What inspired Fat Joe to lose 200 pounds? Rapper opens up about depression and weight loss journey
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Fat Joe, recently shared his transformational journey, where he went on to shed massive 200 pounds. The New York City rapper at one point weighed 470 pounds and wanted to do something about it. While spilling the beans on his bout with depression and how he understands it, Joe said, “The most complex Rubik’s Cube you could ever, ever, ever, ever try to figure out. And so you battling that every day,” he offered an analogy comparing it to his mind.
The 52-year-old rapper added, “When you’re fighting yourself, there isn’t a wall high enough that you can build. There isn’t an island you can go to. There isn’t a place you can go to where you get away from it, because you’re fighting your mind. You wake up, and then the minute you think about it, your brain sends you a message to say, ‘We’re not supposed to be happy.’ And then you fall right back into depression.”
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What inspired Fat Joe to lose 200 pounds?
In a recent interview, Fat Joe, 52, shared how he suffered from depression after losing a close pal, Big Pun. He also attended his funeral back in 2000. “I went to his funeral and I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge. Like, I seen me,” said Joe before adding “And I’m looking at his little daughter. She was the same age as my daughter. I said, ‘You gotta lose weight; otherwise you outta here.'”
He got so invested in the process, and started paying attention to his system, “Your body’s just a computer. It reads stuff you eat in different ways,” he told Men's Health. The ‘Sunshine’ crooner whose real name is Joseph Antonio Cartagena, shared that he now he ensures he’s at his healthiest by regularly keeping track of his blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels.
'So I gotta push forward'
He also talked about losing his wonderful sister, “... And so when I see pictures of my sister, I try to breeze through them. I lost a lot of people, and unfortunately, I can’t sit there and dwell, because I know that’s something that takes me down that path. So I gotta push forward.”
The artist finally managed to come out of that phase after two intense years, “Once you snap out of it, you should know what brings you there and to run the other way,” he said before adding “The minute I feel unhappy, I go toward happy.”