Eminem Says He 'Replaced Addiction with Exercise' After Ballooning to 230 Lbs.

After overdosing on pills in 2007 and weighing close to 230 lbs., Eminem says he got healthy by replacing “addiction with exercise.”

“When I got out of rehab, I needed to lose weight, but I also needed to figure out a way to function sober,” the rapper tells Men’s Journal in its September issue. “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.”

Continues Eminem: “It’s easy to understand how people replace addiction with exercise. One addiction for another but one that’s good for them.”

However, the musician – who says the coating on the Vicodin and the Valium he’d been taking for years left a hole in his stomach, causing him to eating constantly and badly in order to avoid a stomachache – took his running to the extreme.

“I became a f—ing hamster. Seventeen miles a day on a treadmill,” admits the rapper, who says he ran to the point of injury. “I would get up in the morning, and before I went to the studio, I would run eight and a half miles in about an hour. Then I’d come home and run another eight and a half. I started getting OCD about the calories, making sure I burned 2,000 every day. In the end I got down to about 149 lbs.”

He continues: “I ran to the point where I started to get injured. All the constant pounding from the running began to tear up my hip flexors.”

So the rapper turned to TV – Shaun T, to be exact.

“I know a lot of these DVD guys are wacky, but I’m alone in my gym; I need someone on the TV yelling to motivate me,” says Eminem. “Besides, some of this s— is entertaining.”

“When I first started the Insanity workout, I alternated my routine, running one day and doing the Insanity the other. Then I stopped running altogether because it was too much to do them both. The Insanity won. After a while I mixed it up. I did the P90X for a little while (and I still do that ab workout because it’s the most challenging) Now every morning before I go to the studio, I do the Body Beast workout with free weights, bench, and pullup bar at home. It’s just me, so it helps that the Body Beast dude is over-the-top.”

The rapper says that the first time he did the leg routine, “I couldn’t walk for two days.”

He admits it’s a far cry from the old days when he’d hit the gym with Dr. Dre and had to “lift the kiddie weights.”

“Once you’re at a place where you’ve made progress and you’ve got some time invested in it,” the rapper says, “you don’t wanna quit and give up what you started.”