How a high-powered lawyer became a TikTok superstar: Meet the Korean Vegan

“I was never small enough for my family growing up. I remember when I was 5 or 6 years old being told I was too fat,” she recalls. “Then when I went to college, the guardrails came off in terms of food. The freshman 10 turned into 35 very quickly because I had been eating Korean food my whole life, and it was now unlimited soft serve, unlimited pizza, unlimited juice and Doritos all day. And then when I got home from college, the shaming became 35 times worse. I was like, ‘I need to stop eating,’ and I lost all the weight and then some, and everyone was like, ‘Joanne, you look so great.’ They didn’t care that I was eating one meal a day and was on the treadmill for hours. They just saw the results. But that behavior was unsustainable. You can’t just not eat. Instead you binge and gain all the weight back and then some. So it was like that for 10 years. Back and forth and back and forth. I was the butt of so many jokes in my family. ‘Oh, Joanne’s fat again. Oh, Joanne is skinny again.’ ”