For Jelly Roll, his weight loss has changed more than just his physical health. The father of two reveals that losing around 300 pounds has impacted every part of his life, not just his body.
“I’ve gotten closer to God,” Jelly Roll tells Extra. “I’ve gotten closer to myself. I’m a better father. I’m more present with my children. You should see it. I mean, I’m coaching my son’s basketball team this year. They’re kids. I’m not coaching like a competitive team or anything here.”
“I just feel physically better, and I feel like I can physically do [things],” he continues. “Dude, when you’re 550 lbs, you wonder if they have a seat big enough for you. You definitely don’t think about trying to coach a team. You wonder if there’s a bench you can sit on. So, it’s like for God to just even make that big of a difference, and to have the weight off — literally, the weight. 300 pounds — I’m a whole different human.”
How Jelly Roll Lost So Much Weight
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In 2021, Jelly Roll began his quest to lose weight. In recent years, he’s been public about his goals, including to one day be on the cover of Men’s Health, a goal he recently accomplished. Now 41, Jelly Roll shares how he has shed so many pounds.
“Eating very, very vigilantly with my food,” Jelly Roll explains. “I have a whole different relationship with food. I did a lot of therapy around just bad eating. And a lot of running. I love running. …I was like, ‘What do I hate the most?’ ‘Cause I was the dude, I took the easy way out in life. That’s why I went to jail. I was a scumbag human, always took the easy way. So I was like, ‘What do I know I hate? Running. Let’s get into running.’ And you know what I hate more than running? Hills. So I was like, ‘We’re gonna run hills. That’s what we’re going to do.’ So that’s what we do. We run hills.”
“And I love running hills,” he adds. “That’s the wildest part.”
When speaking to Men’s Health, Jelly Roll says that the weight started coming off when he acknowledged the source of his problem: addiction.
“I started treating my food addiction like what it was: an addiction,” Jelly Roll says. “Why did I treat cocaine a certain way? I went to meetings for cocaine and found a sponsor and detoxed off of it and sh– myself and went through real hard life-changing emotional choices to get off cocaine and codeine.
Why Jelly Roll Was So Overweight
In hindsight, the Nashville native now knows why he struggled with his weight for so many years.
“I 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,” Jelly Roll explains. “The 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’t. It took 12, 15 years of being in and out of the system and going through sh– and dealing with drugs and drug addicts to realize, man, that was never actually who I was.”