Jelly Roll’s chef on singer’s big weight loss

Jelly Roll and his chef are opening up about how the singer dropped 100 pounds while on tour.
The Grammy-winning singer, who is currently on his Beautifully Broken Tour, shed the weight over the last year, his nutrition coach and chef Ian Larios revealed in an Instagram video shared on Jelly Roll’s account on Monday.
The video begins with footage of Jelly Roll proclaiming, “When I see y’all in March … y’all aren’t gonna recognize me. That’s why, next year, when y’all see me, you won’t recognize me. I’m going to get under a pile of weights in a way that I never had.”
Jelly Roll had initially opened up earlier this year about setting a big weight-loss goal for himself.
“I plan on losing another 100, 100-and-something [pounds]. If I feel this good down this weight, man, I can only imagine what I’m going to feel like by the time I go on tour,” he said in an April interview with People, after initially losing 70 pounds.
In this week’s Instagram post, Larios shared an update for Jelly Roll’s fans.
“We just passed the halfway point of the tour and Jelly has been crushing it,” Larios says in the video, adding that “he just surpassed his 100-pound weight loss … That 100-pound weight loss goal since his last tour is huge.”
Larios explains that Jelly Roll has been staying active in between performances and traveling, including walking, playing basketball and boxing. Along with his fitness routine, Larios says Jelly Roll has also been focusing on his nutrition.
“One of his favorite pre-show snacks is bananas. We’re making this one a little bit fancier today [with] manuka honey [and some] dark chocolate that we grate over the top,” he says over footage of himself whipping up the snack.
Larios then demonstrates how he prepares a high-protein version of Nashville-style hot chicken and fries for Jelly Roll ahead of a concert.
“We air fry it. It tricks your brain into thinking this is like that nice, greasy Nashville deep-fried, hot chicken. He’s gonna feel like he’s eating at home,” Larios said. “It’s healthy. It’s air-fried, full of protein that helps him stay on track.”
For Jelly Roll, the topic of his weight has followed him throughout his country music career.
In the ABC News Studios-produced documentary “Jelly Roll: Save Me,” the singer said he had been told in the past that he was “too fat” to succeed in music and that it was a hurdle he had to overcome.
“They say we were too fat to be in the music business, my voice wasn’t cool enough — these were all mountains that we had to conquer,” Jelly Roll said in the documentary.