![\"jelly](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-017-69456693c23b2.jpg\" "\\"jelly")
<\/p>\nJELLY ROLL FISTS a handful of loose skin beneath his black compression shirt and moves it from his hip over toward his belly, pulling it out of the way. He takes my left hand and wedges it in there, planting it on his iliac crest, the top of the hip bone. I can feel the bone\u2019s definition. He reaches down between my legs and claws the inside of my left thigh with his huge hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will 1,000 percent not hurt you\u2014especially if you keep that neck stiff when you land so you don\u2019t bang your head,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
His tone is relaxed but also a little intense, like a dad coaching his kid to go off the diving board for the first time. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou ready?\u201d<\/p>\n
Oh, yeah, definitely, I tell him, trying to sound extremely cool with the fact that he is about to body-slam me. To be fair, I volunteered to be body-slammed. I\u2019m here to write about both body and soul, and a body slam seems like a good way to place my trust in both\u2014in the newfound strength and power of his emerging physique, and in the goodness of his heart, which has always been there but which receded for more than a decade behind a tonnage of cocaine, prison time, self-hatred, and fat. <\/p>\n
When you\u2019re getting body-slammed, putting your hand on the body slammer\u2019s hip bone is important, because in the choreographed mechanics of professional wrestling, you assist the body slammer by pushing off his hip bone as he\u2019s heaving you up over his head, making it easier for him to get you up in the air before dropping you. The hip bone move is a little trick that happens quickly and sneakily\u2014you can also push off from the guy\u2019s quad, but the hip is better because you can really press on it, almost like pushing off the ground for a handspring. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
AB+DM<\/p>\n
Jelly loves wrestling and MMA, and he\u2019s friends with a lot of those guys. He even joined the massive WWE event SummerSlam 2025 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, teaming with Randy \u201cThe Viper\u201d Orton to fight Drew McIntyre and the prolific YouTuber Logan Paul. (Paul body-slammed him into an announcer\u2019s table.) He\u2019s delivered body slams before, but now it\u2019s different. More fun, because his body can move better and he just overall feels better. He demonstrates for me a few times the best way to land, with that neck stiff so your head doesn\u2019t pound the mat. He plops down into an athletic sitting position and practices falling back while not letting his head drop. He\u2019s talking the whole time, and not wheezing, and when he\u2019s done, he bounces back up onto his feet.<\/p>\n
The body slam itself? I weigh 160\u2014sometimes the heaviest weight I lift all day is this laptop\u2014and for him, it seemed as easy as body-slamming a paper clip. The landing was easy. My neck was a little sore for an hour, that\u2019s it. <\/p>\n
When I first met him, in February 2025, he was 380 pounds, down 160 pounds from his heaviest, in 2020. He hadn\u2019t seen or felt the definition of his hip bones in years. Now it\u2019s November. He\u2019s 265\u2014and hopping around the ring looking spry. <\/p>\n
Jelly Roll became famous as a country singer, and not just a country singer, but a big, fat country singer with face tattoos, and not just famous but quickly, monumentally famous. He won the Country Music Award for New Artist of the Year in 2023, when he was already 39 years old (and weighed more than 500 pounds); he has been nominated for three Grammys this year, including Best Country Album for Beautifully Broken.