Quick Answer
Gregory Jbara lost more than 80 pounds in about ten months, going from 268 pounds to 185 pounds. This is a 2018 to 2019 story, told by Jbara himself in a public post in October 2019. He started on 28 September 2018, his 57th birthday, with a goal he called lose 57 on my 57th. He worked with nutritionist Lilly Padilla. He switched to clean, organic eating. He cut sugar and junk food. Four months in, he was 55 pounds lighter, and he said his doctor reported normal values on all his bloodwork. By his 58th birthday in September 2019, he weighed 185 pounds. His wife Julie joined the same eating changes and lost 41 pounds by his account. This article sticks to what Jbara himself reported, with no added diet plan, surgery, pill, or product.
Who Gregory Jbara Is
Gregory Jbara is an American stage and screen actor, born on 28 September 1961 in Michigan. He trained at the University of Michigan and then at the Juilliard School in New York. He built his career on Broadway first. He won a Tony Award in 2009 for his role as Mr. Wilkinson in Billy Elliot the Musical. He also won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for the same role. Theatre audiences know him from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Chicago, and Damn Yankees, among other shows.
Television audiences know him best as Garrett Moore on the CBS police drama Blue Bloods. Garrett is the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, the man who handles the press for Police Commissioner Frank Reagan, played by Tom Selleck. Jbara has played Garrett since the show began in 2010. He has also appeared in Grounded for Life, Friends, The West Wing, and Crossing Jordan.
That long career matters to this story. Jbara did not lose weight for a role. He talked about it after the fact, in his own words, as a personal health decision. That is why his account is unusually solid for a celebrity weight loss story. The numbers come from him, not from a photo estimate or a gossip site.
The Starting Point: 268 Pounds in Early 2018
In early 2018, Jbara weighed 268 pounds. He said so himself. Friends and well wishers had raised the subject with him more than once. People who cared about him told him he should do something about his weight. He heard them, but he did not act at once.
For Jbara, that moment came with the death of actress Marin Mazzie. Mazzie died in September 2018 after a battle with ovarian cancer. Jbara and his wife had followed Mazzie and her husband through her illness. Her death hit him hard. He later said it made him see how health problems can turn fatal at any time, and how much that loss breaks a family. He decided that taking care of his own health was a form of self respect, not vanity.
The Birthday Goal That Started It All
Jbara set his goal on his 57th birthday, 28 September 2018. He called it lose 57 on my 57th. The idea was simple and memorable. Lose 57 pounds in the year of turning 57. A round number tied to a birthday is easy to remember and easy to measure. It also gave him a deadline that felt personal rather than imposed.
He did not try to do it alone. He hired nutritionist Lilly Padilla to guide him. Padilla built eating plans for him and adjusted them over time to fit his body and his needs. That matters, because Jbara travels a great deal for work. He moves between coasts for stage and television jobs. A plan that only works at home would have failed on the road. Padilla gave him recipes and plans he could keep while travelling, and he has said they were simple and easy to maintain.
The goal itself also tells you something about his approach. He did not promise a fast fix. He gave himself a full year. He did not set out to lose 80 pounds. He set out to lose 57. What happened next went past the goal, but the goal was modest and steady.
What Changed in His Daily Eating
Jbara changed what he ate, and he changed how he thought about food. He described the shift in his own words as a reversal. He said he had gone from living to eat to eating to live. In plain terms, food stopped being the main event. It became fuel, eaten in amounts that served his life rather than filling every moment.
The practical changes were clear. He moved to clean, organic eating, with plans built by Padilla. He cut sugar. He cut junk food. He gave up sodas and heavy dairy creams, foods he had enjoyed without much thought before. He stopped eating whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary, unglamorous work of eating less sugar, less processed food, and more real food, and doing it every day.
He also kept the plan through events that break most diets. In his own account, he named Thanksgiving dinner, three weeks of holiday travel, a Caribbean cruise, a week of skiing, and visits to family. Those are exactly the occasions where a strict plan usually collapses. His held, because the plan was built to travel with him. Padilla had designed it for a working actor on the move, not for a person sitting at home with a perfect kitchen.
One more point deserves emphasis. Jbara did not describe a branded diet, a named programme, or a product. He described a nutritionist, a set of eating plans, and daily choices. Readers looking for a secret trick will not find one here, because he never claimed one.
The First Four Months: 55 Pounds and Normal Bloodwork
Four months after he started, Jbara reported real progress. He was 55 pounds lighter. He also shared news from his doctor. He quoted his doctor as saying his bloodwork showed stone cold normal values on every test. That detail matters more than the number on the scale. It shows the change was about health markers, not just appearance. His bloodwork at the start had given him reason to worry. Four months of steady eating had brought those numbers back to normal.
This early result also explains why he kept going. Losing 55 pounds in four months is fast, but it came from a large starting weight and a sharp break with sugar and junk food. It did not come from skipping meals or from a gimmick in his account.
It is also the point where his story stops being only about him. His wife Julie had joined him on the new way of eating. She did not need to lose weight for health reasons in the way he did, but she chose to eat the same way. By the time he wrote his four month update, he said she had already lost 30 pounds herself. That shared effort made the plan easier to live with at home. When everyone at the table eats the same food, no one has to cook two dinners or watch someone else eat cake.
