When Jason Bradley DeFord, better known as Jelly Roll, first began his fitness journey, he told people close to him that he wanted to be on the cover of Men's Health one day. At the end of 2024, on his wife Bunnie XO's podcast, he publicly set the goal of making it happen by March of this year. Well, he's two months ahead of schedule. The Grammy-nominated country star is on the cover of our Winter 2026 issue. For his cover story, we followed Jelly over the course of a year to chronicle his epic transformation.

When we first met up with him, he weighed 380 pounds—already down 160 pounds from his heaviest, in 2020. On the morning of our cover shoot at the end of 2025, he weighed in at 265. “When this journey started, I couldn’t get a full mile [in 30 minutes],” he said in July when we visited him during his gig guest-hosting 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' “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." Read about how Jelly changed everything—his body, his mind, his habits, and even his sex life