<\/a> Five and a half million people follow him on Instagram<\/a> and 21 million people listen to him on Spotify,<\/a> and he has toured the United States, Europe, and Australia\u2014this year. <\/p>\n Now, deep into his \u201cjourney,\u201d it\u2019s clear that this journey might end up being the most famous thing he will ever do. <\/p>\n We all set goals, big ones and small ones, and we work toward them, we fail, we try again, we fail again, we give up, we feel bad about ourselves. But sometimes we achieve our goals, and success always, always comes down to how badly we want it. Jelly Roll? He was trying to achieve one of the hardest goals of all: He was trying to lose weight. <\/p>\n Now that he\u2019s done it, the question he\u2019s getting asked a lot is: How? <\/p>\n A lot of spectators and self-appointed commentators\u2014some openly, on social media, and sometimes in a weirdly accusatory way\u2014assume he used GLP-1 medication. While he has nothing against those drugs, he did not. [Editor’s note: After MH went to press, Jelly clarified that he did briefly try weight-loss meds very early on his journey, but stopped after two weeks.] We talked for several hours at intervals over the course of this year about how he was doing it, and how he did it. Toward the end of our last conversation, he distilled his method, his focus, into one word:<\/p>\n \u201cFood, food, food, food, food.\u201d But of course, that\u2019s only part of the story.<\/p>\n It\u2019s instructive to know a little about the person he was before he set the goal. Jelly\u2019s father ran a meat company, turning a one-truck beef operation into a wholesale business offering beef, pork, and poultry in Antioch in Nashville. Jelly had been addicted to food for as long as he could remember. He ate constantly, very often at Waffle House, but really, he ate anything. He was also addicted to alcohol, cocaine, and codeine. He also had an early addiction to money, which became an addiction to feeling important.<\/p>\n AB+DM<\/p>\n \u201cAround eighth grade, I discovered that there was lots of ways to make money,\u201d he says. He\u2019s sitting in a lounge chair in the basement of his big new house near Nashville, with rolling lawns and a pasture for his two bulls and two donkeys. \u201cIt started with buying candy from the dollar store near my school. Then I\u2019d go sell it at lunch. Then I end up getting a pager and getting some homies. The next thing you know, people see potential in you and they start feeding another direction. Kids start smoking weed around the eighth grade. I happened to be able to find some of it.\u201d Eighth grade was also around the time his parents divorced. <\/p>\n He sold drugs, and he got in deep: The next decade of his life was a mess of drug deals and jail time and gangs. He shakes his head and says, \u201cTotally took a different path. Thought I was something I wasn\u2019t. And I was not that person, man. I am not that man. But if you\u2019d asked me then, I\u2019d have died proving it to you. I\u2019d let you kill me to prove to you I was tough.\u201d<\/p>\n Five-forty. That was his highest weight, where he was about five years ago. More than a quarter-ton. That\u2019s what he estimates, anyway. The scale he used to weigh himself when he started was only calibrated up to 520 pounds, and that needle was pinned to the right. \u201cThe needle went past 520, but it didn\u2019t blow it down,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I would play with it\u2014I would teeter the foot up, like, how low could I get it? I was mad optimistic. So it could have been 560, it could have been 528.\u201d<\/p>\n AB+DM<\/p>\n His first step was mental. Before anything, he found a therapist he liked. He went after the addiction in ways similar to how he had stopped using cocaine and alcohol. \u201cEven before I got into getting my blood work done, I went and got mental health therapy about my overeating. I started treating my food addiction like what it was: an addiction. Why did I treat cocaine a certain way? I went to meetings for cocaine and found a sponsor and detoxed off of it and shit myself and went through real hard life-changing emotional choices to get off cocaine and codeine,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t look at the food addiction different. Once I started treating food like an addiction, it started changing everything for me. When I started really looking at the source of why I was eating. What was I eating for?\u201d<\/p>\n He made perhaps his most important discovery about his goal before he ever changed anything about his diet: His goal was not, in fact, to lose weight, but to get healthy. If he was healthier, he would lose weight. In 2021, to start getting healthy, he first worked with Gary Brecka, the influential podcast host, biologist, and founder of The Ultimate Human<\/a>, a health and weight-loss \u201cmovement\u201d that counts Joe Rogan and Dana White among its followers. Before his first meeting with Brecka, Jelly tried to get below 500 pounds. <\/p>\n AB+DM<\/p>\n \u201cI was so fat that I took that weekend and I fasted and just ate a couple of chicken noodle soups. When I came in under 500, I was like, \u2018I\u2019m finally under 500 pounds!