Busta Rhymes has long been viewed as one of hip-hop’s most exuberant and active artists, so the news he almost died due to unhealthy habits may come as a surprise to those who remember his as the vivacious ball of cartoonish energy who made hits like “Woo-Hah!!” and “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See.” In a recent interview with Van Jones for the latter’s YouTube show The Messy Truth, Busta revealed just how bad things got and what pulled him out of his health slump, inspiring him to get more fit.

“I’m in the car and I go to sleep, and I’m snoring crazy,” he recounts. “And it gets to this point where I’m trying to inhale, and not I’m able to inhale. My son got so scared that he spoke to the security about this fear that he had. My son was so scared of how he was gonna hurt my feelings by having this conversation with me directly that he had to tell someone else to tell me. That sh*t f*cked me up — I just felt like I was letting my son down, I felt like I was letting a lot of people down.”

Busta reveals that he’d developed polyps (abnormal tissue growths) in his throat and was up to 340 pounds. His doctor told him, “‘Your polyps grew so big that it blocked 90 percent of your breathing passage and if I send you home tonight and you sleep under the AC and catch a cold and that last 10 percent of breathing of your breathing passage gets blocked up…you are going to die tonight.’” The revelation prompted Busta to change his ways and from some of his recent Instagram posts (and the rejuvenated rapping on his new album Extinction Level Event 2, it looks like it’s paid off.

Watch Busta’s full interview with Van Jones above.