14 DAY TRIAL // Eminem doesn’t talk about his personal life that much, but when he does, he makes sure people will pay attention to what he’s saying, by making every interview a compelling one. The rapper is featured in the September 2015 issue of Men’s Journal, in a piece focusing on the intense workouts that helped him kick the drug addiction that nearly cost him his life in 2007.
As he puts it, he’s got an “addict’s brain,” so he replaced the addiction to prescription pills he developed with excessive exercise. But the latter is obviously the preferred kind of “addiction” because it’s healthy.
Eminem and rehab
The Detroit-born rapper has been very open about his struggle with addiction, which caused a serious weight problem and nearly cost him his life. Fame caught him off his guard and he turned to prescription drugs to cope with it, and in a short time, he was taking pills to stay awake, pills to fall asleep and pills to feel “normal” again.
At his heaviest, Em tipped the scales at about 230 pounds (104.3 kg), which is also when he overdosed on pills and had to be rushed to the hospital.
Once out of rehab, he understood he had to do something about his weight but also to cope with the new reality of being sober.
“I needed to figure out a way to function sober,” Em says. “Unless I was blitzed out of my mind, I had trouble sleeping. So I started running. It gave me a natural endorphin high, but it also helped me sleep, so it was perfect. It's easy to understand how people replace addiction with exercise. One addiction for another but one that's good for them. I got an addict's brain, and when it came to running, I think I got a little carried away.”
Intense workouts
When he says he got “carried away,” he’s not exaggerating: he went down to 149 pounds (67.5 kg) and was always counting calories, to make sure he burned 2,000 a day to ensure he maintained his weight loss.
He would run 17 miles (27.3 km) a day in 2 separate sessions, one in the early morning and one at night, and not miss one workout for the world. In a short while, it became too much and he started experiencing injuries from the strenuous exercise.
He is focused on more varied workouts now, mixing exercises to work all muscles without bulking up. He says he’s tried Shaun T’s Insanity workout but it proved too much for him, and swears by the best results with the Body Beast workout.
“I guess I'm pretty compulsive working out,” Eminem says. But he’s OK this way.