came the part I didn't connect until much later. My cycle — which had always run like a Swiss watch — started arriving two weeks late. Regularly. The flow shrank. From around 2019, my body was quietly turning down the volume on itself, and I was too busy maintaining 49 kg to hear it.

My only exercise was ballet, yoga, walking — lovely things that build almost no muscle. So there I was: thin, camera-ready, constantly a little sick, catching every small illness that went around, with a period that came when it felt like it.

I want to be precise here, because this is the sentence I wish someone had said to me in 2018: I wasn't managing my weight. I was managing a slow breakdown, and calling it discipline.

The Recovery (Or: How I Gained 6 kg and Won)

In 2023, work slowed down and I let go. Over the next couple of years I did something I'd never properly done: I lifted weights. For about two years I trained, ate like a person instead of a bird, and let the scale climb back to 55.

And my body came back to me. The cycle returned to its old clockwork. The constant small illnesses faded. I had energy for rehearsals again. I built actual muscle — from nearly nothing — though the InBody will tell you that project is far from finished: 21.6 kg of skeletal muscle is still the low end for my height. Muscle, it turns out, is the slowest thing I've ever tried to earn.

So that's my trade, honestly stated: I gained six kilograms and got my health back. I'd sign that deal again tomorrow.

But now I'm working again. And cameras — you know what they do. They add what feels like a pound for every kilogram I add in real life. I need to be leaner on screen. The problem is, the only weight-loss method I ever knew is the one that broke me — and I've deliberately forgotten it.

So this project is me learning to lose fat like an adult, for the first time.

Why "Recomposition," Not "Diet"

Look at the numbers again: normal weight, 27% body fat, low-end muscle. Body-composition people have an unflattering name for this — "skinny fat" — and I'll accept it, because it's accurate. The goal this time is not a smaller number. It's a different ratio: lose 2.3 kg of pure fat, keep every gram of the muscle I spent two years earning.

Slower, less dramatic, and the only version that changes how you actually look on camera — and the only version my body will forgive.

The Method (Built Around the Thing I Once Broke)

Three rules run the whole project — and if you remember one thing about it, make it the first:

1. My calories follow my cycle. The diet that wrecked me ignored my body's calendar entirely. This one is built on it. My month has phases now: an "earning" phase (~1,450 kcal, in the week my energy is naturally highest), a "holding" phase (~1,650 kcal, in the hormonal stretch where the only goal is not losing ground — because fighting your hormones is a losing game), and one measurement window. The girl whose period went silent from dieting is now scheduling her diet around her period. I find that almost funny. Almost.

2. Strength training twice a week, 40 minutes. Two full-body sessions that tell my body: the muscle stays. And no cardio at all — which sounds like heresy in a fat-loss plan, so it gets its own section below.

3. The scale is banned. I weigh in exactly once a month — fasted, morning, three to five days after my period ends, same conditions every time. Everything between measurements is water and noise. I spent four years being emotionally governed by a bathroom scale; I'm not renewing that contract.

And the eating itself? Built for my actual life, which happens in restaurants between lessons and rehearsals: sundubu, kongnamul-gukbap, seolleongtang with half the rice, poke bowls. Breakfast never changes — Greek yogurt or two baked eggs, a protein drink, an americano. No cooking-influencer fantasy. If a plan requires me to become a different person, it's not a plan, it's a wish.

The Calf Problem (Or: Why There's No Cardio in This Plan)

Every fat-loss guide on the internet says the same thing: "just add walking." I can't, and I want to explain why properly, because I know I'm not the only woman dealing with this.

When I walk long distances, my calves swell. Not "a little puffy" — dramatically. By evening they're tight, heavy, and a size bigger, and a long filming or lesson day on my feet does the same thing. So the standard advice — 10,000 steps, walk everywhere — actively works against me.

And here's the honest, slightly vain layer on top: I'm an actress. Calf lines show on camera. So I don't just skip walking — I avoid direct calf training entirely. No calf raises, ever, and even my leg exercises are engineered to keep my calves out of it: leg press with my feet set high, hip thrusts, Romanian deadlifts. Legs get trained; calves get left alone.

Which means my calves get managed instead of exercised, with a little nightly ritual: compression socks on any long day, thirty ankle pumps lying in bed, ten minutes with my legs up the wall, magnesium before sleep. If your legs also swell after a day on your feet, I wrote a whole post about the compression sleep socks that actually work — that ritual is half of why my legs survive this job.

Want proof the ritual works? Here's where I have to make an embarrassing confession about the "before" photo: there isn't one, because I deleted them all. In the 48-kg era I hated my calves so much that any photo where they appeared got erased on sight. At my lightest weight ever, my calves were at their heaviest-looking — swollen, thick, always running a size ahead of the rest of me — because my main exercise back then was walking everywhere, which for legs like mine meant swelling them daily and never letting them drain. The only proof left lives in movie-premiere press photos, floating around Google forever — owned by the photographers who took them, not by me, so I can't paste them here. (Yes, you could go looking. I can't stop you.) But honestly, the deleting itself tells you everything you need to know.

So you get only the after. Here they are now — at 55 kg, seven kilograms heavier:

Instagram에서 이 게시물 보기

조수향(@soohyaangc)님의 공유 게시물

Heavier body, calmer calves. That's not a filter and it's not luck — it's years of compression socks, ankle pumps, and legs-up-the-wall doing their quiet, unglamorous work. The scale went up; the boots zip easier. Bodies are funny like that.

So no, there's no cardio here. The fat-loss engine is food and two lifting sessions. My legs have a different job: looking calm on camera and carrying me through rehearsals.

What This Blog Will Get

Not weekly weigh-ins — that's the noise I just banned. Instead:

• A monthly recap after each InBody scan: real numbers, what worked, what fell apart, what I actually ate
• The final post in October: full before-and-after data, and an honest verdict on whether cycle-synced recomposition works

If the numbers don't move, you'll see that too. That's the deal with publishing your baseline: there's nowhere to hide, which is precisely the point.

One More Honest Thing

I've written about what I eat for my skin and my anti-aging routine, and all of it stays true — this project sits on that foundation.

But this is the first time I've attached numbers and the 2018 story to my body in public, and it feels exposed. I'm doing it anyway, for the version of me who was proud of eating like a bird — and for anyone currently mistaking a breakdown for discipline. Every diet post I've ever found helpful had one thing in common: the author had something to lose by lying.

See you at the August scan.

Disclaimer: This is a personal project, not medical advice — my targets were set for my body and my (annoyingly slow) metabolism, so please don't copy the numbers. And one thing I mean with my whole chest: if hard dieting has ever made your period late, light, or absent, that's not a badge of discipline. It's your body asking for help — please see a doctor. I wish I had, years earlier.