If you’ve ever felt like your cravings were stronger than any willpower you could summon — like the harder you fought the pull toward sugar, carbs, and salty snacks, the louder it got — then you need to meet Julie Gushlaw.

For years, Julie’s story sat in the pages of a magazine and never made it here. I’m fixing that today.

When Julie began, she weighed 232 pounds. Like so many women over 45, she was caught in a cycle she couldn’t explain. She’d reach for something salty, then something sweet, and an hour later the hunger would come roaring back. She blamed her willpower. Most of us do.

But the problem was never willpower. The problem was minerals.

When your body runs low on sodium, potassium, and magnesium, it sends out signals that feel exactly like hunger — and it steers you toward the fastest fix it knows: salt, sugar, and refined carbs. Cardiovascular researcher Dr. James DiNicolantonio, author of The Salt Fix, has spent years making this case: when sodium drops, the brain ramps up salt-seeking and the whole reward system tilts toward food. And when magnesium runs low, blood sugar swings harder — setting off the crash-and-crave cycle that sends you looking for something sweet. The craving isn’t a character flaw. It’s a signal.

That was the missing piece for Julie. Once she understood it, everything changed.

She started giving her body back the minerals it had been missing with Zero Hunger Water — sodium, potassium, and magnesium, every couple of hours through her day. The cravings that had run her life began to quiet. She wasn’t white-knuckling her way through hunger anymore. She simply felt satisfied.

The weight came off — 84 pounds of it, over 11 months. Julie went from 232 pounds to 148, and from a size 20 to a size 4.

What moves me about Julie’s story isn’t only the number on the scale. It’s that she finally got an answer to the question that had haunted her for years: Why couldn’t I stop? She was never weak. Her body was asking for minerals — and the moment she gave it what it needed, the cravings lost their grip.

That’s the whole idea behind Zero Hunger Water. The hunger that hits during your eating window, and the cravings that ambush you in the afternoon, often aren’t hunger at all. They’re a mineral need in disguise. Give your body sodium, potassium, and magnesium, and you can get through your day satisfied — without the suffering, and without surrendering to sugar.

→ Read Julie’s full story (PDF)

There’s a moment, if you’re lucky, when you stop running long enough to notice you’ve arrived somewhere new.

I had that moment this weekend.

I lit a little sage. I sat in the quiet. I breathed in clean desert air and let myself feel — really feel — how far this road has come. No phone buzzing. No deadline. Just stillness, and the strange, grateful realization that I am, at 55, the happiest and most myself I have ever been.

I’m calling this chapter Jorge 3.0.

Chapter one was the building years — and it began with my mother.

In 1998, I lost her. It was the deepest loss I’d ever known. But my mom was the spark, and somehow that spark set everything in motion. Eight months later I met Oprah Winfrey and found myself on her show. In 2001, I published my first book, 8 Minutes in the Morning, with a foreword from my friend and then-client Tony Robbins. That launched a 39-book career, 13 of them New York Times bestsellers. I built a beautiful life. I was a new dad. I loved every bit of it.

Chapter two was the unraveling. Then the life I’d built came apart — I lost my dad, my sister, my grandmother, my marriage; the nest emptied. And the man who had spent his whole life building had to sit with a harder question: Who am I, when so much of it is gone?

But here’s the part I hold onto. It was inside that unraveling — during COVID, sitting down for my podcast with Dr. James DiNicolantonio, author of The Salt Fix — that Zero Hunger Water was born. I came up with it, I trademarked it five years ago, and it quietly waited for its moment. That moment is now. This summer. This September. And I could not be more excited.

That chapter broke me open. But it also handed back something I’d buried since boyhood — the right to simply be still, and calm, and me.

Because here’s the truth I don’t say often enough. I grew up a gay Latino kid in the 1970s, raised by a Catholic grandmother who did not want me to be — as she would say — a maricón. I carried that shame for decades. I tried to be perfect so I could feel safe. And that kind of stress doesn’t just steal your peace; it turns up the volume on every craving and every hunger you’ve got.

Chapter three is the homecoming. Me, finally arrived as my true self. And it’s no accident I’m stepping into it as my partner Wyatt celebrates turning 26.

Happy Birthday, Wyatt

I am so proud of this man.

As a designer, Wyatt put the final touches on the Zero Hunger Water packaging — the polish you’ll see when we launch. And he’s my right hand in the lab, too: today, on his birthday, he sat across from me and we ran our flavor taste tests.

So let me tell you what’s coming.

Two Flavors. Both Perfect for Summer.

Strawberry Lemonade tastes like old-fashioned lemonade — the kind that feels like someone spent hours making it on a hot afternoon — with a touch of strawberry that’s just yummy. Make it in 8 ounces, 12, or stretch it to 16 (that’s the max before you dilute the magic), and you get that bright, real lemonade taste every time.

Blood Orange is tangy, bright, and built for July. One sip and you’ll get it. On a hot summer day, drop in a few ice cubes — and if you like it fizzy, make it with carbonated water. It’s so good.

The Ritual Is Simpler Than You Think

Here’s where I want to slow down, because this is where most people overcomplicate things and scare themselves off.

You are not fasting for 16 hours straight. Forget that.

Your day has an 8-hour eating window — and the rest takes care of itself, because sleep is its own kind of fast. You’re already “fasting” while you sleep (wink). So when you add a simple 8-hour eating window on top of your 8 hours of sleep, the math quietly works in your favor — without you ever white-knuckling through a long, hungry day.

During your awake fasting hours, the rhythm is easy: one stick of Zero Hunger Water in 8–12 oz of water, every two hours. Across an 8-hour window, that’s just four sticks — not eight — because sleep covers the other half. Minerals up, false hunger down.

And you don’t even have to do it in one straight block. Most of my midlife clients — women and men — split it: two sticks in the morning, two at night. Four hours in the a.m., four in the p.m. Gentle. Doable. No drama.

That’s the whole point. Simple enough that you’ll actually keep doing it.

Why This Works — The Four Pillars

After 39 books and 25 years in this field, I’ve boiled a lifetime of research down to four pillars of wellness. You can download the full framework free at ZeroHungerWater.com — but here’s the heart of it:

1. Longevity is the goal. Roughly 80% of premature death is tied to obesity and visceral belly fat. Shrinking your waist is the single most important move you can make.

2. Your waistline is your lifeline. It predicts your longevity better than BMI. Target: under 32” for women, under 37” for men.

3. Time-restricted eating works. An 8-hour eating window clears visceral fat better than any low-carb diet — and with sleep folded in, your cells get the time they need for autophagy, their natural self-cleaning. This is the same idea Dr. Mehmet Oz first opened my eyes to back in 2007.

4. Zero Hunger Water solves the hunger. Most “hunger” isn’t willpower — it’s a mineral deficiency. Dr. DiNicolantonio taught me how sodium, potassium, and magnesium quiet false hunger at its source. No sugar. No GLP-1. Just science in a stick pack.

And the one rule beneath all of it: belly goes first. Visceral fat — the deep, dangerous kind, far worse than the jiggly subcutaneous fat on top — is the first to burn. That’s the whole promise.

Download

My Co-Founder Understands Family

None of this would be what it is without my co-founder, Stephan Peeler.

Stephan was born into beverage. His family created Cheerwine in Salisbury, North Carolina, back in 1917 — and 109 years later it’s still family-owned. Every May, 60,000 people gather for the Cheerwine festival. Not for a soft drink. For community. For chosen family.

That’s what we’re building. It won’t happen overnight — we’re starting on a shoestring. But we want something you don’t just buy. We want something you belong to.

Join the First 100

In about 80 days — this September — we launch to our first 100 Founders. I’d love for you to be one of them.

Go to ZeroHungerWater.com and take our Hunger Control Quiz (going live shortly). It’s essentially a one-on-one coaching session with me — you’ll get your results emailed straight to you, and you’ll get access to my brand-new VIP coaching program, free. That’s a $97/month value, yours totally free, ongoing, just for signing up and becoming one of our 100 Founders.

Being a Founder means that when we launch, you’re onboarded to try Zero Hunger Water before anyone else — and you get the best discount we offer, direct from us at ZeroHungerWater.com. It’s only for the first 100 people.

So check it out today.

If you’ve walked this road with me — since Oprah in ‘98, since 8 Minutes in the Morning in 2001, through all 39 books — then come walk this next stretch with me, too.

Be still. Breathe. And let’s begin again, together.

Peace and purpose,
Jorge

The Day It Became Official

On April 8th, I posted a photo on Instagram. You can see it here. It’s me and Stephan Peeler at a Mexican cocina in Irvine — both of us in his Peelers Stoic Series cutoffs, me in white, him in black, both smiling because something had just become real. Stephan is now the co-founder of Zero Hunger Water. I’ve been looking forward to sharing this with you, because his story is one of the most important reasons I believe in what we’re building — and I think once you hear it, you’ll understand why.

Where He Comes From

Stephan didn’t discover the beverage industry. He was born into it.

His family’s roots trace directly to the founding of Cheerwine — a legendary cherry soft drink created in Salisbury, North Carolina in 1917 that has been continuously, proudly family-owned for 109 uninterrupted years. If you’ve spent time in the American South, you already know what Cheerwine means to people there. For everyone else: imagine a brand so genuine, so rooted in community and consistency, that multiple generations of families have grown up drinking it, sought it out in every city they’ve moved to, and passed it down to their children the way you pass down a family recipe. That’s Cheerwine. It wasn’t built by a marketing department. It was built by a family that simply believed in what they made and served their community with total commitment for over a century.

Stephan grew up watching that happen. Not reading about it. Not studying it as a case study. Watching it — up close, as a kid — seeing firsthand what it looks like when a beverage earns a century of loyalty. That kind of education cannot be replicated in a classroom or a boardroom. It lives in you. And it lives in Stephan.

What He’s Built on His Own

Beyond where he comes from, Stephan is a builder in his own right — and I want you to know that, because it matters.

He founded Carolina Malt House, a craft beverage company built on that same generational instinct for what makes people fall in love with what they drink. He brought his family’s deep knowledge of the beverage world into something new and earned a devoted following for it. He created Peelers Apparel — a luxury activewear brand featured in Maxim and LA Weekly — which is what we’re both wearing in that photo, the Stoic Series cutoff that I basically live in. And now Zero Hunger Water is his next chapter in beverage.

That’s three ventures. All of them rooted in the same thing: genuine quality, real community, and a deep belief that the best products don’t just solve a problem — they bring people together around something that matters.

I’m honored this is where he’s pointed that energy next.

