Busta Rhymes isn’t busting loose anymore.
The hip-hop legend is opening about how he lost 100 pounds within a year.
Weighing in at 254 pounds, the 48-year-old rapper says he initially gained weight following the death of two important men in his life — his father and his friend and longtime manager, Chris Lighty.
“I felt cheated,” Rhymes, whose real name is Trevor Smith Jr., revealed to Men’s Health magazine. “The two people I wanted to see me win were no longer here to see it.”
Due to the devastating losses, the “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” lyricist— known for his muscular physique — let himself go with poor diet habits and ending his workout regimen.
During an incident in 2019 one of his sons discovered him asleep in his car struggling to breathe. Rhymes says it took his son and his security team 20 minutes to wake him and get him inside.
A throat doctor later discovered that there were polyps in his throat, restricting 90 percent of his breathing and he had to have emergency surgery.
“That’s when I knew s—t was serious,” he shared “The doctor told me that if I caught a cold or slept wrong that I could die It felt like this was on me now, and I had to steer things in a different direction. I was too young to be on all of these blood-pressure medications and acid-reflux medications.”
On Monday, the former Elektra Entertainment superstar appeared on “Tamron Hall” to discuss his weight loss journey.
Rhymes said the moment he knew his weight gain had gotten out of control was during a video shoot.
” There’s a scene of me wearing all white with a head wrap,” he revealed. “When I initially put that all white on, it showed how badly out of shape that I was on camera, so we went in the dressing room and they duct taped my stomach down.”
“I think the real moments that were cutting deep was when I started to hear the conversations from my kids,” he confided to Hall. “The younger one, before he graduated from high school, sometimes when I would come out of the bedroom in the morning and I would put my hand out to give him a dap on the way to the bathroom or something, and he would walk past me and instead of slapping me on the hand, he was slapping me on the stomach. He didn’t mean no harm intentionally, but it was becoming annoying to me. It was like him indirectly saying to me, ‘You got to rid of this gut, pop.'”
And do that, he did.
