Jason Kaplan Lost Nearly 10 Pounds in His Very First Week on Nutrisystem

Howard kicked off Monday morning’s show by observing Jason Kaplan, whose obesity recently helped him secure a COVID-19 vaccination, looked more svelte than normal. The longtime staffer started a Nutrisystem diet last week and apparently he’d already started seeing results.

“Jason, your face looks thinner,” Howard told him.

“I weighed myself this morning. I’m down nine-and-a-half pounds,” Jason announced.

Howard was thrilled for his staffer, though he imagined sticking to a new diet must be difficult. “Have you cheated?” he wondered.

“I have not cheated,” Jason said, though he admitted his will was tested Sunday while watching Richard Christy’s Kansas City Chiefs and recent Stern Show guest Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers secure spots in next month’s Super Bowl. “I’m watching football and my body was just trained to just shove things in my mouth and there was nothing there to shove, but I’m holding on.”

Jason’s ultimate goal was to lose 100 pounds. “I started at 300. I want to get down to 200,” he said.

Howard thought he was off to a great start, but co-host Robin Quivers cautioned him against shedding too much body mass too quickly—which could result in loose, dangly skin.

“I’d kill for hanging skin, Robin,” Jason laughed.

Jason’s home is free of unhealthy foods these days, but he told Howard that wasn’t the case back when he worked the late-night shift at Roy Rogers as a teenager and often took home as much fried chicken and bacon cheeseburgers as he could carry. “They key to the food at Roy Rogers was waiting right until closing,” he explained. “They’d have to throw out all the food that didn’t get sold, so that would go into a big bag and go back to my house.”

Despite smuggling out enough food to fill up a second refrigerator at his parents’ home, Jason was named Employee of the Month on multiple occasions. It was apparently a low bar to clear, as many of his coworkers didn’t even show up for their shifts. Jason also told Howard he was skinnier and better looking back then, which proved to be a double-edged sword. Though he did lose his virginity to a Roy Rogers cashier, he was also once sexually harassed by someone at work who cornered him by the ice machine. “I was like pinned against the shelf. I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Get away from me.’ I was like laughing. He was like, ‘Come on, man. Come on. You know,’” Jason told listeners. “I had a sleeve of cups in my hand … so I hit him over the head with it. I got out of there and then I just went back to work.”

Executive Producer Gary Dell’Abate also worked at Roy Rogers a few decades back, too, and chimed in Monday to share a few riveting anecdotes of his own. In one, a manager robbed his own store before hitting himself in the head with a hammer in a futile attempt to frame someone else. In another, the place would get ransacked after certain concerts at the nearby Nassau Coliseum. “When the Grateful Dead came to town, we had to take everything away. We couldn’t even put the toilet paper in the bathroom,” Gary said. “We used to put a monitor at the Fixin’s Bar because they would just come in and steal everything.”

Guarding toilet paper wasn’t his worst on-the-job memory, however—he said the “ultimate indignity” was having to get into character every day. “We had to wear a cowboy shirt and a cowboy hat and when anybody came in we had to say, ‘Howdy partner, may I take your order?’ And when they left and you gave them their change, you had to say, ‘Happy trails,’” he recalled.