How We Found Each Other

Stephan is my Sigma Chi fraternity brother. That’s where this starts — not in a boardroom, not through a pitch deck, but through shared values and years of genuine friendship. He has believed in Zero Hunger Water for years, long before April 8th, long before any of this was official. He understood what I was trying to build and he supported it as a friend. The fact that we’ve now formalized that into a real co-founding partnership is something I don’t take lightly, and neither does he.

I’ve spent 25 years in wellness. Thirty-nine books — including 13 New York Times bestsellers — across HarperCollins, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Hay House. My first book, 8 Minutes in the Morning, launched in 2001 with a foreword from Tony Robbins, and Oprah followed. Twenty-five years of asking the same question: why do people — men and women in midlife, people doing everything right — keep struggling with wellness? Why do the solutions keep falling short?

I know wellness. What I’ve never known is beverage. Stephan was born into beverage. That’s what makes this partnership something neither of us could have built alone.

The Mission Behind the Product

Here is what Zero Hunger Water actually is: a clean, simple water additive — no sugar, nothing artificial — built on one insight that took me 25 years and a lot of research to fully understand. Most hunger isn’t a willpower problem. It’s a mineral deficiency. Seventy years of industrial agriculture have stripped our food supply of the sodium, potassium, and magnesium our bodies need — and when those minerals are depleted, our brains fire hunger signals that no diet, no discipline, and no prescription medication can permanently silence. Zero Hunger Water replenishes those minerals and quiets that signal at the source. No GLP-1 required. No side effects. Just science, in a stick pack you stir into water.

It’s for women. It’s for men. It’s for anyone who has spent years fighting their body and is ready to understand what their body has actually been trying to tell them.

The Community We’re Building

What Stephan and I are building together is bigger than a product. We want to do for Zero Hunger Water what the Peeler family did for Cheerwine — build something that people don’t just buy, but genuinely belong to. A community of people who found this early, who share it with the people they love, and who pass it down the way you pass down the things that actually changed your life.

That means real connection. It means access to 25 years of my research and resources. It means a place where the science of hunger gets translated into something you can actually use, every single day, without a medical degree.

Stephan brings the beverage DNA that turns a great product into a great brand. I bring the wellness knowledge and the audience we’ve spent 25 years building together. And together, we hope to build something you’ll still be sharing with your family years from now.

More coming later this year. Stay close.

— Jorge Cruise Founder, Zero Hunger Water

It is Mother’s Day evening. Earlier this morning, after the gym, Wyatt and I splurged a little and went to the Broken Yoke, our favorite breakfast spot in San Diego. We do not go often. Today felt like the kind of day that earned a slow breakfast. His mother lives up in Seattle. Mine has been in heaven since 1998. So it was just the two of us at the table, two men a long way from the women who built them, sharing coffee and quiet gratitude for the fact that we ever had mothers at all. That breakfast is where this letter began.

There is one thing I wish I had said to my own mother in the last few years of her life, and I never got to say it. I want to say it to you instead.

The thing I wish I had said is this. Mom, you first.

She died too young, at sixty-five, in February of 1998, because in the most important arithmetic of her life, she did not put herself first. I will tell you that story in a moment. But before I do, I want to give you the song I wrote for her this weekend, and for you.

Listen to You First here on Suno at suno.com/song/070dbda6-51cb-453d-829e-fa66729c90c6.

The song runs about three minutes. The chorus is two words. You first. I wrote it because the world has been telling mothers their whole lives to take care of everyone else, and the world is wrong. The strongest love a mother gives is the one where she still lives. That is the line my own mother did not get to learn in time to use.

Gloria

My mother’s name was Gloria Cansino. She was born on May 9, 1932, in Bogotá, Colombia. Yesterday would have been her ninety-fourth birthday. She became one of the working actresses of Mexico’s Época de Oro, the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, in its last and most lyrical chapter. She appeared in Ramón Peón’s Nuestras vidas in 1950. She played Marta in Alberto Gout’s Mujeres sacrificadas in 1952, opposite the great Ninón Sevilla. She danced on screen in Maratón de baile in 1958. And in 1959, at twenty-seven years old, she was cast as the female lead in Ismael Rodríguez’s La ciudad sagrada, a film shot in the Yucatán pyramids, performed partly in the Maya language. Rodríguez was one of the great directors of the twentieth century. He gave my mother top billing. If you would like to see her filmography or follow her work, her IMDb page is at imdb.com/name/nm0134446, and the family tribute page I built for her years ago is at facebook.com/gloriaacansino.

Her name was Cansino, the same name carried by Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Carmen Cansino, of the Sevillian dance dynasty. The two families have no documented connection. But the name has always carried dance in it.

Tonight Wyatt and I will probably watch one of her films. The one we usually return to is The Scalphunters, the 1968 United Artists Western directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas, and Ossie Davis. The film was shot in the desert outside Torreón, Mexico, and family memory has always placed my mother in the background of it, dancing in the dust kicked up by the horses during the Mexico shoot. You can rent or buy it on Apple iTunes if you ever want to see her in motion. That is the image of her I carry on Mother’s Day. Not the hospital. The desert. A thirty-six-year-old Colombian woman dancing in a Western with some of the biggest names in Hollywood from that era.

The role she chose

My mother had a real career. She was working with the best directors of her era. She could have kept going. She chose not to.

She married my father, Mel, an American who would later spend years overseas, and when I was born in 1971 she made the trade that women of her generation often made. She took the career she had built since she was eighteen and folded it into a single new full-time role. Mother. She was no longer Gloria Cansino, female lead. She was mamá. And she was, without any hesitation in my voice as I write this, the best mother in the world. The most loving, the sweetest, the most patient woman I have ever known. She taught me what love is. Everything I have ever done in my career — every book, every coaching call, every Substack letter you have read from me — comes downstream from the love she gave me when I was small.

I want every mother reading this letter to hear that sentence again, because most of you have done some version of the same trade in your own life. The role you chose was a real career. The work you did in that role made everything else possible. I am the man I am because Gloria chose to be my mother instead of the next Ismael Rodríguez lead. I would not trade that choice for any career she could have had. She probably would not have, either.

How I became Jorge Cruise

I want to tell you, on this particular Mother’s Day, the full version of how I became the writer you are reading right now, because every single piece of it traces back to one woman in a hospital bed in San Diego in late January of 1998.

I was twenty-seven years old. I had finished my undergraduate work at UC San Diego in exercise physiology. I had been training private clients at a gym in La Jolla. I had read every Anthony Robbins book I could buy at Barnes & Noble. I had a website that almost nobody read. I had no publishing deal, no manager, no agent, no book. I had dreams. I had no résumé that suggested those dreams were on the verge of becoming anything. My mother, dying in a hospital, was the only person in my life who already believed I would become the man I am today.

In the last week of her life, when she could barely speak, she pulled me close one afternoon and gave me a single instruction.

“Take it to Oprah.”

It was not a hope. It was not a wish. It was an assignment. She had been watching me work for years. She had seen the clients I was training. She had read the early drafts of the program that would eventually become my first book. She had watched me underline every page of Anthony Robbins. She knew, the way mothers know, that her son’s message belonged on the biggest stage in America, and the biggest stage in America in 1998 was Oprah Winfrey’s. She did not have the energy left to argue with me about it. She just gave me the assignment and trusted that I would carry it out.

She passed away on February 5, 1998.

I went to work.

Eight months later, I was on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It was the end of 1998. I still did not have a book. I had a website that Oprah’s team had somehow found in the very early days of the internet, when a website was something a man built in his apartment with a friend who knew HTML. I said yes the way you say yes to a door your mother has told you was about to open even when nothing in your résumé suggests the door should open at all.

That single afternoon on Oprah’s stage changed everything.

In 2001, Rodale Press signed me to write my first book. The book was called 8 Minutes in the Morning. The whole plan was eight minutes a day. It became an international bestseller in sixteen languages. Anthony Robbins, the same Anthony Robbins whose books I had been reading in college at my mother’s kitchen table, wrote the foreword. I never asked him to. He offered. My mother’s instruction had reached up into the universe and pulled down everything I needed to start the career I have now had for twenty-five years.

I am now writing my fortieth book.

Every single one of them has been hers. I have never written a book that was not, at some level, an attempt to put into the hands of strangers the kind of practical health information my mother did not have in her own hands when she needed it. I have never coached a client whose life did not, in some small way, become a second chance for my mother. I have never written a Substack letter, including this one, that was not in some way addressed to her. That is the secret of every author you have ever read. The book is always addressed to one person, and that person is almost never the reader. In my case, the person is Gloria.

Why she left at sixty-five

I want to tell you, gently and clearly, how she died, because the way she died is the reason I have spent the last twenty-eight years doing this work.

She was a dancer her entire life. By her sixties, her hip was destroyed from the cumulative wear of half a century of dancing. Her doctors recommended a hip replacement. She was afraid of the surgery, and she put it off. To manage the daily pain, she began taking ibuprofen. Many ibuprofen. For years. She did not fully describe to her doctors how much she was taking, and so nobody traced the link in time between the medication and what was quietly happening to her kidneys. The medical literature now calls this pattern analgesic nephropathy — the slow erosion of kidney function from chronic over-reliance on common pain medications. By the time the kidney damage became visible, it was advanced enough that she needed a fistula placed in her arm and was put on dialysis. Her body, already inflamed and depleted, did not have the reserves to recover. She passed on February 5, 1998, in San Diego, at sixty-five years old, three months and four days short of her sixty-sixth birthday.

I am telling you this part because I have to. She did not have to die. She did not have the right information at the right time, and she did not give her doctors the full picture of what she was doing to manage her pain. Both of those gaps, the one about information and the one about disclosure, are still costing women in midlife their lives in 2026. I do not want one of them to be you.

The reminder, from a friend

So consider this letter your gentle reminder, on Mother’s Day, from someone who loves you.

The hip you have been ignoring because you do not have time for the surgery. Make the appointment. The medication you are taking more of than the label suggests. Tell your doctor exactly how much. The sleep you have been losing because the kids or grandkids need you at six in the morning and you went to bed at one. Move the bedtime. The medical check-up you skipped last year because it felt indulgent. Schedule it tomorrow. None of these are dramatic. They are how women in midlife stay alive long enough to see their grandchildren grow up.

The strongest love a mother gives is the one where she still lives. You first, mamá. This week. Starting today.

