Gary Brecka Details First Conversation With Jelly Roll Prior To Incredible Weight Loss Journey: “He Felt Like He Was Gonna Die Every Night When He Went To Sleep”

Bussin With The Boys/Jelly Roll

Jelly Roll’s weight loss journey has been nothing short of incredible to watch.

When the rapper-turned-singer first burst onto the country music scene in 2022, Jelly, whose real name is Jason DeFord, famously weighed 550 pounds. At this weight, it was obviously difficult to perform everyday tasks, and he knew he had to make a change.

At the beginning of 2023, he publicly announced that he was starting his fitness journey, first losing 23 pounds in two weeks with help from his nutritionist, Ian Larios. Throughout the year, he would continue to address his eating habits while training to run his first 5K in May 2024 in Los Angeles.

Already down 70 pounds at the time of the 5K in LA, Jelly would reveal to Joe Rogan that he had dropped over 100 pounds in October 2024. Mainly pointing to maintaining a healthy diet, the “I Am Not Okay” singer also pointed to playing pickup basketball nearly every day during his Beautifully Broken Tour.

“It’s really inspired me to start focusing on my health. I’m down 100 pounds now – officially down 100 f**king pounds. It’s been all food. I’m working out, I’m walking. But what I’ve learned is that as I’m losing the weight, by nature I want to go walk and do more stuff because I’m lighter. I feel better.”

“I’m working out every day, walking around the arenas. One day, they have a basketball court… this is insane by the way that I’m playing NBA arenas. I’m on the Orlando Magic court like… I’m f***ing Fat Shaq. The first day, it’s like me and three or four dudes. The crew heard, the next day (there was) 30. The whole crew showed up for me. They’re just there because they know it’s helping me.”

Flash forward to 2025, and Jelly Roll has now lost over 200 pounds, looking nearly unrecognizable in his recent Instagram post on September 15th after performing for and meeting the Pope in Vatican City.

In the caption, he made a nod to his incredible weight loss, saying:

“I can fit in Louis Vuitton now. Pray for my bank account.”

Today, Jelly’s personal health consultant, Gary Brecka, made an appearance on former NFL players Taylor Lewan and Will Compton’s podcast, Bussin’ With The Boys, to discuss everything from his involvement in President Trump and Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement to his experience with biohacking.

When asked by Lewan about Jelly’s incredible journey, Brecka noted that Jelly first asked him for help by direct messaging him, “Do you work with fat people?” He’d also describe how hard it was for him to watch someone as good as the “Save Me” singer struggle so badly.

“I got a DM one day from him, and he said, ‘Do you work with fat people?’ We flew out and met him in LA, and we flew on his jet to Vegas. I had him do some blood work, had him do the gene testing. I did the whole lab review for him on the plane.

It was actually very sad because I could see this guy’s heart. He’s a good human, but he could barely fit in this private airplane seat. And he started talking to us, describing what it was like to go through a day in the life of just being him and his weight.”

Brecka would then go on to describe some of the horrific experiences that came with everyday life for Jelly, most notably the fact that he would have to force himself to sleep on his side due to the fear of suffocating while sleeping on his back.

“He would say, ‘I have to sleep on my side and wedge myself in with pillows, because if I roll on my back at night, I’ll suffocate. I’ll vomit.’ He was like, ‘I never turn the radio down in the car, because when I pull up to a spotlight, I can hear myself wheezing. So I’ll just turn the radio off to bury the sound of my own breath wheezing. Every morning that he would wake up… he would thank God that he didn’t die that night, because he felt like he was gonna die every night he went to sleep.”

Finally, he’d note that the former CMA New Artist of the Year ultimately decided to embark on his weight loss journey not for himself but to continue making a change in the lives of his fans through his music.

“[He’d say], ‘I’m ready to commit to changing this, because God’s given me this opportunity to have my music serve the world. And I feel like I’m gonna die.’ He is one of the most genuine human beings, and to see that transition right there is just amazing, man.”

You can love or hate Jelly Roll’s music itself, but you simply cannot deny the impact he’s made throughout his relatively short career in the genre so far. Between his powerful drug testimonies, his advocacy for prison reform and his inspiring weight loss journey, he’s been a force of good in a time where it feels hard to find.

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