\u2019 But I was privately thinking, Dude, fuck, I\u2019m sending a grown man a picture of me on the scale at almost 500 pounds.\u201d Jelly captioned the photo: \u201cI guess we\u2019ve gotta start somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Brecka became his advisor in the early weeks, but Jelly knew he wanted to work with a medical team, too, and he found his at Ways2Well<\/a>, a wellness clinic with locations in Austin and Houston. He told the company\u2019s founder, an entrepreneur and former pharmaceutical rep named Brigham Buhler, that he didn\u2019t want to use Ozempic or any other GLP-1. \u201cHe said, \u2018When I do this, I don\u2019t want an asterisk next to my name, bubba,\u2019\u200a\u201d Buhler says. \u201cI want to show people that this is possible.\u201d <\/p>\n A blood panel revealed several factors that, if left undetected and uncorrected, would have made Jelly\u2019s journey a lot longer. (A sidenote is that when Jelly says Ways2Well in his thick and charming Tennessee drawl, it sounds like Ways2Whale.)<\/p>\n First, his insulin levels were \u201csuper high,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019ll see heavy guys struggling for a long time in the early part because they\u2019re not fast enough to strike that insulin down. And it takes so long to do it.\u201d It was one of the first markers targeted by Danese Rexroad, the nurse practitioner who treated him at Ways2Well. <\/p>\n \u201cInsulin is designed to help glucose enter the cell,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you have an excessive amount of insulin, it forces your body to store fat. So switching those receptors and switching what Jelly\u2019s body was signaling with insulin helped him rapidly adjust his insulin resistance. I wasn\u2019t doing a big science experiment. It was just meal timing and eating real foods.\u201d She also started him on metformin, a pharmaceutical used primarily to treat type 2 diabetes that Rexroad hoped would reduce his triglycerides (fat cells in the blood) and improve apoptosis (the process of cells dying in the body). <\/p>\n AB+DM<\/p>\n \u201cMy testosterone level\u2014and I\u2019m cool to talk about this openly\u2014was of a preteen boy,\u201d Jelly says. Normal levels for a man Jelly\u2019s age start around 300 ng\/dL and go up to 900, but obesity is associated with low T levels, 300 ng\/dL and lower. \u201cWhen 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\u2019s my testosterone level? I mean, dude, we\u2019re talking a 57.\u201d <\/p>\n He\u2019s been married to his wife, a blonde bombshell named Bunnie Xo, since 2016, and weighing 500 pounds with low testosterone was a form of torture. \u201cYou can\u2019t get it up without T,\u201d he says. \u201cI was married to a smoke show, and I was still struggling.\u201d<\/p>\n His cholesterol was high. His A1C, which measures sugar in the blood, was way high. \u201cThe first couple of blood panels were like, how are you alive?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Jelly Roll rapping at the Hard Rock Cafe in Nashville in 2011, when he was 26 years old.<\/p>\n Jelly Roll performing at Tootsie\u2019s Orchid Lounge in Nashville in 2021, when he weighed more than 500 pounds.<\/p>\n Ways2Well is run on a promise to correct root causes rather than simply medicate symptoms. Ninety percent of the business, Buhler says, is doing blood panels and turning unhealthy results healthy using widely accepted approaches like eating whole foods rich in the nutrients a patient is lacking. They don\u2019t accept insurance, which Buhler says makes the company more accountable to its clients: \u201cWe don\u2019t just bill an insurance company every month and coast while the patient is chronically ill. When somebody\u2019s using their cash and they don\u2019t get results, they\u2019re going to fire us fast. And they should.\u201d<\/p>\n Buhler gives an example of the difference between doctors who simply prescribe drugs to mask symptoms and those who correct underlying problems so the symptoms go away:<\/p>\n \u201cIf you have high blood pressure, you\u2019re going to be given high blood pressure medication, right?