What I learned to give you

There is an idea I learned years ago from Jack LaLanne, the father of American fitness, who lived to ninety-six in a body that worked until almost the last week of his life. Jack used to say that your waistline is your lifeline. He meant it literally. The size of your waist, more than your weight on a scale, more than almost any other single number we have, predicts how long and how well any of us will live. Belly fat is not cosmetic. It is inflammatory. It is the body’s way of storing the kind of slow chemical damage that, in my mother’s case, eventually became damage no surgery could undo.

I have spent twenty-eight years building practical tools for women in midlife to use to shrink that waistline at home, gently, without GLP-1 medications and without anything complicated. 8 Minutes in the Morning was eight minutes a day. That was the whole plan. Every book I have written since has been some version of the same promise. Easy. Practical. Sustainable. Built for a mother who does not have time for anything that is not.

I have a free guidebook called Belly Goes First. It is the foundation of everything I have learned. It contains my Zero Hunger Water formula, which you can make at home for pennies. It contains a 19-day plan to get into beautiful shape from your own kitchen, including the protein-and-movement framework that can help women in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond restore lost lean muscle. It is never too late. You can download it free at skool.com/bellygoesfirst. A Mother’s Day gift, from her son.

If you want company while you put yourself first, I host a coaching meeting every Monday night at five p.m. Pacific. The door is always open. There is no charge to drop in. I do this because my mother did not have a room like that to drop into, and I do not want any of you to be in the same position she was.

To my mother

To my own mother, Gloria — born on a Saturday in Bogotá in 1932, lost on a Thursday in San Diego in 1998, the best mother in the world, the woman who chose me over a film career she had built since she was a teenager, the woman who pulled me close in her last week and pointed me toward a stage she would not live to see me stand on — I am still doing the assignment, Mom. Forty books in. Still going. Love you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day. I miss you every single day.

And to every mother reading this, especially the tired ones, and the ones doing it alone, and the ones who suspect they are not doing enough — you are doing more than enough. You are doing the work that makes every other kind of work possible. Happy Mother’s Day.

Please share this letter and the song with one mother in your life who needs to hear it today. That is the only thing I am asking. If a friend of yours is one ibuprofen, one skipped check-up, one unattended hip away from a story like Gloria’s, be the one who forwards her this letter. That is how women in our community take care of each other.

You first.

Carry it well.

— Jorge

A little over two weeks ago, I published the first letter I had ever written about losing my best friend. I called it “The Jim Novak Creed.” Dr. Jim Novak had died one day before that letter, on Monday, April 20, 2026, at seventy-two, of a heart attack, in the best shape of his life. Please go read that first letter (https://www.jorgecruise.com/p/the-jim-novak-creed) before this one. It is the foundation of everything I am about to write.

This is the second letter. It picks up where the first one left off.

I want to start with the truth about how I felt that first week. I was in shock.

Not the shock of someone losing a sick man. Jim was not sick. This was a man who hiked Mount Soledad with me on Christmas Day, who ate clean, who was strong, who was nineteen years my senior and could still outrun me on the trail. He was, in every sense, the picture of the kind of seventy-two-year-old I want to be at fifty-five.

And he was gone in a single morning, with no warning.

The shock had a second floor I want to name, because it is the part most of us do not say out loud. For a moment, I thought I might be next. When the older man you secretly use as your benchmark for I have time passes suddenly while doing everything right, when he passes at seventy-two, the math in your own head reorganizes itself. If Jim could go, who am I? I am not proud of how self-referential that thought was. But it was there.

Underneath the shock, there was one question I could not stop asking.

Why?

Why this man. Why now. Why, when his work was so clearly not done.

I asked God for an answer for two weeks and did not get one.

This past Monday, I did.

This letter is about what the answer turned out to be.

The turn

On Thursday, April 30, I drove to Ventura Cove for Jim’s celebration of life with my heart still in pieces.

What happened in those three hours rewrote me.

A celebration of life, done right, is not a funeral. A funeral is grief in a black suit. A celebration of life is people doing what the dead would have done if they were still here. Networking. Hugging each other. Eating on the grass. Doing God’s will, as Jim used to say without irony.

People did not come to that lawn to talk about how sad they were. They came to talk about how Jim changed their lives. Three hundred and fifty of them. The stories were specific. The stories were funny. They were full of recipes he gave away, hikes he took people on, treatments he refused to write, treatments he wrote for free. That is how we should remember the people we love in 2026. Not embalmed in sadness, but brought back to life by what they planted in us.

A celebration of life done right is also a prescription pad. The lessons of the dead person get rewritten, in new ink, in new handwriting, onto the lives of the people who showed up.

I walked in carrying shock. I walked out carrying a circle.

I did not arrange a single piece of it. I just showed up empty and let the room work on me.

That is what let go and let God actually means. It is not passive. It is the most active spiritual practice I know. You stop arranging the outcome. You show up. You let the universe do what only the universe can do.

Melinda, the sister the universe sent me

The most important person I met that afternoon was a woman named Dr. Melinda Silva, MD.

Melinda is, at almost sixty-three, one of the most vibrant, light-filled, alive humans I have ever met. She lifts. She trains. She radiates the kind of physical and spiritual force most of us spend midlife trying to remember we are capable of. She is board-certified in family medicine, fellowship-trained in integrative and regenerative medicine, and the author of Aging Gracefully and Strong. Her own patients voted her Compassionate Physician of the Year. She runs two clinics in San Diego: one in Eastlake near the lakes in Chula Vista, and one on Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach, two blocks from where Jim spent forty years saving lives.

And she was Jim’s mentee. For fifteen years.

When I asked her, in a text earlier this week, whether she would share something for this letter, what she wrote back stopped me in my chair. She said that long before hormone therapy was widely accepted or trendy, Jim was already doing the work, quietly, courageously, with unwavering conviction. She said that fifteen years ago, when she began her own journey into integrative medicine, there were very few mentors to look up to, and that Jim did not just walk that path for her. He illuminated it. She said he revived her faith in medicine at a moment when she had begun to lose hope in the establishment.

And she closed her message with one line that, frankly, made me cry on my couch:

“His legacy lives on in all of us who continue the work he so bravely began.”

That is the woman who, on the lawn at Ventura Cove last Thursday, sat with me for the better part of an hour and, without me asking, offered to become my primary doctor.

Here is why Melinda matters to me, beyond the medicine.

I do not have many close women in my inner circle at this stage of my life. Niki, my stylist and dear friend since 1990, is one of the very few. The odds of forming a deep new friendship at fifty-five are statistically low. Most of us at this age are not adding new people to our inner circle; we are managing the depletion of the inner circle we already had. And then, on the lawn, the universe handed me a Filipina-American woman in her sixties who is going to become my sister.

I can already see the shape of what is coming. She is a sister figure, full stop. The universe knew I needed one. It put one on the lawn.

Raul, the two-for-one with Jim

The first person who walked up to me on that lawn was a man named Raul Tellez.

Raul is what I have come to think of as my two-for-one with Jim Novak. He carries Jim’s spirit forward in a way few other people do. He was, for the better part of twenty-five years, one of Jim’s closest friends. He is Latino. I was born in Mexico City. And in the ninety minutes we stood together on the grass at Ventura Cove, this man and I became something I do not have an English word for.

Hermano.

When I asked Raul to share something for this letter, what he sent me yesterday morning was so generous, so detailed, and so revealing of a side of Jim I had never seen, that I am going to let him tell it in his own voice. This is Raul, not me.

He first met Dr. Novak in the early 2000s as a patient, “never imagining that our connection would grow into one of the most meaningful friendships of my life.” From that very first visit, Jim had a rare ability to make you feel like more than just a patient. You felt like family. What began in Jim’s clinic evolved into a genuine, lasting friendship. Raul remembered the moment Jim briefly opened an office in Sherman Heights, an underserved community in San Diego, because “giving back to those in need was always close to his heart.”

They shared a deep curiosity about health and wellness, often exchanging ideas about new approaches and ways to help people heal. Jim, in Raul’s words, was “endlessly curious and open-minded, always searching for better ways to support those in his care.” His motivation was never recognition. “It was simply about helping people feel better, no matter what they were going through.”

Over time, Jim became more than Raul’s doctor. He became their family doctor, caring for Raul’s wife and two daughters for more than two decades. When Raul’s wife became seriously ill, Jim was always there. Day or night. Ready to take the call, offer guidance, and provide comfort during their hardest moments. “That kind of dedication is rare, and it is something I will never forget.”

But the part of Raul’s letter that stopped me in my chair was the part about Mexico.

Jim loved Mexico. Raul introduced him over the years to friends and colleagues there who shared their interests, both in the United States and abroad. A few years ago, Jim invited Raul to join him and a small group on a trip to explore a wellness center called El Grullo, outside of Puerto Vallarta, a place focused on healing and health. Jim was considering purchasing the business and wanted Raul’s honest opinion.

They spent a week there. Raul came home physically renewed (he lost fifteen pounds), but more importantly, he came home with a deeper understanding of the man Jim was. During the stay, Raul learned that the ownership had some complications and shared his concerns with Jim. Jim listened carefully and chose not to move forward. He later thanked Raul. “That spoke volumes about his humility and the value he placed on trust and honesty.”

About two years ago, Jim called Raul with excitement in his voice and asked if Raul would be interested in purchasing land in Mexico, about an hour outside of Puerto Vallarta, in the mountain town of Mascota. Knowing Raul was a Mexican citizen, Jim thought the process would be easier for him, and wanted to share the opportunity so we could be close to one another. Raul gave it serious thought. His family roots are about an hour from there. It was not feasible for him at the time.

But Jim went ahead. He talked about that land constantly: the views, the possibilities, the life he envisioned there. He planned to build a custom home, and he would send Raul renderings of the property; each one was more impressive than the last. But what stood out most, in Raul’s words, “was not the home itself. It was his purpose.”

Jim was not building a vacation house in Mascota. He was building a wellness center for the surrounding community. A place where people in the mountains an hour from Puerto Vallarta, people without a Pacific Beach to walk into on Lamont Street, could come to heal. That was always his driving force, Raul wrote. “His heart was in helping others.”

He kept Raul updated on the progress, always ending their conversations with the same invitation: pack your bags and come visit once everything is complete. It is heartbreaking that Jim did not live to see it finished, or to spend a single afternoon in the place he spoke about with such joy. “That dream, like so many of his efforts, reflected who he was at his core, a man who looked beyond himself and sought ways to uplift others.”

Raul closed his letter with a sentence in Spanish that I want to leave on the page exactly as he wrote it, untranslated, because some things only land in the language they were born in.

“El mundo es menos brillante sin ti. Descansa en paz, mi gran amigo.”

