Hip-Hop heavyweight Fat Joe is talking about his 200-pound weight loss, while also opening up about his battle with depression, and how he “pushed forward” to become healthy following Big Pun‘s death.
The 52-year-old Bronx rapper, born Joseph Antonio Cartagena, recently spoke with Men’s Health about how he arrived to a turning point with his mental and physical health. He revealed that when he was at his heaviest, about 470 pounds, he had to sit himself down and give himself a pep talk.
The realization came after back-to-back losses, including the unexpected death of his best friend and fellow rap legend Big Punisher. On February 7, 2000, Big Pun, born Christopher Rios, died at age 28 after suffering a massive heart attack and respiratory failure. At the time of his death, he was said to have weighed 698 pounds.
In addition to Pun’s death, Joe would lose six more friends to heart attacks, plus deal with the loss of his grandfather, and his sister, who fell into a coma after receiving a dose of epidural while giving birth in 2000. Joe would fall into a period of depression that caused him to drink in excess and quickly gain weight.
Things began to take a toll and going to work was even hard to do. Joe said that doing interviews at the time only worsened his depression.
He explained, “Imagine me and Big Pun all over TV. We’re together. We’re best friends. Making hit records together. He dies, and everybody in the world keeps coming up to me: ‘Sorry for your loss.’ They’re not knowing that they’re triggering the depression every single time. There was no way to go in the world. 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.”
Joe 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.”
Joe recalled a specific moment in time, which was how he felt when he went to Pun’s funeral. He said, “I went to his funeral and I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge. Like, I seen me. 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.'”
Two years after all of these traumatic moments, Joe had his gradual revelation and would begin to take his health more seriously, and begin swapping his bad habits for the good ones, kickstarting his weight loss. He said, “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.”
In 2002, during Joe’s first attempt to get fit, he focused on going to the gym and making dietary changes. But when that didn’t work, the rapper soon learned, “Your body’s just a computer. It reads stuff you eat in different ways.”
By 2011, Joe, who was diagnosed with diabetes around age 12, was beginning to celebrate his physical transformation, and no longer needed to take insulin. For over a decade, Joe’s been able to keep his weight off, which hasn’t been easy. But, he made all the lifestyle changes like keeping a healthy mindset, exercising, eating right, and checking his blood pressure, cholesterol and blood-sugar levels routinely.
Since weighing his heaviest at around 470 pounds, Joe has lost about 215 pounds over the last 15 years of his weight loss journey.
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