Jelly Roll is revealing he suffered a setback in his weight loss journey shortly after gracing the cover of Men’s Health in 2025.
“This is where the game gets a little ugly,” Jelly Roll, 41, said in a YouTube video on Friday, April 17. “We hit the goal and it was right before the holidays. So, I was like, ‘You know what, man? I’ve been working hard for the last three years losing this weight.’ I said, ‘I’m going to enjoy the holidays.’”
Jelly Roll (real name is Jason DeFord) explained that he enjoyed indulging in Thanksgiving, Christmas and birthday-related meals, admitting that he “kind of got off the rails.” Days before celebrating Christmas, Jelly Roll broke his collarbone.
“That set me down where I had to quit running, quit walking, quit exercising for some extended period of time,” he said. “I said all that to say that I have, to some degree, lost my way.”
Jelly Roll noted that being on the cover of Men’s Health was not his final goal, adding that he’s more than 40 pounds above what he’d like to be.
“I haven’t weighed in,” he admitted. “I’ve been avoiding the scale. I’m afraid to see what the scale is going to say, from what my actual goal is.”
Jelly Roll shared that he has a new a goal of running the 2026 New York marathon in November and landing a cover of a magazine shirtless.
“I want to get these last 40 or 50 pounds off and then I eventually want to cut my skin and I eventually want to be on the cover of something crazy like GQ or Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair or Forbes or Time with my shirt off,” he said. “I know this is getting real silly now, but I don’t know. I just believe there’s this story that a guy can go from 560 pounds to a shirt off picture. It’s absurd.”
In another clip, Jelly Roll was seen weighing himself, adding that he was “scared.” He then showed a close-up of the scale, which revealed he weighed 276.2 pounds on April 10.
“So we’re up 12 pounds,” he said.
Jelly Roll, who had been candid about his weight through the years, began taking his weight loss journey seriously in 2022.
“I’m going to spend the first couple months of the year just focusing on family and health,” he told Music Mayhem in December 2022. “I lost some weight this year in 2022, but in 2023 I wanna finally conquer the demon. I don’t leave for a big tour until about the middle of the year. So I plan on taking the first half of the year to tighten the album up and get some work in.”
More than three years later, Jelly Roll has lost more than 275 pounds.
