Jelly Roll explained why he didn’t use GLP-1s before losing nearly 300 pounds on his weight loss journey.
“I just remember everyone telling me GLP-1s, or taking the Ozempic or the Mounjaro, ‘Listen, it’s gonna hurt your stomach a little bit,’” Jelly Roll, 41, shared in a new Men’s Health profile published on Friday, January 2. “I’ve treated my body so bad, I can’t believe God’s gave me this voice for this long. I didn’t deserve it. I literally didn’t do it out of fear.”
The musician ultimately worked with a therapist to help treat his “addiction” to food.
“Even 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 s*** myself and went through real hard life-changing emotional choices to get off cocaine and codeine,” Jelly Roll shared. “I didn’t look at the food addiction different. Once I started treating food like an addiction, it started changing everything for me.”
Jelly Roll eventually went from 540 pounds down to 265 pounds. “I feel like I’m a teenager, dog,” he joked. “I have the sex drive of a 17-year-old again. I’m f***ing pouncing on my wife. We’re having daytime sex again. It’s f***ing awesome.”
He continued: “[Before the weight loss] my testosterone level — and I’m cool to talk about this openly — was of a preteen boy. When I went in there for the test, it was bad. Bad. The world opened up when I [saw] it on paper. I was like, ‘That’s my testosterone level?’ I mean, dude, we’re talking a 57.You can’t get it up without T. I was married to a smoke show, and I was still struggling.The first couple of blood panels were like, ‘How are you alive?’”
Jelly Roll, who has been married to Bunnie XO since 2016, called struggling with his weight a “never-ending sadness.”
“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,” he recalled. “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.”
Jelly Roll broke down how his size impacted every aspect of his life, saying, “I was so fat that there came a moment in life that my wife and I had to put two queen beds beside each other because we couldn’t fit in a king bed anymore, I was just all over. It’s almost to the point where I look back now and I can’t believe that I was able to perform, that I was on national television, and that I was on stages and doing 100-something shows a year.”
He continued: “I was killing myself, literally. I mean, I was eating myself to absolute death. I can’t talk about one area of my life it was not affecting. It’s as disgusting as you imagine, when I really look back at it. I was struggling to wipe my ass. You know what I mean? Like, I’m ashamed of it. When I think of it being disgusting, I feel shame again. And shame is the exact same thing that will send me right back into the pantry. It’s the same thing that sends an alcoholic right back to the bar.”
After dropping nearly 300 pounds, Jelly Roll is remaining committed to his wellness journey.
“I don’t have a goal weight, I have a feeling weight, and I don’t feel it yet. I’ll know when I feel it, because I’ll finally be there. But, man, I’ve worked really hard and lost the weight the right way,” he shared. “I feel the weight loss in every facet. Whether it’s basketball and how I dribble or move, or how I can breathe running up and down a court. I feel it when I sleep and my hip hurts less and I can roll over easier without making a big of a rumble. Or the fact that me and my wife can fit on the same bed again.”
The musician admitted his weight loss has also “dramatically” changed his marriage. “Now it’s a totally different thing. I’m chasing her around the house,” he noted. “I’m like a teenage kid again! I’m like the Pink Panther — I bust out of every corner. And she opens the cabinet and I go, ‘Hi!’”
There have been some more unexpected side effects, however. “There’s so much skin under here. I’m starting to meet with skin surgeons to talk about possibly cutting skin in the next year,” Jelly Roll said. “That’s probably what I have the weirdest relationship with. It’s like, I’m proud of it because I earned it.”
He concluded: “It’s a symbol of a war that I fought with myself. But equally, it is in the f****ing way. So it’s just, you keep looking in the mirror, like, If that wasn’t there, dude, I’d be fire. So, [I’ll] probably have to clip these titties off eventually.”
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