\u201d he says. \u201cWhy is your blood pressure high? That\u2019s your body giving clues that something\u2019s wrong. You have to peel back the layers and figure out what\u2019s causing it. In Jelly\u2019s case, why would his body send signals that his insulin needed to be so high? He wasn\u2019t absorbing nutrients because his gut health wasn\u2019t ideal. So we start with the basics, and it sounds simple, but: eating well, moving, sleeping, managing your stress. All of that is curative, but it\u2019s really the foundation of health.\u201d AB+DM<\/p>\n A team was taking shape. Jelly began hormone therapy (\u201cI\u2019ll be on testosterone replacement therapy probably for the rest of my life\u201d), and his levels were starting to even out. He was becoming aware of what was happening in his blood and in his organs. \u201cThat was a big part of my journey: wanting to know what\u2019s happening within me.\u201d<\/p>\n Men’s Health’s video team followed Jelly Roll for a year, interviewing him in Los Angeles, Nashville, and Australia. You can watch the full documentary, A Year For a Life, here.<\/a><\/p>\n People blame obese people for being obese. The truth, according to Jelly Roll, is that no one loads more blame on an obese person than the obese person. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was never-ending sadness,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd anger. I was a prisoner to my own body. 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\u2014people don\u2019t think about every facet of \u2018I still want to be able to do that and I can\u2019t.\u2019 I was so inspired by that kind of stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n It was only part of why he hated the person he had become by his early 20s. \u201cI felt guilty about every decision I made in my teenage years, and that my default was to double down on them because I would have been embarrassed to back out of them,\u201d he says. \u201cThe ego of a young man had me wanting to be a thug so bad, had me wanting to be connected with the street so bad. Had me wanting to be something I wasn\u2019t. It took 12, 15 years of being in and out of the system and going through shit and dealing with drugs and drug addicts to realize, man, that was never actually who I was.\u201d<\/p>\n AB+DM<\/p>\n Before all that, when he was a hefty 10-year-old who liked to play football and baseball (all the other boys on the middle school football team were Black, and all the other boys on the baseball team were Hispanic; \u201cIt\u2019s how I am who I am. I thank God I grew up that way\u201d), he saw a dead body for the first time. A boy his age drowned in an accident. Jelly went to the funeral and saw the boy and touched his face. One of the new teachers at the middle school was standing outside, and to Jelly it looked like she didn\u2019t want to go in. He encouraged her to go, and he went with her.<\/p>\n \u201cEven that little boy was a lot more cheerful, a lot more joyful, a lot more happy to be around than the obese person I became, who was in and out of the system,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t know how I turned into that person later.\u201d<\/p>\n About the face tattoos: the cross under his right eye, the teardrops, the music man across his hairline. People chastise him online about them, accusing him of wanting attention. He laughs at this. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the polar opposite,\u201d he says. \u201cThe way shame sometimes shows itself is not always the way we expect it to be. We think shame is somebody in the streets on their knees, with their head down. But shame sometimes is pride. Sometimes shame is just bravado. Behind real bravado, 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\u2019s 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 fuck.\u201d<\/p>\n He may remove the face tattoos. Part of the journey.<\/p>\n His previous false starts at losing weight\u2014and there were many\u2014were false, he believes, because he swore he would do too much at once, and he ended up doing nothing at all. \u201cA lot of dudes get to their bottom dollar, and we\u2019re like, \u2018I\u2019m changing! Tomorrow in the morning when I wake up, I\u2019m a different person!\u2019 We attack it all at once. \u2018I\u2019m gonna run! I\u2019m gonna lift! I\u2019m gonna eat right. I\u2019m gonna do this and this and this.\u2019 Listen, man, because I\u2019ve 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 \u2018I\u2019m gonna count every calorie and macro that goes in my mouth.