Raul Tellez

We are going to Mexico together. He is helping me reclaim the dual citizenship I have had on paper since birth and never claimed. We will see each other every month. Some friendships take twenty years. Some take a Thursday afternoon on grass.

Anna Claire and Thomas, the divine meeting

The third encounter requires me to take you to a place called Sun Life Organics.

If you do not know about it, here is what you need to know. It is the wellness sanctuary founded by Khalil Rafati, the author of the memoir I Forgot to Die, a man who survived multiple overdoses and homelessness on Skid Row before building, from the ashes of his old life, the most beautiful spiritual community space in California. The original Sun Life is in Malibu. The newer one is in Del Mar. Khalil’s businesses are not restaurants in any conventional sense. They are vortexes of energy: twenty-thousand-, thirty-thousand-, fifty-thousand-dollar mineral specimens, geodes the size of small children, crystals taller than the people standing next to them. You walk in and your nervous system changes.

A few months ago, I went to the Del Mar location alone, on a day I was not feeling well. I had tried In-N-Out. I had tried Tender Greens. Neither one carried the spiritual frequency I was looking for. So I drove to Khalil’s place because I knew the room itself would feed something the food alone could not.

I sat down. And next to me were a beautiful woman and her tall, lean, healthy son. We started talking the way people talk in places with that kind of energy, without the usual armor. I had no idea who they were. They had no idea who I was. We were just three people Khalil had pulled into the same vortex.

Her name is Anna Claire Le Beau. Her son is Thomas.

I would not learn until weeks later, until Jim died, and Anna Claire reached out to me with the kindest text message I had received in months, that she and Thomas were two of Jim Novak’s most profoundly loved patients.

What Anna Claire shared with me earlier this week is the kind of thing every American family with a teenager on multiple psychiatric medications needs to read. I am telling it with her permission and Thomas’s.

Thomas began seeing Jim in his early twenties, after a journey that started when he was fourteen and that, by the time he reached Jim, had taken him through twenty-five different pharmaceuticals across nearly a decade in the Western psychiatric system. By twenty-one he was, in Anna Claire’s word, a legal drug addict, ultimately addicted to Xanax. The addiction was unknown to her for a long time. When they discovered it and pulled him off abruptly, he had a grand mal seizure.

That is when they got him to Jim.

Jim did what Jim did. He pulled Thomas off everything, slowly and safely. He changed his diet to living foods. He got him to give up cigarettes and minimize alcohol. He addressed every input that was stressing his nervous system. And, in the way Jim built relationships with all his patients, he and Thomas bonded. Over healthy eating. Over intermittent fasting. Over exercise.

Thomas became, in his mother’s words, absolutely obsessed. He practices everything Jim taught him today. Eighteen months ago, he walked away from alcohol. He and Anna Claire have talked about going public, speaking together on youth depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, with Thomas’s recovery as the spine of the message.

He credits Jim Novak with saving his life.

Anna Claire’s own story she described as “a little more boring.” It is not. In her late fifties she began waking up exhausted, with a brain that was, in her words, muddy and foggy. She is a Broker of Record. Her mind is the asset. Jim ran extensive blood work.

Her mercury level came back at 159.

A mercury level of 5 is considered a serious health issue. Hers was one hundred and fifty-nine. Jim was, in her word, shocked she was not bedridden. He chelated her every Friday morning for about a year and pulled it all out.

He saved her life.

That is who Jim Novak was. That is who we lost on April 20. And that is why the room at Ventura Cove was 350 people deep.

The universe placed Anna Claire and Thomas in front of me at Khalil’s vortex months before Jim died. I had no idea what I was walking into. They had no idea what they were walking into. There are no coincidences. There is only the work of a Higher Power, arranging meetings on a timeline we cannot see.

Brandi, and the man at home

I want to acknowledge two more names briefly. Brandi, the death doula who chose the music for my first ketamine session in 2021, the year I lost my father, my sister, my second marriage, and very nearly my own life. Jim ran those sessions. The last time I saw Brandi before Ventura Cove, she was hanging on by a string. At the celebration she walked up to me radiant. She is a death doula now, helping people pass with peace, the way Jim helped me come back to life.

And the man I am so lucky to have had at my side that day. My partner, Wyatt.

Wyatt and I met during the worst stretch of my life, which means he saw, up close, how deeply Jim Novak cared for me before he ever met Jim himself. Over the years that followed, Wyatt and Jim came to know each other well, and Wyatt was there with me on the lawn at Ventura Cove last Thursday, paying his respects.

For someone who has been through two divorces, I never thought I would find love again. I especially never thought I would find love with someone who is, in every measurable way, my equal. That is the part of this story I never let myself plan for.

Wyatt has been the steady center of my life for years now. When things have gotten difficult, and they have, he has carried his weight without ever making it a transaction. Earlier this year, when there was a gap in income while I was starting new ventures, Wyatt was there to help close it. I have never been with anyone who has shown up for me the way he has. He has the gift I do not have: he can be alone and be at peace. He can sit in a house for a weekend and emerge restored. I cannot. I am working on building something closer to that in myself. Less dependence on any single person, including him. More inner ballast.

What has surprised me most about loving Wyatt is the way our love has grown because we are equals. We mirror each other. When one of us needs a correction to become our best self, the other one says it, gently, but plainly. That is what equals do. The marriages I had before were not built that way. This one is.

A relationship cannot carry the full weight of one person’s social hunger. Wyatt is one chair, and one human cannot be five chairs. No one can. Melinda, Raul, Anna Claire, Thomas, Brandi, Niki, JJ, my AA rooms, Sigma Chi, my kids: these are the chairs that take the load off the love at home and let it be what love is supposed to be. A center, not a stand-in for the entire community.

Thank you, Wyatt. I love you.

The teaching: we are made for each other

Here is the deepest thing I have learned from this loss.

Humans are social beings by design. Not by preference. By design. Our nervous systems were built, over hundreds of thousands of years, to function inside a tribe. Hierarchy, belonging, family, ritual, the chosen room: these are not luxuries. They are the operating environment our biology was written for. Take a human out of community and the system starts to fail in measurable ways. Cortisol rises. Inflammation rises. Sleep collapses. Mood collapses.

A small percentage of humans genuinely thrive in long stretches of solitude. Maybe ten or fifteen percent of us. I am not one of them. The vast majority of us are not. The wellness culture of the last decade has, in my view, sold a lie to midlife adults: the lie that you should be able to do this alone. You should not. You were not built to.

The work is not “learn to need no one.” The work is “build a circle wide enough that the loss of any one person does not break you.”

That is what Ventura Cove handed me. A wider circle.

The 350 people on that lawn were Jim’s circle. They are now, by inheritance, mine. What I felt standing among them, what I am still feeling, six days later, is that this circle is not going away. We share too much. The same vision. The same focus. The same quiet conviction that the right way to live is the way Jim lived. Quietly. Without performance. With patience. With the patient sitting in front of you treated as the most important person in the world for the next forty-five minutes, and then with the next patient treated the same way.

That is the community he built. And it is now ours to carry.

The drive home

I want to tell you what happened on Monday morning’s drive home from the gym, because if you are wondering whether the universe ever bothers to confirm the decisions you make, this is my answer.

I went to the gym Monday morning thinking I would come home and finish writing this letter. Three drafts. Three rewrites. I could not hear Jim’s voice. So I went to the gym. And on the drive home, three things happened in fifteen minutes that I now believe were not coincidence.

Sign one. The coffee shop. I drove past a place where Jim and I had once sat together. He had ordered decaf. I made fun of him. He looked at me with that quiet half-smile of his and said, “Jorge, if you cannot sleep, and you cannot sleep, switch to decaf. A regular cup is about ninety-five milligrams of caffeine. A decaf cup is two to seven. You will lose almost nothing in flavor and you will get your sleep back.” USDA figures confirm those numbers. A 93-percent reduction with almost no taste penalty. He was right ten years ago. I am finally listening.

Sign two. The butcher shop. A few blocks later I drove past the place where Jim used to take me. He loved that place. He would walk me up to the counter and point out the heart, the brain, the liver, “the original multivitamin,” he called organ meats. He believed in this so deeply that he was, in his last years, eating a near-carnivore diet built around grass-fed protein and time-restricted eating. That is how Jim ate.

Sign three. My right pinky pulsed. At the next light, the same finger that has been quietly inflamed for months, the same finger, the same joint, the same inflammation pattern that ran up my mother Gloria Cansino’s hands and feet and arms toward the end of her life, began to throb. Gloria self-medicated with ibuprofen and Tylenol for years. By the time we understood what it was doing to her kidneys, on February 5, 1998, she was gone. She was sixty-four. I am fifty-five. I do not want to go where she went. I want to go where my grandmother went. She lived to one hundred and three.

God, give me a sign. He gave me three. In fifteen minutes.

The decision: jump-start, not crutch

I want to use the rest of this section to make a commitment to you, and to Jim, on the public record.

For the last several weeks, I have been over-relying on a prescription stimulant. I have been taking Adderall to push through deadlines. The medication works. It also wrecks my sleep. And I have noticed something I want to be honest about: in the weeks I have been taking it most heavily, I have not been at my best. Less patient. Less present. Less Jim.

I am not telling anyone reading this to stop their medication. That is between you and your doctor. None of this is medical advice. I have enormous respect for Dr. Daniel Amen and the doctors who prescribe stimulants responsibly. For people with severe ADHD, the medication can be life-changing.

But I have been forgetting the lesson Jim taught me about every medication, going back twenty-three years.

Use it episodically. Use the lowest dose that works. Use it for the shortest window possible. Find a natural alternative wherever one exists.

Jump-start, not crutch.

That is the four-word ethos that runs through everything Jim ever prescribed me. The same lesson he taught Thomas about Xanax. The same lesson he taught me on Mount Soledad about GLP-1s. The same lesson he would have wanted me to apply to Adderall this spring, while I was using it like a crutch and telling myself it was a jump-start.

So here is my commitment, which I want to make in writing, where I cannot take it back.

I am not removing Adderall from my life. I am not throwing my prescription away. I am not making a binary, dramatic vow. I am, instead, committing to the jump-start-not-crutch ethos for the rest of my life: for Adderall, for caffeine, for any medication a doctor and I decide is worth using.

And I am committing to the conversation Jim would want me to have with my doctor, and that I want every reader of this Substack to consider having with theirs:

“Doctor, am I using this as a jump-start, or as a crutch? What’s the off-ramp? What’s something natural I can do that mimics what this is doing for me, so I can use the medication for the shortest window I actually need, and walk on my own again?”

