News, he now sees that sobriety is ultimately a personal choice. “I had what I call a white light experience where I saw myself either dead or losing everything that meant anything to me,” he continued. He had to sit down then-fiancée Meg Ryan and explain what was going alcohol poisoning symptoms and treatment on. A month later, Lovato was hospitalized for a near-fatal overdose. In September 2023, the Cruel Intentions alum shared on Instagram that this was “the longest I’ve gone since I was a teen without some kind of nicotine or marijuana in my system (among other things).”
Eminem Talks Addiction & Rehab
Eminem’s provocative lyrics, littered with homophobic and sexist rhymes and profanity-laden attacks on all manner of public figures, caused a scandal. He transformed this controversy into a platform for his alter ego, Slim Shady, who became one of the great antiheroes of his time. The mainstream media branded him a “public menace” and theorized about the reasons for his excesses. When criticism threatened to slow down his rise to the top, the Detroit rapper turned to allies such as Elton John, the first big, socially acceptable global star to dare to defend and legitimize the Eminem’s lyrics and talent. His success shot to a new level in 2002 when he emerged as a cinematographic rebel without a cause, but with a hoodie, in the semi-autobiographical movie 8 Mile, which earned him an Academy Award for best original song. Eminem has been sober for 13 years, and has been in the rap game for even longer.
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- Now, before he heads to the studio, he does the DVD workout with free weights, a bench and a pull-up bar.
- “For the last eight weeks maybe, I don’t really know…I’m on them all day,” he said on his Armchair Expert podcast.
- “It was like a few pictures of me on a boat and I’m all, like, bloated out, and I call it pills-and-booze face….My face was just like 10 times more than it is now. And I just didn’t like myself very much, so then I made a change.”
- Singles including Without Me, The Real Slim Shady and Just Lose It featured the character and became major commercial hits.
- But now the 149-pound musician can finally do the videos without pausing.
Eminem asked, “Didn’t you ask the doctors when I started recording new shit, when I first started rapping again, and sent it to you, didn’t you say, ‘I just wanted to make sure he didn’t have brain damage? ‘” The podcast host confirmed that he was in fact concerned during the recovery process that there might be some “permanent problems” with his health. “My addiction didn’t start in my early days when I was coming up. We used to drink 40s (forty-ounces of liquor) on the porch and just battle rap each other,” the 49-year-old star recalled of creating The Slim Shady LP. “When I got out of rehab, I needed to lose weight, but I also needed to figure out a way to function sober. Unless I was blitzed out of my mind, I had trouble sleeping. So I started running,” he told Men’s Journal. “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.”
Eminem celebrates 12 years of sobriety: ‘I’m not afraid’
As well as exercise, Eminem has previously claimed that his friendship with Elton John was important in the process of overcoming the rapper’s drug addiction. After his near-fatal methadone overdose, Eminem rang up John, who had himself attended rehab in 1990. “My addiction didn’t start in my early days when I was coming up,” he explained in a personal essay for XXL in September 2022.
“I didn’t care as much about hurting myself as I did about hurting her. So, initially it was easier for me to say, ‘I’m doing this for her.’ And now, I’m doing it for myself.” After an incident in Newport Beach where the Olympic swimmer tried to kick in his own hotel room door, Lochte made the decision to seek treatment in 2018. “Ryan has been battling from alcohol addiction for many years and unfortunately it has become a destructive pattern for him,” his rep told E!
Moore, who sought treatment in 2012, thanked two unnamed people she “barely knew” for delivering something of an ultimatum to her to turn her life around. “Unless I was dead, I better show up,” she quipped, adding that she was given “a chance to redirect the course of my life before I destroyed everything.” While accepting the 2018 Woman of the Year Award by the Peggy Albrecht Friendly House, a residential program for women recovering from substance and alcohol abuse, Moore spoke about the “self-destructive path” that nearly derailed her career. “My personal experience with it is that everything is better,” she continued. “And it just felt so extreme to have to say, ‘But none?’ But none. If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it.” “I walk around and I see aspects of it that I’ve never seen before. I’ll look at a building and I’ll go, ‘My God, I never noticed that about that building, those doors.’ I have lunches and coffee and my friends.”
