Last we heard from Eminem, he was doing what he does best: eviscerating pop cultural figures ranging from Donald Trump to Bill Cosby in an epic, six-minute freestyle.
These days, we take it for granted that Slim Shady will be around pissing people off and stirring up controversy for several decades to come, but the future wasn’t always so certain for the 42-year-old rapper.
In the new issue of Men’s Health magazine, Em opens up about his weight struggles and the drug addiction that nearly cost him his life.
"In 2007, I overdosed on pills, and I went into the hospital," says the emcee born Marshall Mathers.
"I was close to 230 pounds. I’m not sure how I got so big, but I have ideas. The coating on the Vicodin and the Valium I’d been taking for years leaves a hole in your stomach, so to avoid a stomachache, I was constantly eating — and eating badly."
After nearly dying from the overdose, Em says he focused on his daughter and sobered up…and proceeded to go way overboard in his efforts to lose weight:
"I think I got a little carried away. I became a f–king hamster. Seventeen miles a day on a treadmill….I started getting OCD about the calories, making sure I burned 2,000 every day.
"In the end I got down to about 149 pounds. I ran to the point where I started to get injured. All the constant pounding from the running began to tear up my hip flexors."
Wow, we never knew Em was such an intense dude. Just kidding, he’s basically a throbbing forehead vein come to life.
Anyway, he says he’s now found a healthy balance and learned to cool it on the obsessive running in favor of weight training and workout programs like P90X.
We couldn’t be happier to hear it.
We know Eminem idolizes Tupac and a number of other rappers who checked out before their time, but unlike so many hip hop icons before him, it looks Shady will be around to cash in on his own greatest hits albums.
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