The Real-Life Diet of Eric Nam, Who Will Make an Exception for Nashville Hot Chicken

Photograph by Joel Chaama; Collage: Gabe Conte

Eric Nam, the K-Pop star behind hits like “Ooh Ooh” and “Can’t Help Myself,” understands the ways in which the mind and body are connected.

“Every time I have a big spiral or panic attack, it's because my body is exhausted,” he says. A few weeks into a world tour to promote his latest album House on a Hill, Nam is feeling that connection more than ever—especially since he’s also an entrepreneur on top of being a pop star. He counts a podcast and media company, DIVE Studios, and a mental health app, Mindset, in his business portfolio.

Nam developed the self-care app he co-founded which features celebrities like Summer Walker, Tori Kelly, and members of Seventeen talking about mental heath, is especially dear to Nam. “It’s always weird for me to be like, ‘I’m a mental health advocate,’” he says. “it was more of a gradual, very organic thing more than it was like ‘We need to be advocates.’”

At 34, the eternally boyish Eric Nam has already lived a few lives. An Atlanta native who was supposed to become a business analyst at Deloitte, he left finance to enter a talent competition in South Korea and become a star. Nam now deftly toggles between the worlds of entertainment and business. GQ recently caught up with Nam to discuss life on the road, working out with Jeremy Lin’s trainer and the best cheat meal in Nashville.

GQ: You're in the middle of a tour, doing multiple shows a week. How’s it going so far? How is it feeling in your body?

Eric Nam: I’m adjusting, I'll say that. In my body, it feels a little crazy. To be frank, I have had a sinus infection since the tour started. It's been a cocktail of antibiotics and all these crazy things that I'm trying to fight it with. And so it wasn't the most ideal start, but I think I'm finally getting over it. So I'm very excited to start to feel better.

Otherwise, it feels good to be on stage. I think there's a part of me that can't deny that getting up and dancing for a hundred minutes in heels can be tough. But it's always an adjustment to get back into it. We're at the top [of the tour] and I'm feeling good.

Sorry to hear that you're battling all of that. I'm sure it affects your singing too.

I think for me, singing and performing is not just a physical thing. It's so much about energy. It has to be coming from a good place emotionally and energetically. And so being sick has just been the hardest thing. To kind of get ready to go on stage and really kill it? I think for me anxiety comes from being like, ‘Okay, I don't feel great. I wonder if I can perform at least 90%? If I can't give a hundred, can we do 90?’ That's always where I'm trying to push myself.

There is one aspect of being on tour that I feel like is so much a part of your off-tour life anyway—you're always flying all over the place, from Korea to America and back. I know that in the past, you’ve said that you spend more time on an airplane than anywhere else. How do you take care of yourself with all that travel?

It's so mundane and boring, but it's really about sleep and drinking as much water and vitamins as possible. I've been traveling non-stop since pretty much April or May of this year. I've spent probably a maximum of a week in LA for rehearsals. That's the longest time I've spent in a single place I think—which is insane. Staying hydrated, taking my vitamins, trying to eat right and then sleeping whenever I can—that's the biggest thing. It's like, if you're tired, go to bed. Be okay with missing out on certain things. Get rid of FOMO.

That comes with experience and I guess maturity of knowing that going out for one more party isn't actually going to be that much better—because you're going to get hit on the back end of that.

Any tips you've learned traveling so much all these years?

I always try to take, if possible, a night flight if it's a long one. You can sleep on a night flight. I usually get into Korea or Asia early in the morning, and I stay up as long as I can so I don't have jet lag. That's usually my fix.

Can you talk about your fitness regimen on the road? You have such a punishing schedule, and I can imagine it's hard to really maintain a regimen.

Honestly, I think everything is about balance. I've found that forcing yourself to work out when you're tired is actually worse for you. It's better just to get sleep and relax than to force yourself into a gym and work out. Because you're just going to get injured—that's something that I have to remind myself of.

So more than it being this strict regimen, it's really about self-awareness and staying in tune with your body. So are you hungry? Are you exhausted? Did you sleep enough? Are you hydrated? Those are the key things before I can say, OK, I'm feeling good, let's go have a workout. If I'm feeling good, then OK, we're going to lift really heavy and do all the exercises, or we're going to do a 20, 30 minute jog and just get some sweat out.

I have friends who are so strict with themselves. Like, everyday they have to run five miles and do this and that. I'm like, yeah, but that sounds so bad for your mental health because then they get stressed out when they’ve missed a workout. They’re so bummed and they hate themselves for missing it. For me, I'm more just like, OK, well, you just weren't feeling good. It's fine, you'll catch up on the next one.

And so even my trainer—actually, he was Jeremy Lin's trainer for a long time—he's also very understanding. [He’ll be] like, OK, you should recover. You should not work out, or you should just go stretch. And so that's kind of been my routine. I'm still figuring it out, but again, it's all about being very self-aware and being forgiving, but also trying to just feel really good. I think that's the goal.

