Jelly Roll has long been candid about his struggles with his weight—but now the country star is laying it all bare.
Appearing on the cover of the January/February 2026 issue of Men’s Health, the Grammy-nominated singer shared he has now lost a whopping 275 pounds—thanks to healing his relationship with food. “Once I started treating food like an addiction, it started changing everything for me,” he said. “When I started really looking at the source of why I was eating. What was I eating for?”
While Jelly Roll’s primary goal was to get healthy, losing weight was a natural byproduct. The 41-year-old had tried losing weight before, but his weight loss journey was anything but linear.
In an August 2018 Instagram post, he revealed he lost 200 pounds in under two years, but had gained 60 of them back. “TODAY is the day I start over,” the singer wrote. “I want to LIVE a normal life and have a normal relationship with food.”
Several years later, in January 2024, Jelly Roll announced that he was training to run his first 5K race. That April, he told People he had lost another 70 pounds. “I’ve been really kicking ass, man. I’m doing two to three miles a day, four to six days a week,” he said.
After completing his 5K in May 2024, the singer set his sights on a much more ambitious endeavor: finishing a half marathon. “When this journey started, I couldn’t get a full mile in that 30 minutes,” he told Men’s Health. “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.”
By April 2025, Jelly Roll was down almost 200 pounds from his starting point, weighing approximately 357 pounds. It was then he revealed that his “new goal” was to be on the cover of Men’s Health by March 2026—a dream he secretly held since he was in prison.
Just two months shy of his deadline, the country star has not only fulfilled this dream, but is down nearly 300 pounds. At his heaviest, he weighed 540 pounds, but as of November 2025, he weighs in at around 265 pounds.
Getting there was far from easy, however.
Jelly Roll hired nutrition coach and chef, Ian Larios, to cook his meals and began employing a medical team to perform blood panels and come up with a plan to lower his cholesterol and blood sugar levels. “Even before I got into getting my blood work done, I went and got mental health therapy about my overeating,” he said.
While Jelly Roll’s weight loss journey is not over yet, he plans to eventually undergo surgery to have some of his loose skin removed.
To read more about Jelly Roll’s life, music career, and physical transformation, read Jelly Roll’s complete profile on Biography.com.
Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.