For me, the off-ramp is the one Jim told me about ten years ago. The gym. And specifically, the part of the gym I have been avoiding for almost three months. Cardio. Walking. Hiking. Sustained heart-rate elevation. The 2021 systematic review of exercise and ADHD confirmed that physical activity hits the same catecholaminergic pathways, dopamine and norepinephrine, that stimulant medications hit. Jim told me this in 2015. Move first. Pill last.

So I am not removing anything. I am adding cardio back. That is my commitment to Jim. Not subtraction, addition. Move more than I medicate.

It is also why, in the Novak Reset I am about to share with you, the first rule is Move. Jim’s number one was always walking. Mine is going to be too.

Gloria. Jim. Two bookends.

My mother died on February 5, 1998. I was twenty-seven. That is the loss that built my career. For twenty-eight years I have been writing books and building businesses on the unstated foundation that my mother did not have to die, that she lost her life because she did not have the right information at the right time, and that my work would put the right information into the hands of as many people as possible.

Now Jim is gone. And I think this loss is going to do for the next chapter of my work what Gloria’s loss did for the first.

Two catalytic bookends. Twenty-eight years apart.

Gloria gave me the first chapter. Jim is giving me this one. That is what mentors do, even after they are gone.

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The Novak Reset: Jim’s ethos for the second half of life

Here are the five rules I am living by, starting Friday, May 1. I am calling it the Novak Reset, because it is Jim’s ethos distilled into five disciplines I am reminding myself of every morning before my feet hit the floor.

1. Move every day. Forty-five minutes minimum. Walking, hiking, swimming. Sustained heart-rate elevation. Your brain learns to make its own dopamine when you stop outsourcing it.

2. Time-restricted eating. One window, eight hours or less. Most days, fast 16+ hours. Hunger is information, not an emergency. Your body does not need food as often as the food industry has trained you to believe. That is how Jim ate.

3. One real human, in the room, every single day. Not text. Not like. Look another human in the eye every twenty-four hours. And once a week, return to the same place at the same time, your meeting, your church, your dinner, and let them know you.

4. One voluntary discomfort, every day. Cold shower. A hard set in the gym. The conversation you have been avoiding. The chapter you have been not-writing.

5. Radical honesty, in writing, every morning. Three sentences. What did I do yesterday that I am proud of? What did I do that I am not? What is the one thing I am most avoiding today?

Bonus rule, from Jim himself: switch to decaf if you cannot sleep.

I have built a one-page Novak Reset card in honor of him: a printable, beautifully designed reminder of these five rules, with a 30-day check-box grid and a small dedication to Jim at the bottom. It is free. Download it here. Print it. Tape it to your fridge. Share it with as many friends as you want. No email signup, no paywall, nothing to buy. That is what I am doing for the rest of this year. Hopefully longer.

Pick It Up: a song for Jim

I want to share one more thing before I get to the closing of this letter. It is the most personal thing I am putting in writing today.

For years, I have been teaching my coaching clients on Monday nights at five p.m. Pacific that one of the most powerful things you can do, when something painful happens in your life, is to take the pain and turn it into an anthem. Lyrics. Music. A song you can play on the days you forget what the lesson was. Pain into power. That is the practice. I cannot sing for anything. I want to be the first to make fun of myself for it. But I can write. And we live in a moment where the AI tools available to all of us mean you do not need a record deal to put your grief into a song. You just need the words.

So on Monday morning, after the drive home, after the three signs, after the pinky pulsed, I sat down and wrote the lyrics for a song called “Pick It Up.”

It is a tribute to Jim. It is universal. The lyrics never name him; they just speak to anyone who has lost a mentor, a parent, a friend, and is standing at the edge of a decision they have been putting off. The chorus is the line I want every person in midlife to chant the next time they are tempted to wait one more day: Hoy, hoy, hoy, pick it up, pick it up. That is what Jim was telling all of us, every day of his life, with the way he showed up for his patients. Today. Today. Pick it up.

Whether you knew Jim or not, this song is for anyone who has been waiting for tomorrow to do the thing they already know they have to do. It has helped me already, just writing the words. It might help you too.

Click here to listen to “Pick It Up” on Suno. (https://suno.com/song/ff3a9beb-f7f7-4950-85d6-5935e7eb83b7)

If it moves you, please share it. The link is free, the song is free.

If you have your own painful experience and you want to try the practice, write the lyrics yourself, even if you have never written before. Do it. Lyrics, for an experience this big, are easier than you think. You are not writing a book. You are writing five verses about something true. That is enough.

The manifesto

I am still here.

I lost my mother at twenty-seven. I lost my best friend at fifty-five. The universe could have broken me a dozen times over and did not.

I am choosing presence. I am choosing community. I am choosing to use this loss the way Jim would want me to use it: as fuel, not anchor. I am choosing to be the kind of fifty-five-year-old who is building toward the seventy-two-year-old Jim was, instead of the kind of fifty-five-year-old mourning the loss of him.

This is my manifesto. Jim is gone. His ethos is in my pocket. The torch is mine.

If you have lost someone, last year, last decade, thirty years ago, go to the next celebration of life you are invited to. Stay for the second hour, not the first. Sit on the grass. Hug the people you have not hugged in fifteen years. Let yourself be ambushed by grace.

And then pick up the torch.

Carry it well.

— Jorge

This Substack is not medical advice. Talk to your doctor about any medication changes.

Today at 3:30pm we gather at Ventura Cove Park to honor Dr. Jim Novak. The address is 3209 Gleason Road. Wear what you would wear to the beach. Bring nothing but yourself.

I want to tell you why we are doing it there, of all the places we could have done it.

For the last two years of his life, Jim spent his Wednesdays and Thursdays in Pacific Beach feeding strangers. Not patients. Not friends. Strangers. He did it through a quiet, nine-year operation called God’s Kitchen, run by a husband-and-wife team named Chris and Irene Ibanez. They have served well over three million meals out of a single van. They have no website. No nonprofit status. No donation page. No flyers. They do not advertise. The people they feed find them by word of mouth, the way real medicine has always traveled.

Chris told me yesterday why they do it that way. He said the government would tie his hands, and he wants to be free. He said they do not photograph the people they serve, ever, because it is not picture day for them. He said his job is to read the signs and flow with the day. Jim loved every word of that. Jim loved Chris and Venus, and they loved him.

I sat with Chris on the phone yesterday and asked him what he wanted me to tell you. He said something I have not been able to stop thinking about.

He said: most of the people who live on the outside have their guard up all the time. They have to. The world has earned that guard. But on Thursdays at the Cove, he said, their guards are down. And when your guard is down, you can finally start to receive what you were supposed to receive — a hot meal, a hug, a word, a name.

That is what my best friend was doing with the last Thursdays of his life.

He was not building anything. He was not posting about it. He was not adding it to a CV. He stood at a grill, served food, talked to people whose names most of us will never learn, and went home, and came back the next Wednesday, and did it again. Two days a week. Quietly. For two years.

Chris told me his “outside family” — the people on the street who knew Jim from those Thursdays — has been calling all week. They saw the news. They want to come. Some of them knew Jim better than people who shared a last name with him.

That is who he was when nobody was looking. That is who all of us should hope to be.

So here is what today looks like. Chris will speak first at 3:30. He hits hard and he hits fast — that is his way, and Jim loved it. Anyone who wants to say a few words about Jim can. Keep it short. Then the line opens, and the outside family is served first. There will be a tent for Jim with photos, candles you can light, and a bottle of wine and a cigar he and Chris were supposed to share. We will share it for him.

If you come, find Chris and Venus when you arrive. Thank them. They are the reason today is what it is, and they were the reason Jim’s last two years had the shape they had.

Come as you are. Casual. No need to dress up. Just bring whatever piece of Jim you carry. Tell a story. Serve a plate. Be the light he was.

And if you cannot make it: do the one thing. The thing you have been putting off. The call, the apology, the appointment, the dream. That is the only tribute Jim would actually want.

His guard was always down. Today, let yours be too.

Haven't read Jim's story yet? Start here: The Jim Novak Creed.

Ventura Cove Park, 3209 Gleason Rd, San Diego — Thursday, April 30 at 3:30pm. To contribute to God’s Kitchen in Jim’s name, reach Chris Ibanez at (619) 929-7669.

One of my greatest honors was when Khloé Kardashian called and asked me to join Revenge Body. Working with her—and a young woman who had never lost weight before—proved how powerful self-belief, support, and smart nutrition can be. Every person deserves that transformation.

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When you’re fasting when is the best time to workout?

Well take it from my client Dorinda Medley, if you want to get a flat stomach make sure to exercise before you break your fast. Listen to my Radio Andy interview with her about Zero Hunger Water.

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In February 1998, I lost my mom, the woman who believed I could one day meet Oprah Winfrey. Eight months later, that wish came true. I was invited to The Oprah Winfrey Show to share how I coached clients online—back when “the internet” was a new frontier. Yahoo had just named me the most downloaded fitness trainer of 1997, and Oprah was fascinated by the idea of helping people transform through a screen. During a break, I told her my mom had passed earlier that year and had always said, “Take photos of the people who change your life.” But security had taken my camera. Oprah stopped the crowd, tapped her microphone, and said, “Here’s a secret—if you don’t ask for what you want, you’ll never get it.” She agreed to take the photo you see here, and that single moment became the defining lesson of my life and career.

That day, I learned that courage opens doors gratitude alone can’t. More than twenty-five years later, I’m still training people online—still living that lesson—and forever grateful to my mom and to Oprah for helping me believe that asking can change everything.

You can begin your transformation right now below.

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My best friend passed away yesterday.

I was supposed to have lunch with Jim this week. He’d returned my call a few days earlier and we’d missed each other, so I stopped by his house yesterday morning just to check in. That’s when I learned he was already gone.

I want to tell you about him, because I believe you need to hear this story today, whoever you are and whatever you are putting off.

The man who saved my life

Jim Novak was my doctor for more than two decades. He was also my friend, my teacher, and on more than one occasion, the reason I am still here to write to you this morning.

When I had hepatitis C, he cured me — and he did it at a time when most doctors were still telling patients to manage it and wait. When my father was handed a terminal diagnosis, Jim quietly rewrote the ending: he gave my dad thirty more years of life. Thirty. Think about that.

In 2021, I was carrying the hardest year of my life — a second divorce, bankruptcy, the recent loss of my father, and I was carrying grief from several fractured relationships. I wanted to end my own life. My dear friend Mike Koenig grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Try ketamine IV before you do anything you cannot take back.” Jim delivered it. Seven sessions. He never charged me a dollar, because he knew I did not have a dollar to give. That is who he was.

