In a cover story for Men’s Health, the singer opens up about his healthy journey from being 500+ with the testosterone level of a pre-teen boy to weighing in at 265 and with the energy, drive and stamina of someone half his age.
Jelly Roll (aka Jason Bradley DeFord) is loving the new life he’s worked hard to achieve. The Grammy-nominated country superstar opened up with Men’s Health about his weight-loss journey, opening up about some of the startling things he learned at the beginning, and how far he’s come.
Topping out at more than 520 pounds (Jelly explained that his scale maxed out there and he could not move it at all, “so it could have been 560, it could have been 528.” Jelly said he reached his maximum weight around 2020.
Working with The Ultimate Human founder Gary Brecka and wellness clinic Ways2Well, Jelly started by getting himself under 500 pounds and assessing where he was. He was also adamant that he didn’t want to use GLP-1 drugs to achieve his results, saying, “I don’t want an asterisk next to my name, bubba. I want to show people that this is possible.”
Men’s Health notes that after publication, Jelly did admit to trying these drugs for two weeks before committing himself to achieving his goals without them.
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At the start, he took a full blood panel, and learned some startling results about his insulin levels, “super high” and his testosterone levels, super low.
“When you have an excessive amount of insulin, it forces your body to store fat,” Ways2Well nurse practitioner Danese Rexroad told Men’s Health. “So switching those receptors and switching what Jelly’s body was signaling with insulin helped him rapidly adjust his insulin resistance. I wasn’t doing a big science experiment. It was just meal timing and eating real foods.” He was also put on a drug to treat Type 2 diabetes.
His A1C, which measures sugars in the blood, was so high, Jelly said that “the first couple of blood panels were like, how are you alive?”
The other number that left the singer truly shocked was his T. “My testosterone level — and I’m cool to talk about this openly — was of a preteen boy,” Jelly told the magazine. “When I went in there for the test, it was bad. Bad. The world opened up when I seen it on paper. I was like, That’s my testosterone level? I mean, dude, we’re talking a 57.”
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A normal t-level for a man Jelly’s age is between 300 ng/dL to 900 ng/dL, while obesity commonly reduces those numbers. But a reduction in testosterone can have a huge impact on a man, and especially when it comes to his romantic life.
Jelly went there, talking about struggles in his intimate relationship with Bunnie Xo, with whom he’s been married since 2016. “You can’t get it up without T,” he said candidly. “I was married to a smoke show, and I was still struggling.”
He said that a team came together to look at the root causes behind his health issues, rather than just give him medications to address the symptoms, though medication is a part of the process. “I’ll be on testosterone replacement therapy probably for the rest of my life,” Jelly admitted to Men’s Health.
Nevertheless, what his body could adjust and change for the better, Jelly says has been happening. “That’ was a big part of my journey: wanting to know what’s happening within me.”
For Jelly, who admitted that food was as much an addiction for him as cocaine and codeine had been during his years in and out of the prison system, he’s learned that it’s about setting small goals. Every time he’d decide to do everything it takes to lose weight, he’d fail, so he started with just one of those things — and he recommends that one thing be food.
“Start there. F–k everything else,” he said. “Just commit yourself to ‘I’m gonna count every calorie and macro that goes in my mouth.'”
He was also clear in learning that he needed to shift his goal. He wasn’t trying to lose weight, he was trying to be healthy. That’s why the focus on blood panels and knowing what’s going on inside. The scale only tells one part of the story.
In 2021, Jelly hired chef/sports nitritionist Ian Larios, who has worked with some MMA champions. Jelly, a huge fan of MMA, found him through this route and one of the first things he told him was that he wanted to appear on the cover of Men’s Health magazines.
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In December 2024, he reiterated this goal, “to be on the cover of Men’s Health in 2026. The magazine has come to mean a lot to him, he explained, because he would read it in jail and be inspired by the stories and transformations within its pages. He wanted his own journey to be told there.
Men’s Health followed him for a year, watching his healthy journey throughout 2025 before granting his dream with the first issue of the new year. Along with the dramatic change in his body, the magazine noted that when they returned to visit him in November, he proudly declared that his healthier body is a different man in the bedroom, too.
“Now it’s a totally different thing. I’m chasing her around the house, you know what I’m saying?,” he laughed. “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!'”
“Dramatically different world,” he declared. Next up is loose skin removal, which he is planning for sometime this year. The journey continues.