“My personal feeling is that we cannot allow the speed of crime to move faster than the speed of government. We have to be agile.” But on recent LPs – Kamikaze (2018) and Music to Be Murdered By (2020), each of them surprise-released – he has played again with the more provocative side of his artistry. He caused controversy with the Music to Be Murdered By track Unaccommodating by – very Slim Shady-ishly – comparing himself to the terrorist who bombed an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017, killing 22. Eminem, who now prefers exercise DVDs, said that his hobby quickly went from helpful to harmful.
““It took a long time for my brain to start working again,” Em said of his accidental overdose on methadone. Eminem’s rise to stardom, back in 1999, made him a scourge of the syrupy late-nineties pop scene. But he also managed to alter stereotypes about the criminality of the rap genre in the eyes of the general public. He dominated the portable CD players of turn-of-the-century youth, who emulated his style by dying their hair blonde and donning tank tops and oversized pants. “If I had been black, I wouldn’t have sold even half of it,” he acknowledged in one of his songs. Though he has gone through more trying times than most people should ever have to, he has certainly come out on top and is now considered not only an icon of hip-hop but one of the true legendary cultural influences of the century.
“I mean, there’s probably enough to make another Relapse 2,” Eminem said. “There are a lot of songs still that did not leak out from Relapse.” Mathers began how addictive are gabapentin and pregabalin? a systematic review mixing in other workout DVDs too, including the P90X, which he still uses for abs, and the Body Beast, which he does every day instead of running.
In 2018, the Halloween star got very candid about her 10-year addiction to opiates, which began in the late ’80s after a minor plastic surgery “for my hereditary puffy eyes.” The reslt was a prescription that changed her life. “I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same how to tell if someone is on drugs time,” Perry said in a 2022 profile in The New York Times, marking 18 months of sobriety. The Princess Diaries alum shared in April 2024 that she is more than five years sober. As she told the New York Times, “That feels like a milestone to me.” Eminem isn’t the only star to open up about their addiction and sobriety.
“It was like a few pictures of me on a boat and I’m all, like, bloated out, and I call it pills-and-booze face….My face was just like 10 times more than it is now. And I just didn’t like myself very much, so then I made a change.” The now-51-year-old admitted he was able to downplay his addiction until it had gotten out of control, like when he was unable to answer questions during interviews. And it only got worse after friend and fellow rapper Proof died in 2006. In the piece penned for XXL, Em discusses the way that “everything changed” after he signed with Interscope and released his second studio album, 1999’s ‘The Slim Shady LP’.
When he first started the at-home routines, Eminem said he couldn’t move for two days. But now the 149-pound musician can finally do the videos without pausing. In an appearance on the new episode of Paul Rosenberg’s Paul Pod podcast Thursday, Eminem, 49, and Rosenberg, his longtime manager, recalled the rapper’s recovery from the overdose, which the pair agreed he almost did not survive. Eminem’s near-fatal drug overdose in 2007 was a wake-up call that not only inspired him to get sober, but pushed him to have “fun with music again” for the first time in years. I just remember liking it more and more,” Eminem says of his addiction to prescription medications in a clip from the documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs. Having brushed aside accusations that he had a drug problem on the grounds that he wasn’t shooting heroin or smoking crack, the rapper fell dangerously deep into a substance habit that included Vicodin, Valium, and Xanax.
“Feeling thankful for the freedom that comes with breaking addictions and dependency on substance,” he added. “Sobriety, clarity, and spiritual connectedness feels real good.” Crediting Arnett as “the reason” he went sober, Cooper added, “He took that risk of having a hard conversation with me that put me on a path of deciding to change my life.” She added, “It’s so funny. When we reveal ourselves and our truths and the things we’ve worked so hard for, it’s so liberating and vulnerable all at the same time.” She eventually sought help and noted that “it took some time to get on my own two feet.” “I don’t discuss this a lot,” he said during a May 2024 podcast appearance.