Jelly Roll Makes Sad Admission About Life Before Weight Loss

His face and arms covered by tattoos, Jelly Roll is an easily recognizable figure. However, the music star's appearance has changed considerably over the years.

In 2020, Jelly Roll tipped the scales at 540 pounds. Over five years later, he's shaved off just over half of that, thanks to a commitment to health and weight loss.

“The battle was with food addiction,” Jelly Roll admitted in a 2025 interview with PEOPLE. “I’ve never had a healthy relationship with food, so that was the hard part…really fighting that demon at first and getting into that discipline and commitment. But once you get into that discipline and commitment, it’s like an avalanche.”

However, in order to get to where he is now, Jelly Roll had to break through the lowest point of his life, he told Men's Health in a new interview.

'Never-ending sadness'

The "Need a Favor" singer, whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord, told Men's Health that at his heaviest, he felt lost physically and mentally.

“It was never-ending sadness,” Jelly Roll said. “And 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—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.”

Turning things around

After making the decision to commit to getting healthy, Jelly Roll hired chef and sports nutritionist Ian Larios in 2021. He also went to work with Ways2Well, a wellness clinic with locations in Austin and Houston.

As he has said before publicly, another critical difference for Jelly Roll was treating his relationship with food as an addiction.

"Even before I got into getting my blood work done, I went and got mental health therapy about my overeating," he said. "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."

So far, so good, and he's now got the magazine cover to prove it.