WE ALL SET GOALS, especially at this time of year. Some are big, some are small. We achieve some, others we don’t. Usually, success hinges on how badly we want to achieve something. Five years ago, Jelly Roll wanted to achieve one of the most elusive goals: losing weight. Now he’s done it, and everyone is asking the same thing: How?
Online, many have assumed – with an accusatory tone – that Jelly lost the weight with the assistance of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic. While he admits he briefly tried weight-loss meds very early on his journey, he says he stopped after two weeks and changed his method. In his Men’s Health US cover story, he was able to distill that method into a single word: food.
Jelly Roll had been addicted to food for decades. His father ran a wholesale meat company, and Jelly ate constantly. He had a particular weakness for Waffle House, but really, he would eat anything. He was also addicted to alcohol, cocaine and codeine.
He reached his heaviest point in 2020, when he weighed 540 pounds (125kg). That’s what he estimates, anyway. The scale he used to weigh himself was only calibrated up to 520 pounds. “The needle went past 520, but it didn’t blow it down,” he says in his cover story. “So it could have been 560, it could have been 528.”
Jelly Roll went after his food addiction the same we he went after his other addictions. “I started treating my food addiction like what it was: an addiction,” he says. “I went through real hard life-changing emotional choices to get off cocaine and codeine. I didn’t look at the food addiction different. Once I started treating food like an addiction, it started changing everything for me.”
He sought the advice of medical professionals from wellness clinic Ways2Well. This allowed him to do a series of blood tests to assess his health, revealing a number of factors that were contributing to his difficulties in losing weight.
His insulin levels were “super high,” he says. “You’ll see heavy guys struggling for a long time in the early part because they’re not fast enough to strike that insulin down. And it takes so long to do it.”
Insulin levels were one of the first markers targeted by Danese Rexroad, the practitioner who treated him. “When you have an excessive amount of insulin, it forces your body to store fat. So switching those receptors and switching what Jelly’s body was signalling with insulin helped him rapidly adjust his insulin resistance. It was just meal timing and eating real foods,” she says. “She also started him on metformin, a pharmaceutical used primarily to treat type 2 diabetes that she hoped would reduce fat cells in the blood and improve the process of cells dying in the body.
Jelly also had low testosterone. “My testosterone level – and I’m cool to talk about this openly – was of a preteen boy,” he says. Normal levels for a man Jelly’s age start around 300 ng/dL and go up to 900, but obesity is associated with low T levels, 300 ng/dL and lower. “When I went in there for the test, it was bad. Bad. The world opened up when I seen it on paper. I was like, That’s my testosterone level? I mean, dude, we’re talking a 57.”
His cholesterol was high, too. And his A1C, which measures sugar in the blood, was really high. “The first couple of blood panels were like, how are you alive?” he says.
Jelly began hormone therapy. “I’ll be on testosterone replacement therapy probably for the rest of my life,” he says. After that, his levels started to even out. He became more aware of what was happening in his blood and in his organs. “That was a big part of my journey: wanting to know what’s happening within me.”
Jelly believes his previous attempts at losing weight failed because he was trying to do too much all at once and ending up doing nothing. “A lot of dudes get to their bottom dollar, and we’re like, ‘I’m changing! Tomorrow in the morning when I wake up, I’m a different person!’ We attack it all at once. ‘I’m gonna run! I’m gonna lift! I’m gonna eat right. I’m gonna do this and this and this.’ Listen, man, because I’ve done this before: Just pick one of those. And you know which one you need to pick? Food. Start there. Fuck everything else. Just commit yourself to ‘I’m gonna count every calorie and macro that goes in my mouth.’ ”
To get on top of his diet, Jelly hired a private chef and sports nutritionist who prioritised making small progress rather than trying (and likely failing) to move leaps and bounds all at once.
His chef cooks healthy meals with unprocessed ingredients, but makes sure to use flavours he knows Jelly will like. The musician’s favourite Waffle House item is the hash brown bowl, with double hash browns cheese, scrambled eggs, sausage patties, onions, peppers and tomatoes. Almost every morning, Jelly’s chef makes his own rendition, with potatoes cooked in bone broth, so they’re rich in protein and collagen. He makes chicken sausage from scratch and roasts vegetables into a vitamin-rich, sugarless ketchup.
While improving his diet was Jelly Roll’s primary focus, he also made strides to be more active. He frequently does four-mile walks/jogs shortly after waking up. He runs the first mile and a half, walks a half-mile, then alternates two-tenths running, two-tenths walking. “When this journey started, I couldn’t get a full mile in in that 30 minutes,” he says. “Now I could put on a pair of tennis shoes, walk out that door, do a mile loop around Hollywood Boulevard, and be back in 12 minutes and 25 seconds. You feel me?”
He’s been putting in work in the gym, too. While he still mostly wears roomy clothes, muscles are starting to poke through. His biceps are discernible, his deltoids round and firm, and his shoulders are emerging. “These shoulders are mine. Meaning they’re only gonna get bigger. There’s no more fat to lose in them,” he says. “They were gone. I had never seen them.”
Jelly Roll acknowledges that he still has a long way to go, but he has no plans to slow down. As he says, this journey was never about losing weight, it was about getting healthy. Now that he’s healthy, the weight will continue to fall off.
