Jelly Roll has been on a weight loss journey for a few years now, and he’s still going strong! The “NEED A FAVOR” singer recently revealed that he is down 300 pounds during a new episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Jelly Roll told podcast host Joe Rogan that he feels “really, really good,” essentially like “a whole different human.”
Jelly Roll, whose real name is Jason DeFord, turned 41 earlier this month and told Rogan he began seriously considering his health change when he was 39 and realized he would soon be turning 40. “I thought about it around my birthday because I knew my next one was 40,” he said. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a 500 pound 40-year-old.’”
“It felt like I’d already cheated the game. I’d had multiple heart issues,” Jelly Roll revealed. “I was like, ‘Man, I should really start trying to figure this out.’”
When he began his journey, the Nashville native says he started small, setting a goal of using a cold plunge and walking 10,000 steps per day. When the morning of his first planned walk came, it was raining, but Jelly Roll shared that he wanted to push through and prove to himself that he could follow through on the promise he’d made to himself.
“I was like, ‘Man, that rain’s pretty hard,’” he recalled, adding that his family saw the weather and offered him alternatives, which Jelly Roll explained was because of “me lying to them for so many years that they wanted to save me my shame again and my embarrassment.”
“My wife [Bunnie XO]’s like, ‘It’s okay, Papa.’ Or my daughter was like, ‘Just wait until the rain quits or do it on the treadmill or something.’ But in my mind I was like, ‘No, I’m going outside.’ And I was like, ‘I’m done lying to y’all, and I’m done lying to me. I told y’all I was going to go do this walk, and I’m going to do this walk.’”
He ultimately did go on that walk, and when he returned home, he found his family outside waiting for him. “I’m coming up the driveway to the hill and all my family’s out there cheering me on, clapping, hands up,” he said through tears. “I’ve done nothing but lied to them for years about this weight. I had done nothing. I had never proved to them that I was going to change, that I’d be a man of my word in any regard. They had every reason not to go out there and cheer me on. And that was a big moment.”
Jelly Roll explained that that was when he realized how much his food addiction and his weight had affected those closest to him. “I married the kind of woman that makes you smile when you’re crying,” he said of his wife, Bunnie XO. “And I couldn’t even get aroused. I was so big.”
The 41-year-old Tennessee native is also dad to a daughter and a son, and he shared that at that point in time, he couldn’t throw a football with his son, so his brother would do it for him. “I was too big to throw the football,” he remembered. “And I was like, that’s what my addiction has done to these people. And here they are cheering for me. Oh dude, we’re turning up. We’re going to figure this out.”