I want to say something here that I could not have said five years ago, because I did not know it yet. None of those losses caused my suicidal thinking. I did. I had forgotten every tool I had ever been taught — over 30 years of Tony Robbins seminars, the whole teaching that we trigger ourselves and that our own character defects create our own misery. The grief I was caring from several fractured relationships, was what the universe used to wake me up. Those losses are, today, the greatest gifts of my life. They are the reason I grew up. Jim understood that, which is why he handed me ketamine and then walked me straight back into the rooms where I would learn the actual medicine: the Serenity Prayer, the fourth step, and the truth that no one but me is responsible for my peace.

Breakfast on Garnet

Here is something I have not told many people, and I am telling you today because it matters.

For years now, my mornings have been built around two things: my AA meeting at 7 a.m., and the time I spend afterward with my unofficial sponsor JJ. JJ and I walk Pacific Beach. We talk about the steps, about surrender, about what I am carrying that I am not supposed to be carrying. We end up, more often than not, at breakfast spot on Garnet right near Jim’s office.

And Jim was always there.

Not every time — but often enough that it stopped feeling like a coincidence years ago. I would be sitting across from my sponsor, working the hardest hour of my week, and Jim would walk in for his coffee, and he would see us, and he would nod, and sometimes he would sit for a minute. He was doing his own morning, and I was doing mine, and the two of them kept crossing on purpose.

Yesterday morning, April 20, I went to my meeting at 7 a.m. I did what I always do. And then, when I would normally have headed to meet JJ, something in me said drive to Jim’s house instead. I did not know why. I just went.

I want you to hear what I am saying. I did not find Jim. The universe walked me there. I was doing God’s will before sunrise, and the universe used that moment of surrender to put me on the porch where I was supposed to be. If that does not tell you something is running the show, I do not know what would.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

courage to change the things I can,

and wisdom to know the difference.

If you have never learned the Serenity Prayer, learn it today. Say it out loud. It is the shortest, most honest piece of writing about the relationship between a human being and everything larger than a human being that I have ever found. It is also the exact thing Jim Novak lived by, whether he ever called it that or not. He trusted his gut. He followed what was true. He accepted what he could not change and he changed what he could, and he was at peace with the difference.

Trust your gut. Trust the universe. It has got your back, even in the mornings that look like bad news.

❦

The regret research nobody wants to read

Bronnie Ware was a palliative-care nurse in Australia who sat with dying people for years. She began writing down what they told her at the end. She turned it into a book that has now sold over a million copies in thirty-two languages. Here, verbatim, are the five regrets she heard most often:

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

• I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

• I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Ware noticed something else: most people, she wrote, had not honored even half of their dreams — and they had to die knowing it was because of choices they had made, or not made.

Read that sentence again. Slowly.

❦

Jim never carried a single one of those regrets

That is the most important thing I can tell you about him, and it is the whole reason I am writing this today.

Jim lived the life that was true to him. He chose integrative medicine when the establishment ridiculed it. He spent three years of his twenties on Native American reservations with the National Health Service Corps because that is where he was needed. He opened his own practice in 1985 and ran it his way for forty years. He questioned everything, he read constantly, he sat at UPW and Date With Destiny beside me more times than I can count, and he lived by what he learned.

He told his feelings. He stayed in touch. He flew to New York with me to stand beside a younger author who needed a doctor’s credibility in the room, and then dragged me through Whole Foods at Columbus Circle teaching me which endives are best for the liver. He went to yoga retreats. He hiked to the top of Mount Soledad with me last Christmas Day and told me, as we came down, not to let GLP-1s become another Adderall — “use them as a jump-start, not as a crutch.”

He let himself be happy. He fed strangers every Thursday at Ventura Cove Park with God’s Kitchen. He was, until his last morning, the light.

What the data says about waiting

The research on midlife is brutal if you read it honestly. A meta-analysis of ten studies covering over 136,000 adults, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, found that people with a strong sense of purpose have roughly a 17 percent lower risk of death from any cause. Boyle’s work out of Rush University showed high-purpose adults had a 40 percent lower mortality rate than low-purpose peers. Hill and Turiano, tracking six thousand adults for fourteen years, concluded that purposeful people simply live longer — and that it doesn’t matter when you find it. It only matters that you find it.

The Jim Novak Creed

So here is what I am doing, starting today, Tuesday, April 21, 2026. I am calling it the Jim Novak Creed, and I am challenging every one of you reading this to take it on with me for the next thirty days.

• Honor the dreams you have not yet honored. Write the book. Make the call. Forgive the sister. Tell the child. Take the action today that you would regret, at the end, having not taken.

• Be the light.

The one thing

Here is what Jim Novak would want me to leave you with today, and it is the whole point of this letter.

Jim lived his life by doing the most important thing first. The hardest thing. The thing everyone else was putting off. The treatment no one wanted to try. The therapy that required him to sit with his own pain. The career pivot when the old career stopped being true. The trip to see the grandkids instead of another week at the desk. The thank-you to the universe before the next complaint. The hike up Mount Soledad on a Christmas Day when he could have stayed home. He did the hard thing first, and everything else in his life fell into place behind it like dominoes.

So here is the only question that matters this morning.

What have you been putting off?

Not the easy thing. Not the small thing. The one thing — the one you know in your heart represents the whole chain of positive change that needs to happen in your life. The treatment you keep rescheduling. The conversation you keep rehearsing and never having. The call to the estranged son. The resignation letter. The plane ticket. The 7 a.m. meeting you have been meaning to walk into. The doctor’s appointment. The book you were meant to write. The apology you owe. The dream you keep telling yourself there will be time for.

Think of that one thing right now. You already know what it is. You knew before I asked.

Be like Jim Novak, and do it today. Not tomorrow. Not this weekend. Not when the quarter closes or the kids are back in school or the weather turns. Today. Because today is the only day we have, and Jim proved that in the most final way he could yesterday morning.

That is the Celebration of Life he would actually want.

Come say goodbye

We will gather to honor Jim on Thursday, April 30, 2026, at 3:30pm, at Ventura Cove Park, 3209 Gleason Road, San Diego. We are hosting it alongside God’s Kitchen — the Pacific Beach meal service where Jim volunteered every Thursday — so that the work he loved continues on the day we honor him. To coordinate with the family or to contribute to God’s Kitchen in Jim’s name, please reach Chris Ibanez at (619) 929-7669.

If you cannot be there in person, then do the one thing. That is the only tribute Jim would want.

He did things now. He never postponed a kindness. He never waited for the right moment to tell the truth. He was the light, and now he is part of the light, and the rest of us are the torch.

Carry it well.

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Download my FREE Belly Goes First guidebook and start now. Midlife hunger isn’t willpower. It’s signals. Here’s how we shut it down.

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The real culprit behind physical hunger is mineral deficiency. Modern soil depletion and decades of salt-shaming leave your body craving magnesium, potassium, and sodium — the actual regulators of physical hunger. Zero Hunger Water® puts those minerals back. One stick in water, zero calories, no stimulants — just pure mineral science that helps you eat less naturally.

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Step 1 — Longevity is the goal. Not just lifespan — healthspan. The years you spend feeling strong, sharp, and fully alive. My operating philosophy: Feel Great All Day. Every protocol I teach serves that north star.

Step 2 — Your waist circumference is how you measure it. Jack LaLanne said “your waistline is your lifeline” and modern science has proven him right. Visceral fat — the deep belly fat around your organs — actively secretes inflammatory chemicals (Fontana et al., Diabetes, 2007: 50% higher IL-6 than peripheral fat). A 2014 pooled analysis of 650,000 adults found every two-inch increase in waist circumference raised mortality risk by 7–9% independent of BMI. The thresholds: under 32 inches for women, under 37 inches for men. Forget the scale. Measure your waist and learn more.

Step 3 — Time-Restricted Eating is how you reduce it. In 2022, Mingqian He and colleagues published in Cell Reports Medicine a randomized trial comparing TRE (8-hour eating window) against a low-carb diet in 169 adults. TRE reduced visceral fat by 13 cm². The low-carb group gained visceral fat. The difference was statistically significant. My book The Cruise Control Diet covers this protocol. My colleague Dr. Jason Fung from Toronto leads the field.

Step 4 — Zero Hunger Water solves the #1 obstacle. The reason most people fail at TRE is mineral-deficiency hunger. When insulin drops during fasting, kidneys release sodium — creating electrolyte debt that mimics intense hunger. Morris et al. (2008) showed sodium deprivation makes sugar-craving neurons 10 times more reactive. A 2021 meta-analysis of 32 RCTs linked magnesium deficiency to increased body mass. Zero Hunger Water® — sodium, potassium, and magnesium — fills that gap. Every two hours during your fasting window. The false hunger disappears.

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I had a camera, a small Canon, and a question about belly fat. I wanted him to explain, in his words, exactly why belly fat was dangerous — in the way only a cardiac surgeon who had held a human liver in his hands could explain it. What came out of that conversation is something I have been thinking about ever since, and something that now sits at the center of Step Two of my Longevity Map.

What he taught me about visceral fat — and why it is not like any other fat

Dr. Oz opened with something that stopped me cold. He described a type of fat he had famously brought onto Oprah’s show: omental fat. The omentum is a layer of fatty tissue that sits beneath the muscles of your abdomen, wrapped around your internal organs. You cannot pinch it. You cannot see it in a mirror. You can carry an enormous quantity of it and look, from the outside, like someone who is perhaps just a little soft around the middle.

But unlike the fat on your arms, your thighs, or your hips — which he dismissed, almost fondly, as costing you “a couple of days” — visceral fat is metabolically dangerous in a way that is categorically different.

“That fat is way inside of you, under the muscles of your belly. Those of you who worry about your fat thighs — that’ll cost you a couple of days. But that’s not what a doctor worries about. — Dr. Mehmet Oz, Columbia University, 2008”

Here is the biology he laid out, and it has held up perfectly almost 20 years since: visceral fat is positioned directly adjacent to the portal vein, the large vessel that carries blood from the digestive organs to the liver. In our ancestral past, this placement was a feature, not a bug. When famine struck — and famine struck often — the body could rapidly mobilize that visceral fat, send it through the portal vein to the liver, and convert it to fuel. Visceral fat was the body’s emergency reserve, sitting right next to the expressway that led to the organs that needed it most.

The problem, as Dr. Oz described it with a wry precision I have never forgotten, is that we solved the famine problem but kept accumulating the fat. You can get a carton of milk out of the fridge in thirty seconds now, he said. Our ancestors spent all day hunting. We have the storage system of people who needed reserves, living in a world with no shortage at all.

