Fat Joe has revealed Ozempic was responsible for his dramatic 200lbs weight loss.
The All The Way Up star, Fat Joe, 54, who first revealed his shock transformation in July 2023, said a combination of the celebrity-favorite weight loss drug and cutting carbohydrates from his diet enabled him to drop the weight.
Fat Joe told US Weekly: ‘Ozempic says you may only have two pieces of your favorite stuff.’
The star did not reveal how long he had been taking the drug for.
Fat Joe added: ‘We just try to eat everything with the least carbs as possible. So we try to stay away from the bread, the pasta, the rice. That’s the smartest way to eat.
‘Like this morning I ate breakfast, I had this toast. I cut the corner off, ate it and kept it moving. Normally I would’ve ate [sic] the whole thing. But you know, that’s what we do. We cut carbs and try to be smarter.’
Fat Joe also revealed his wife of 29 years Lorena Cartagena misses his bigger frame as she ‘likes me being a big boy.’
Last year the star revealed his weight loss had helped him get his diabetes under control and has given him a whole new outlook on life.
He started his journey to a healthier weight and mindset more than 20 years ago when his friend and fellow rapper Big Pun died of a heart attack in 2000 at age 29, but only really started making big progress with his weight loss journey recently.
‘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,” the Another Round rapper told Men’s Health.
The outlet asked him if he planned on changing his name now that the adjective fat no longer applies to him.
He said he briefly considered changing his stage name to Slim Joe or something similar but in the end opted not to.
‘Although I’ve gotten health conscious on another level, it wouldn’t make sense to change it. Now it’s my brand. It’s what I built,’ he said.
The What’s Luv singer also spoke to the outlet about the depression he’s battled for his entire life, calling his mind, ‘The most complex Rubik’s Cube you could ever, ever, ever, ever try to figure out. And so you battling that every day.’
He continued: ‘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,’ he explained.
And one he figured out how his body processed different types of food, revealing that his parents still cooked with lard and drank whole milk, he also unlocked the key to fighting his depression.
‘Your body’s just a computer. It reads stuff you eat in different ways,’ he said.
And once he got his weight under control, he no longer had to inject insulin as he had been doing since he was diagnosed with diabetes at age 12.
After a period of pretty bad depression, he figured out that, ‘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 explained how a conversation with one of his drivers left him feeling like ‘Slim Joe’ was a disappointment to his bigger fans.
‘Steve is a big boy. And he said, “Man, you always fly, Joe. All the big boys, you gave us confidence and made us think that big was fly. You Fat Joe. Then out of nowhere, you start losing weight.”