'I had to get whipped, because I didn’t appreciate anything.'
Timbaland is showing off his body transformation!
In the latest issue of Men's Health, the 47-year-old music producer, whose real name is Tim Mosley, poses for pics that display his 130-pound weight loss.
"I had to get whipped, because I didn’t appreciate anything," says Mosley, who's worked with Beyonce, JAY-Z, Drake and more. "All my life I felt it was a little too easy."
Despite his professional success, Mosley's dramatic body change came after he went through a divorce, struggled with addiction to prescription painkillers, and had millions in unpaid taxes to the IRS.
"It put me in a great feeling of not caring, of just being free," he recalls of painkillers, which he was prescribed after a root canal and returned to when an old injury resurfaced. "I’m like traveling, doing shows, popping ’em, having fun, just being ignorant."
The breaking point, though, came when Mosley "had a dream that death was near" in which he saw himself "with a white face." Another factor was his children, Reign, Demetrius and Frankie.
"It’s like a bright light going on in your brain," he says of raising children. "That’s how you know what true love really is."
After that realization, Mosley set out to put his life together again, moving, paying off the IRS, and completing his divorce.
"I had to downsize, get all that superstar stuff out of the way," he says. "The divorce at the beginning was very messy, but now we are good friends."
As for the addiction to painkillers, Mosley decided to work on that by himself. "Just me and God," he says. "This was the path chosen for me. God was rebuilding my character."
It wasn't an easy road to conquer his addiction, though, as Mosley counts withdrawal as "one of the toughest things I’ve been through."
"The only things that got me through it were my kids, my girl, the help of God keeping my mind still," he says of his girlfriend, Michelle Dennis, whom he calls "a great woman."
Next came the gym. Mosley weighed 350 pounds when he began working out and, after starting slow, he was eventually boxing and jumping rope. Though the workouts were hard, Mosley says, they were nothing compared to withdrawal.
"When you get beat up the way I got beat up mentally, this ain’t hard," he insists.
Even with all his hard work and all the improvements to his life, Mosley notes that "God has me under construction, which I’m still under."
"I don’t feel like I’m complete. I don’t want to ever feel like I’m complete, ’cause my mind would probably get idle," he says. "God needed me to be clear so I could see what is needed, not what I want."
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