Jelly Roll is one of the many celebrities who have dropped some serious pounds – and he’s sharing some secrets. After losing 275 pounds, the singer’s weight loss didn’t come from a viral moment or a dramatic “before and after.” It came from sitting with the hardest truth of his life: he was slowly disappearing inside his own body.
At his heaviest, Jelly, whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord, estimates he was anywhere between 528 and 560. The scale he used only went up to 520, and the needle pushed past it. “The needle went past 520, but it didn’t blow it down,” he told Men’s Health. “And I would play with it—I would teeter the foot up, like, how low could I get it? I was mad optimistic.”
© Getty“I was a prisoner to my own body,” he told the outlet. “Dude, wiping my ass was a problem. Washing myself properly was a problem. Getting in cars. Every decision I made in life had to be based on my weight.” “If it could hold me, facilitate me, or fit me—people don’t think about every facet of ‘I still want to be able to do that and I can’t.’ I was so inspired by that kind of stuff,” he continued.
Food was one of his escapes. Growing up around his father’s meat business in Nashville, eating was constant. But food wasn’t just comfort. It was compulsion. And it sat alongside other addictions Jelly has spoken about openly: alcohol, cocaine, codeine, and even the addiction to money.
How he lost the weight
© Shannon Finney“I started treating my food addiction like what it was: an addiction,” he said. He started with therapy. “Even before I got my blood work done, I went and got mental health therapy about my overeating.”
When he started, it was rough. He fasted, lived on chicken noodle soup, and eventually dipped under 500 pounds. When it happened, he took a photo of the scale and sent it anyway, even though it embarrassed him. “I was privately thinking, ‘Dude, f—, I’m sending a grown man a picture of me on the scale at almost 500 pounds.’”
From there, Jelly committed to doing it differently. No shortcuts. No miracle drugs. He made it clear he didn’t want Ozempic or any GLP-1 medications. “When I do this, I don’t want an asterisk next to my name,” he said. “I want to show people that this is possible.”
© GettyWhat he did want was answers. Bloodwork revealed severe insulin issues, hormone imbalances, and metabolic problems that had been working against him for years.
Understanding what was happening inside his body became part of the healing. “That was a big part of my journey: wanting to know what’s happening within me.” Insulin resistance, gut health, and hormone therapy came next. “I’ll be on testosterone replacement therapy probably for the rest of my life,” he said. So did the basics: eating real food, moving consistently, sleeping, and managing stress.
The emotional work ran just as deep. Jelly has never shied away from his past, including selling drugs, gang involvement, and jail time. “I can normally find shame. I can normally find guilt. I can normally find insecurity. I was the biggest, the loudest, the toughest, the meanest, the growliest, the fattest. There’s normally deep inside of that a really, really small, insecure human. I was that, for sure. Then a by-product of that was I got fat as f**k.”
What finally made this attempt different from all the others was restraint, but changing his eating habits was the biggest move. “A lot of dudes get to their bottom dollar, and we’re like, ‘I’m changing! Tomorrow morning when I wake up, I’m a different person!’ We attack it all at once,” he said. “Just pick one of those. And you know which one you need to pick? Food. Start there. F**k everything else. Just commit yourself to ‘I’m gonna count every calorie and macro that goes in my mouth.”
Now, 275 pounds lighter, Jelly Roll is being candid, proving that consistency, accountability, and the courage to sit with yourself long enough to change are the biggest secrets.
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