And so the visceral fat accumulates. Because it sits on that portal vein expressway, everything it secretes — the inflammatory chemicals, the adipokines, the toxic signals — goes straight to the liver. He described three consequences that together constitute metabolic syndrome: the liver, poisoned by those signals, begins producing bad cholesterol, creating the conditions for heart disease. The liver, irritated and overwhelmed, stops responding to insulin properly, leading to type 2 diabetes even in people with normal insulin levels. And the physical mass of the fat itself, pressing against the kidneys, causes them to misread the body’s fluid pressure signals and drive blood pressure up. High cholesterol. High blood sugar. High blood pressure. The three-headed monster of metabolic syndrome, all traceable back to that one fat depot sitting beneath your navel.

“Belly fat gives you high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and high blood cholesterol.” And then he added the number I have never forgotten: a lot of belly fat strips, on average, more than fifteen years from your life.

The tape measure moment — and the formula everyone needs to know

This is the part of the video I want you to watch most carefully, because it is where Dr. Oz delivers something that I believe is one of the most practical and underused pieces of health guidance available to the general public.

He does not ask for BMI. He does not ask for weight. He pulls out a tape measure.

Here is the formula he gave me, and I am going to write it out clearly because it deserves to be written clearly. Your waist circumference should be no more than one half of your height. That is it. That is the number. If you are six feet tall — seventy-two inches — your waist should be no more than thirty-six inches. If you are five feet four — sixty-four inches — your waist should be no more than thirty-two inches. This formula works for children and adults alike, for men and for women, for every body type. It requires nothing but a tape measure and five seconds of your time.

For women: thirty-two and a half inches or less. For men: thirty-seven inches or less. But the formula — waist equals half your height — is the more precise and personal version.

I was thirty-seven years old and measuring twenty-nine and a half inches in that video. Dr. Oz declared me safe. He made me suck in — but safe.

Why this video is actually about time-restricted eating — even though neither of us called it that

There is a passage in this conversation that, when I listen to it now, sounds almost prophetic. Dr. Oz explained why our ancestors’ visceral fat was so responsive — why it could be mobilized so quickly when famine arrived. The answer was timing. During the periods of not eating — the famine periods, the hunting days, the long stretches between meals — the body preferentially drew from visceral fat because of its direct access to the portal vein. It was the most accessible store, sitting right next to the highway that led to the liver.

What he was describing, without using the term, was exactly what researchers have since confirmed through randomized controlled trials. In 2022, a landmark study published in Cell Reports Medicine by Mingqian He and colleagues tested an eight-hour eating window against a low-carbohydrate diet in 169 adults with metabolic syndrome. The TRE group reduced their visceral fat area by thirteen square centimeters. The low-carb group actually gained visceral fat. The mechanism is precisely what Dr. Oz described in that hallway in 2008: when insulin drops during the fasting window, the body turns first to the fat depot with the easiest access to the portal vein. Your belly goes first.

He called it “famine time.” We now call it time-restricted eating, or intermittent fasting. The biology is identical. The science has only gotten stronger since that July afternoon at Columbia.

Where Zero Hunger Water fits into this picture

The reason most people cannot sustain time-restricted eating is not lack of discipline. It is mineral deficiency. When insulin drops during the fasting window, the kidneys excrete sodium at an accelerated rate — and that sodium loss drags potassium and magnesium with it. The body, depleted of those three minerals, fires a hunger signal that is neurologically indistinguishable from genuine caloric need. Research by Morris, Na, and Johnson, published in Physiology & Behavior in 2008 — the same year as this video — showed that sodium deprivation causes the sugar-sensitive neurons in the brain’s taste-processing center to become up to ten times more reactive. The hunger is real. The calories are not needed. The mineral is.

Zero Hunger Water — sodium, potassium, and magnesium, zero calories, no GLP-1 required — is the solution to that specific problem. It restores the mineral balance that makes the fasting window bearable, and in doing so, allows the mechanism Dr. Oz described in 2008 to actually work: your body enters the fat-burning state, it draws from the visceral fat sitting on the portal vein highway, and your belly goes first.

This is not a new idea. Dr. Oz was teaching the biology of it before most people had heard the phrase intermittent fasting. I am just finally building the product that makes it effortless.

What I want you to do right now

First, watch the video. It is just under six minutes.

Second, get a tape measure. Measure your waist at the belly button, over the hips. Take the number seriously. This is not about how you look. It is about your liver, your insulin response, your blood pressure, and the fifteen or more years that excessive visceral fat will steal from you if you let it.

Third, if your number is higher than half your height — or for women higher than thirty-two and a half, for men higher than thirty-seven — download my free Belly Goes First guidebook. It has a nineteen-day challenge with a built-in tracker for your waist circumference measurements at days one, seven, fourteen, and nineteen. It is free. It is designed for both men and women. And it is the entry point to the Longevity Map I have been building for thirty years.

Download FREE Guidebook

Fourth, if you want to do this with me in real time — join me on Monday evenings at five o’clock Pacific for our live coaching session. That is an invitation from someone who is in it alongside you.

“Your waistline is your lifeline. It was on Jack LaLanne’s belt buckle decades before Dr. Oz confirmed it at Columbia. It is still true today. Go measure.”

I grew up as the only boy in my mom’s water-aerobics class (clueless then… makes sense now!). As a Catholic gay Latino man and proud father of two sons, my story took time. I was married for nine years to an incredible woman—my boys’ mom—who supported me completely when I finally understood who I was after reading Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why, and Ricky Martin’s book, Me. Those books helped me accept that being gay isn’t a choice, no matter what I was told growing up.

Today, at 55, my sons are in college, and yes—this program works for men too. Wellness is wellness. Even the one and only Steve Harvey joined in, and lost 11 pounds. So gentlemen—come on in.

Ladies—you already know it works. Bring your husbands, boyfriends, brothers.

Bottom line: this journey is for everyone. Let’s do this together.

You can begin your transformation right now below.

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Most of the women I work with are over forty, and they feel like their bodies have suddenly gone rogue. They eat less, they move more, yet the stubborn belly fat that appeared seemingly overnight refuses to budge. If this sounds like you, I need you to know that you are not broken. You are simply dealing with a specific biological force that requires a specific biological solution. Midlife is not the end; it is the upgrade.

To fix the weight, we have to understand the fat. The fat on your arms or hips is subcutaneous fat. While it might frustrate you in the mirror, it isn’t what is threatening your health. The real enemy is visceral fat. This is the toxic fat stored deep inside your abdomen, wrapping around your vital organs. Visceral fat is not just idle storage; it is an active, pro-inflammatory organ that continuously secretes chemicals into your system, leading to insulin resistance, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome.

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In 2022, a landmark study was published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine by lead author Mingqian He and a team of researchers. This article is one of the most critical pieces of science I have read in my career because it proves exactly how we win this battle. The researchers conducted a randomized trial to determine the effects of a low-carbohydrate diet against an 8-hour time-restricted eating schedule.

The results were a revelation. The study found that while both groups lost weight, only the 8-hour time-restricted eating window significantly reduced visceral fat area and improved metabolic syndrome markers like fasting blood glucose and uric acid. In fact, time-restricted eating was superior to a standard low-carbohydrate diet for reducing visceral obesity.

Why does this work? When you restrict your eating to an 8-hour window, you allow your insulin levels to drop for sixteen hours. This drop in insulin signals your kidneys to release sodium, and it triggers a metabolic switch where your body stops burning the food you just ate and starts drawing fuel from your internal stores. As the Mingqian He study confirmed, your visceral fat is the first place your body goes for fuel when you enter that state. Your belly goes first.

However, there is a catch. When insulin drops and your kidneys release sodium, your body enters electrolyte debt. This deficiency mimics intense hunger and amplifies sugar-craving neurons by nearly tenfold. This is why most diets fail: you aren’t fighting a lack of willpower; you are fighting a mineral deficiency. This “internal starvation” hijacks your appetite and makes you feel like you are starving even while you are carrying thousands of stored calories in your fat tissue.

This is why I created Zero Hunger Water. By giving your body the specific proprietary blend of sodium, potassium, and magnesium it needs, you turn off the Physical Hunger signals. This allows you to comfortably reach that fat-burning window where your belly goes first.

I am pouring the culmination of my thirty-year career into my upcoming book, Zero Hunger Plan. But I don’t want you to wait until next year to start your upgrade. I want you to have the science and the strategy today. I have created a free, printer-friendly guidebook called Belly Goes First that outlines the 19-day challenge you need to transform your health.

We are starting this 19-Day Challenge together as a community this coming Monday, April 6th, which is Easter Monday. It is the perfect time for a fresh start. Download the guidebook, sign the commitment on page 26, and let’s make your belly go first so your life can go forward.

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Zero Hunger Water® test users reported losing significant weight (e.g., Barbara Rastello lost 21 pounds in 19 days, Julie Gushlaw lost 84 pounds in 11 months), reduced cravings, increased energy, better sleep, and improved kidney function. It’s also lowers stress hormones, which are linked to belly fat.
Read the full article.


Electrolyte Science (ranked 1–9; sodium first, then potassium/magnesium)

1. NHANES (n=38,722): lower sodium intake is linked to higher added sugar intake, implying low‑salt diets can drive compensatory sweet cravings. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32762131/#:~:text=was%2043,the%20associated%20high%20sugar%20intake
   

2. Systematic review of 23 human trials: sodium restriction worsens insulin resistance and raises counter‑regulatory hormones, a metabolic state that increases appetite. https://journalofmetabolichealth.org/index.php/jmh/article/view/78/242
   

3. Comprehensive review: sodium deficiency powerfully activates salt appetite and rewires reward circuits; repletion normalizes hedonic tone—mechanism for “false hunger.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4433288/#:~:text=PMC%20pmc,82%2C%20118
   

4. Controlled rat study: adding NaCl cut food intake by ~10–25% and reduced body‑fat gain—evidence that sodium status can directly suppress feeding. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1252395/#:~:text=containing%2013%20g%20NaCl/kg,%20or,water%20had%20a
   

5. Independent institutional repository of the NHANES analysis confirming low sodium ↔ higher sugar intake (secondary source for #1’s finding). https://touroscholar.touro.edu/nymc_fac_pubs/2785/#:~:text=51.2,the%20associated%20high%20sugar%20intake
   

6. One‑year program in metabolic syndrome: increasing dietary potassium was the strongest predictor of BMI reduction (~45% of variance), supporting potassium’s satiety/weight‑control role. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6627830/#:~:text=regression%20analysis%20revealed%20that%2045,239)%20and
   

7. Meta‑analysis of 18 RCTs: oral magnesium improves fasting glucose and insulin sensitivity in at‑risk groups—blunting crash‑and‑crave cycles that fuel appetite. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27530471/#:~:text=,sensitivity%20parameters
   

8. Review: magnesium stimulates cholecystokinin (CCK) release; across studies, it suppresses hunger, lowers intake, and reduces body weight (magnesium glycinate preferred for bioavailability). https://www.mattioli1885journals.com/index.php/progressinnutrition/article/view/9081#:~:text=Aim:%20Magnesium%20has%20many%20important,influence%20of%20cholecystokinin%20on%20hunger/satiety
   

9. Alternate anchor to #1 (same NHANES cohort) again showing low sodium associates with higher sugar consumption—reaffirming the sodium–sweet craving connection. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32762131/#:~:text=showed%20that%20among%2038%20722,health%20may%20be%20explained%20at
   
   

   

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Here’s my answer.