The Rest of the Journey to 185 Pounds
After the first four months, Jbara kept going at a slower, steadier pace. He lost about 25 more pounds over the next several months. By his 58th birthday, on 28 September 2019, he weighed 185 pounds. The total loss from 268 pounds was 83 pounds, which he described as more than 80 pounds. He had beaten his original goal of 57 pounds by a wide margin, and he had done it in about ten months of steady work, with the final result landing just under a year after he started.
The slower second phase is normal and healthy. Early weight comes off faster when a person cuts sugar and processed food sharply. Later losses slow down as the body gets smaller and needs less energy. Jbara did not panic about the slower pace, and he did not chase it with extreme measures in his account.
He shared the result himself in October 2019, in a public post that summed up the journey. That post is the main source for this article. He did not hire a publicist to announce it. He wrote it as a personal update, thanking Padilla by name and describing the trip in plain terms.
His Wife Julie and the Family Change
Julie Jbara is a central part of this story, and she deserves more than a passing mention. She joined her husband on the new eating plan without being asked to, and she stayed with it. By Jbara’s later account, she lost 41 pounds in total. That figure is his, reported as part of the family story, and it shows how a health change can spread through a household.
The family angle matters because it answers a common question. How did he keep the plan going for ten months? Part of the answer is that he did not do it alone. His wife ate the same food. His nutritionist adjusted the plans. His daily life supported the change instead of fighting it. A plan that lives only in one person’s willpower is fragile. A plan that lives in a household is far stronger.
It also matters that Julie is not presented here as a before and after subject. She is part of the story because Jbara himself credited her, not because this article is judging her body.
Blue Bloods and the Rectify Episode
Jbara kept working on Blue Bloods through the whole transformation. Viewers who watched the show across 2018 and 2019 could see Garrett Moore change on screen as the actor changed in real life. That visible change on a weekly television show is part of why fans noticed and asked questions. His face and frame on screen in later seasons look different from earlier seasons, and the reason was the real life plan described here.
The show itself touched on fitness and health in the same period. The Season 9 episode titled Rectify aired on 5 April 2019. In that episode, Frank Reagan must decide whether to bring in a tougher fitness test for the police department, after an incident in which an officer’s backup physically could not keep up with a chase. The episode is about police fitness as a job issue, not about Garrett having surgery. Some online write ups have stretched it into a story about Garrett’s health procedure. The official episode description does not say that.
Jbara did not leave Blue Bloods, and his character did not leave either. He stayed with the show for its full run, playing Garrett through the final season. The weight loss changed how he looked on screen. It did not change his job. That steadiness fits the man in this story. He made a personal change, kept working, and let the work speak for itself.
What He Did Not Do
It is worth stating plainly what Jbara did not credit in his account. He did not credit surgery. He did not credit weight loss drugs. He did not credit a branded shake, a tea, a supplement, or a paid programme. His account names one professional, nutritionist Lilly Padilla, and one method, clean organic eating with sugar and junk food cut out. Any website that attaches a product or a procedure to his name is adding something he never said.
He also did not publish a detailed day by day diet sheet. He shared the shape of the plan, not a menu for readers to copy meal by meal. That restraint is honest. A plan built for one person’s body, schedule, and travel cannot be copied exactly by someone else. Readers who want to change their own eating should talk to a doctor or a qualified nutritionist, as Jbara did, rather than copying a celebrity menu from the internet.
Finally, he did not claim the result was easy or instant. Ten months of daily choices is a long time. It included holidays, cruises, ski trips, and work travel. The story is useful precisely because it is ordinary.
Conclusion
Gregory Jbara’s weight loss is one of the rare celebrity stories told with real numbers from the person himself. He started at 268 pounds in early 2018. He began a plan on his 57th birthday, 28 September 2018, with a goal of losing 57 pounds. He worked with nutritionist Lilly Padilla, switched to clean organic eating, and cut sugar and junk food. Four months later he was 55 pounds lighter with normal bloodwork. By his 58th birthday in September 2019 he weighed 185 pounds, a total loss of more than 80 pounds. His wife Julie joined the same eating changes and lost 41 pounds by his account. The Blue Bloods episode Rectify aired in April 2019, in the middle of this period, as the show itself dealt with police fitness on screen. No surgery, drug, or product is part of his account, and none should be added to it.
For his career on stage and screen, read his Wikipedia biography, which covers his Tony Award win and his long run as Garrett Moore on Blue Bloods. For his current work and official portraits, visit his official website. Both pages are real sources, and neither sells a diet in his name, because he never sold one.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much weight did Gregory Jbara lose?
He lost more than 80 pounds in total, going from 268 pounds to 185 pounds. The exact difference is 83 pounds. He reported both numbers himself in October 2019.
When did Gregory Jbara start losing weight?
He started on 28 September 2018, his 57th birthday. His goal was to lose 57 pounds in the year of turning 57, a goal he called lose 57 on my 57th.
Who was Gregory Jbara’s nutritionist?
His nutritionist was Lilly Padilla. She built his eating plans and adjusted them over time, including plans he could follow while travelling for work.
What did Gregory Jbara eat to lose weight?
He switched to clean, organic eating and cut sugar and junk food, including sodas and heavy dairy creams. He did not publish a detailed daily menu, so no exact meal plan can be quoted from him.
Did Gregory Jbara have weight loss surgery?
No. His own account credits food changes and his nutritionist’s plans. He never credited surgery, drugs, or any product. The Blue Bloods episode Rectify was about a police fitness test, not about Garrett having surgery.
Did Gregory Jbara’s wife lose weight too?
Yes, by his account. His wife Julie joined the same eating changes and lost 41 pounds in total. She did so by choice, eating the same food at home.