What do you usually eat on tour?

I'm trying something new on this one. Because I love to eat, when I get into a city, I’ll have a cup of coffee in the morning and then I'll eat whatever's local to the city. So in Nashville, we would have to have Hattie B's Hot Chicken. Or in Atlanta, we have to have Waffle House and all the Southern food.

All that stuff, I let it go. And then we do the show. After the show last night, for example, the entire crew had Hattie B's Hot Chicken with fries and bread. I won’t do that anymore this tour. I'm trying to get on this thing where I eat my meal before the show. If I'm hungry after the show, I'll have a protein shake and that's it. Just trying to remove as much food that is unnecessary from my diet as possible.

Between us, oh man. I have my good days and I have my bad days. As of yesterday, I’ve been on a diet of lean proteins and leafy greens and a little bit of carbs—and that's it for every meal. And it hurts my soul and it breaks my heart. But I've decided to give it a go because early this year I was very consistent in working out and eating very well and I felt really good. And then once travel picked up, it got really, really bad.

Honestly, touring is the most routine that I have. My team and I, we've been so excited to be on a bus because we at least know we're going to be on a bus, sleep on a bus, wake up, perform,—it's like a normal workday.

So now that we have that, we're trying to eat as healthy as possible. So again, lean meat and high protein, vegetables, a little bit of rice, or some carbs, and that's about it. If I snack, it's going to be a fruit, maybe a protein bar. I'll cheat every once in a while—don't tell my trainer—and that's it. It's not fun.

What do you cheat with?

What do I cheat with? I'll cheat with anything. Give me fried chicken. I love fried chicken. French fries, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers. I am really good at convincing myself that hamburgers are actually healthy. I think about it as [protein] and there’s vegetables. [Laughs] That sounds like a salad in an efficient form to me, honestly.

And then I've cut out drinking completely for this tour. Usually on tour, I'll just completely cut it out.

How did you get to that decision?

I usually don't drink on the road on tour because it immediately dries out my throat. I can lose my voice very quickly. I also know that when I drink, I get just massive zits. I don't want to deal with breakouts.

But then also, again, I really like drinking. I love my tequila, whiskey, wines, everything. But I'm trying to really remove as much alcohol from my life as possible, because I think I'm starting to find that it's the day after—it's the guilt from it and the physical sluggishness. I'm like, maybe I'm starting to be done with it. I'll still go out and have a good time, and I'll still have a drink every once in a while. But I think I'm starting to get to the point where I'm like, okay, we can have a drink. We don't need to really get drunk or whatever.

Every time I have a big spiral or a panic attack, it's because my body is exhausted or it's because I'm overwhelmed. So knowing that: How do I set myself up so I have the least possibility of getting sick? And so, if not drinking is going to ensure that I don't wake up with a sore neck and a headache the next day, I'm just going to cut it out. That's kind of where I've been.

One of the things you’ve really centered in your career is mental health. You've made it an advocacy—you even have an app. In my experience, that's such a taboo topic especially in a lot of Asian cultures. Was there a moment in your life where you felt like, oh, I need to take a more proactive stance on this? That you think led to you making it an advocacy and later founding the app?

I think there were many moments that kind of led to this. For example, one of my first panic attacks happened on an airplane. I was so busy, I was so stressed out. I was actually flying to New York for a fashion week thing. I had never had one before, and it was terrifying. I thought I was dying, and it led me down this spiral of ‘I'm going to have a heart attack and die on this plane.’ That was one. I realized, it’s not just me, it happens to a lot of people.

There were other moments before that where I was just very, very anxious and depressed and paranoid for a multitude of reasons. And so [I realized] it's a consistent practice that we need to have. We need to have a very proactive approach to maintaining good mental health in the same way that we're supposed to work out, eat right, sleep well, drink water. We should be practicing [good habits] for good mental health too.

As I was going through these things, I was trying to figure it out. I was like, why can't we talk about this? And I was like, well, if you won't, I'll do it. I have a platform.

What is resetting like for you? How do you recharge?

I like to go to a resort and do nothing. Just have books—and maybe I won't even read them. This kind of goes back to even my mentality with working out and all that stuff. It's about being kind to yourself, and it's about having the self-awareness to say you don't need this right now, and you don't have to do this right now. There's nothing worse than forcing yourself to read a book that you don't want to read just to say you read it, which I think a lot of people do. They want to be like, I read a book. And you're like, yeah, but do you give a shit? You don't care. You didn't take anything away from it because the entire time, that was a task. It wasn't you really reading.

And so that's kind of what I try to spend my time doing. I just go somewhere or I go home to Atlanta and I just will watch Netflix and drink coffee and just look at grass and chill.

Originally Appeared on GQ

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