\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n In 2021, Jelly hired a chef and sports nutritionist named Ian Larios.<\/a> He\u2019s an MMA fan and ended up working with some MMA champions, which is how Jelly found him. <\/p>\n Larios didn\u2019t want to watch his new client lose, gain, lose again, then gain again, but that\u2019s how things started. At one point, Larios had to tell Jelly he might drop him because it wasn\u2019t working. \u201cJelly works in a high-pressure environment, touring all the time, and food was his addiction. It brought him comfort. And it\u2019s tough to kick. It wasn\u2019t an overnight thing where he woke up one morning and was fully motivated. It took lots of stumbles, and we still have some,\u201d Larios says.<\/p>\n He worked with Rexroad at Ways2Well to treat the whole Jelly Roll. \u201cWe set small goals and we met every few months,\u201d she says. \u201cI told him, \u2018We\u2019re going to try to aim for lower insulin, better cholesterol, better sleep. These are the goals that we\u2019re going to hit. It doesn\u2019t mean that in three months you\u2019re going to feel amazing and everything is correct.\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n Larios moved into Jelly\u2019s house and cooks for him most days. He\u2019s had a custom mobile kitchen constructed for tours. Using unprocessed ingredients, he developed meals he knew Jelly would like and that would lower inflammation and give his body the nutrients in which it was deficient, like magnesium. Jelly\u2019s favorite Waffle House item is the hash brown bowl: \u201cdouble hash browns,\u201d American cheese, scrambled eggs, sausage patties, and onions, peppers, and tomatoes. Almost every morning, Larios makes his own rendition: He cooks potatoes in bone broth and air-fries them, so they\u2019re rich in protein and collagen. He makes chicken sausage from scratch and roasts vegetables into a vitamin-rich, sugarless ketchup. <\/p>\n \u201cThere is no bad food in our plan, but if you eat too much of any food, it could be bad,\u201d Larios says. \u201cYou can overconsume good calories, too. So it was just creating thought patterns for him where it\u2019s like, \u2018Let\u2019s create good habits with good food and go from there and move our bodies.\u2019 That was step one.\u201d <\/p>\n![\"bright](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/mh-jelllyroll-yellowbreaker-69446ae0874e3.png\" "\\"bright")
<\/p>\n![\"jelly](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-013-6945673023096.jpg\" "\\"jelly")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n![\"boxing](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-002-69456786586be.jpg\" "\\"boxing")
<\/p>\n![\"boxers](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-003-694567ad14c0b.jpg\" "\\"boxers")
<\/p>\n![\"quote](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/mh-jellyroll-pq01b-6957c2fdefa5c.png\" "\\"quote")
<\/p>\n![\"jelly](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-011-6945682d3a832.jpg\" "\\"jelly")
<\/p>\n![\"nashville,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-018-694568acc39fb.jpg\" "\\"Nashville")
Ed Rode<\/p>\n![\"nashville,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-019-694568c84bcdf.jpg\" "\\"Tootsie's")
Mickey Bernal<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n![\"jelly](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-016-6945690f84046.jpg\" "\\"jelly")
<\/p>\n![\"loading](\"https:\/\/www.menshealth.com\/_assets\/design-tokens\/fre\/static\/icons\/buffering.046027b.svg\")
![\"person](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1767999796_523_thumb_3840x2160.0000001.jpg\" "\\"The")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n![\"jelly](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-005-1-694569b9b4919.jpg\" "\\"jelly")
<\/p>\n![\"text](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/mh-jellyroll-pq03-694571b012b03.png\" "\\"text")
<\/p>\n
![\"person](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126feajellyroll-006-69457218e12ab.jpg\" "\\"person")
<\/p>\n![\"mens](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/hlh010126cvrwinter-social-01-69446b2c044c3.jpg\" "\\"mens")
<\/p>\n![\"Headshot](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/d483fe98-f319-461c-9345-48e8bea1d6f2_1526037810.jpg\" "\\"Headshot")
<\/p>\n