Fat Joe Details His 200-Pound Weight Loss
In a new interview, Fat Joe reveals that he has lost 200 pounds. He shares that at his highest weight, he tipped the scales at 470 pounds. The "All the Way Up" rapper says that the death of his best friend and fellow Terror Squad member--Big Pun scared him and also sent him into a deep depression.
Big Pun died in 2000 with a weight that, at one point, topped nearly 700 pounds.
“I went to his funeral and I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge. Like, I seen me,” Fat Joe told Men's Health, “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.'
The rapper, whose real name is Joseph Antonio Cartagena, said that he began to reprogram his brain. “Your body’s just a computer,” he said. “It reads stuff you eat in different ways.” He adds that he regularly checks his blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels.
He also shared with the magazine that he also battled depression. Joe explained his mental health at the time using a scene in “The Matrix Resurrections” when Keanu Reeves’ character Neo sits in a bathtub with a rubber duck on his head.
“That’s what depression was like to me,” he said. “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.”
He added, “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."
Joe shared that he has chosen to "push forward" despite losing loved ones and that changing his habits also helped him improve his mental health.
"Once you snap out of it, you should know what brings you there and to run the other way. The minute I feel unhappy, I go toward happy," he said.
Despite the physical change, the BX legend says that he has no intention of changing his iconic stage name, He confirmed that with Page Six in October of last year, saying, “As a business, I spent so many millions and millions of dollars marketing Fat Joe that it wouldn’t be smart to change my name now."