I was a twenty-something kid at UCSD studying political science, carrying extra weight, and trying to figure out what I was even doing on this planet. I didn’t know the nineties were about to hand me everything — my career, my purpose, and one of the most important lessons I’d ever learn.

My mom Gloria was alive. She was luminous — a dancer, a teacher of elegance, the person who cheered loudest for every wild idea I had. My dad believed in me too. When I told them I wanted to become a wellness trainer after attending a Tony Robbins seminar, they didn’t flinch. They helped me create CD audio kits — not tapes, CDs, because that mattered then — and my career was born.

I started an entertainment magazine in college called College Scene with my sister and my roommate Andrew. I organized Learning Annex seminars at the Hyatt in San Diego, standing up in front of rooms of strangers holding a five-pound model of fat, teaching people that the belly was a mind problem before it was a body problem.

And then I had the idea to use video — before YouTube, before Instagram, before anyone knew what a content creator was. I launched Fit Now, interviewed Richard Simmons, became friends with Bob Green (Oprah’s trainer), and eventually landed in Chicago at Harpo Studios.

Harpo. You know what that spells backwards.

My mom had passed away on February 5th, 1998 — just months before that taping. I was grieving and grateful at the same time. And when the show was over and I was standing feet from Oprah, I did something that scared me.

I asked.

I told her about my mom. About the dream she had for me. And I asked if we could take a photo together — something I could hold onto to remember what was possible.

Oprah stood up in front of her entire studio audience, told them I was the only guest who had ever asked for that photo, and called her photographer over herself.

That photo is the one I keep. Not because of who’s in it — but because of what it taught me.

The greatest lesson of my nineties wasn’t from a seminar. It wasn’t from a bestseller. It was this: ask for what you want. Because if you don’t ask, the answer is always no.

Tony Robbins taught me to change my identity. But Oprah taught me to use my voice.

Now I’m 55. Still asking. Still showing up. Working on my 40th book, The Zero Hunger Plan, and inviting you to join me this Monday at 5 PM Pacific Time for a live coaching session where new members get an advance draft of the book. I’ve got an 80% off code, a hardship discount for anyone who needs it, and 25 years of research on how to transform your health from the belly out.

The nineties were the decade I learned to ask.

This Monday is yours.

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I want to begin with a story that is very close to my heart. On February 5, 1998, I lost my mom, Gloria Cansino. She was a luminous actress from Mexico’s golden era of cinema in the 1940s and ‘50s, a lifelong dancer, and a teacher of elegance. She was only in her sixties when she passed. In her later years, years of dancing left her with severe hip pain. Her doctors recommended a hip replacement, but she hesitated. It felt risky, even unnecessary. So she did what so many people in midlife do: she tried to manage the pain herself with ibuprofen, day after day. None of us realized the danger of long-term use. Over time, that decision — made from courage and naivety, not neglect — damaged her kidneys. Dialysis followed. I watched her radiant energy fade.

Here is the contrast that haunts me and drives me: my grandmother — my mom’s mother — lived to 103 years old. Same bloodline. Same kitchen. Two completely different endings. The difference was not genetics. It was the decisions each woman made in midlife, and the information she had when she made them. My mom didn’t lose her life because she didn’t care. She lost it because she didn’t have the right information at the right time.

Eight months after I lost her, I was invited onto The Oprah Winfrey Show. That appearance launched my career. But her death launched my mission. Thirty years and thirty-nine books later, everything I do still comes back to one question: What do people in midlife need to know that Gloria didn’t know — that would have given her thirty more years? That question is why I built The Longevity Map.

The Longevity Map: Four Steps That Change Everything

Step 1 — Longevity is the goal. Not just lifespan — healthspan. The years you spend feeling strong, sharp, and fully alive. My operating philosophy: Feel Great All Day. Every protocol I teach serves that north star.

Step 2 — Your waist circumference is how you measure it. Jack LaLanne said “your waistline is your lifeline” and modern science has proven him right. Visceral fat — the deep belly fat around your organs — actively secretes inflammatory chemicals (Fontana et al., Diabetes, 2007: 50% higher IL-6 than peripheral fat). A 2014 pooled analysis of 650,000 adults found every two-inch increase in waist circumference raised mortality risk by 7–9% independent of BMI. The thresholds: under 32 inches for women, under 38 inches for men. Forget the scale. Measure your waist.

Step 3 — Time-Restricted Eating is how you reduce it. In 2022, Mingqian He and colleagues published in Cell Reports Medicine a randomized trial comparing TRE (8-hour eating window) against a low-carb diet in 169 adults. TRE reduced visceral fat by 13 cm². The low-carb group gained visceral fat. The difference was statistically significant. My book The Cruise Control Diet covers this protocol. My colleague Dr. Jason Fung from Toronto leads the field.

Step 4 — Zero Hunger Water solves the #1 obstacle. The reason most people fail at TRE is mineral-deficiency hunger. When insulin drops during fasting, kidneys release sodium — creating electrolyte debt that mimics intense hunger. Morris et al. (2008) showed sodium deprivation makes sugar-craving neurons 10 times more reactive. A 2021 meta-analysis of 32 RCTs linked magnesium deficiency to increased body mass. Zero Hunger Water® — sodium, potassium, and magnesium — fills that gap. Every two hours during your fasting window. The false hunger disappears.

Where GLP-1 Drugs Fit — and Where They Don’t

GLP-1 medications like Ozempic quiet appetite, and when that happens, people transform. But the data shows: Kevin Hall’s 2024 modeling study in Obesity demonstrated GLP-1 weight loss plateaus at roughly twenty-four months. When patients stop, approximately two-thirds of lost weight returns within a year (STEP 1 Extension Trial, 2022). The side effects are well documented. These drugs need an off-ramp. My FREE guidebook is that off-ramp — but please keep reading. No GLP-1 required.

A Second Chance at Your Best Life

If you’re in midlife like me: midlife isn’t the end — it’s the upgrade. After twenty-four years in publishing and coaching — 39 books — I’ve discovered one core principle: when you control hunger, you control your life. Not just your weight. Your energy, your focus, your mood, your confidence — everything.

GLP-1 medications have made hunger control mainstream. But pills and shots can’t solve emotional hunger. Without that piece, people relapse. Because hunger isn’t just physical — it’s emotional and social. That’s where my FREE guidebook and club come in.

Download FREE Guidebook

Three Hungers: Minerals, Dopamine & Community

After decades of research and hundreds of interviews with the best minds in wellness, I built the Zero Hunger Method on three proven pillars, one for the body, one for the brain, and one for connection. Clinically, you can think of these as homeostatic hunger (physical), hedonic hunger (emotional), and conditioned hunger (social and environmental).

Pillar 1: Minerals for Physical Hunger

This is the straightforward science.

When I interviewed Dr. James DiNicolantonio, author of The Salt Fix, he said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Most hunger is not a calorie problem—it’s a mineral problem.” He showed me how often “hunger” is actually your body crying out for sodium, potassium, or magnesium. These minerals regulate your hunger hormones—ghrelin and leptin—and when you restore them, your cravings start to quiet almost instantly. You can watch our full conversation here: Dr. James DiNicolantonio on The Salt Fix.

My friend Robb Wolf, creator of LMNT electrolytes, reinforced the same principle in another one of my favorite interviews: Robb Wolf. He reminded me that our ancestors ate diets rich in natural minerals, while modern processed foods have stripped them out. Without minerals, the body sends constant “feed me” signals, even when calories are abundant. In this program, we’ll restore that natural balance—starting with something simple: my Zero Hunger Water®, a mineral-infused drink that you can make at home in seconds.

You’ll learn how to nourish at the cellular level so you finally feel full between meals, steady all day, and relaxed around food. When your body has what it truly needs, the noise of cravings fades into quiet.

Pillar 2: Dopamine for Emotional Hunger

This is where it gets personal—and powerful.

Emotional hunger isn’t about an empty stomach. It’s about an empty reward system. That’s the part of the brain that runs on dopamine, the chemical that fuels motivation, satisfaction, and joy. When dopamine is low, willpower feels impossible. When it’s balanced, discipline feels easy.

One of the greatest influences on my work has been Dr. Anna Lembke, the Stanford psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation. Her research helped me understand why so many people, even on perfect diets, still relapse. Modern life overwhelms us with quick dopamine hits—sugar, scrolling, shopping, streaming—until our brains forget how to feel real satisfaction.

Dopamine recovery isn’t about deprivation; it’s about replacement. In this program, we’ll rebuild dopamine naturally—with purpose, progress, and connection. You’ll learn to design your mornings to spark motivation, create micro-wins throughout the day, and wind down in ways that soothe instead of sabotage.

We’ll also talk about my longtime friend and colleague Dr. Jason Fung, whose work on insulin control complements everything we’re doing here. When you lower insulin (through smart carb control and intermittent fasting), your physical hunger stabilizes. Combine that with dopamine structure and your emotional hunger stabilizes, too.

Here’s the part I don’t talk about enough, but it is the truth.

I was raised by my grandmother in a very Catholic, traditional, conservative family. For years, I didn’t understand I was a gay Latin man. I carried shame I didn’t deserve, and I tried to be “perfect” to feel safe. That kind of stress doesn’t just drain your joy, it turns up cravings and food noise.

What changed my life was learning to see my story through a different lens, through God’s eyes, through the universe’s eyes. Not “Why is this happening to me?” but “How might this be happening for me?” Today, with AI, I can teach that perspective shift fast. Inside this club I’ll show you a simple monthly process to take a painful memory, extract the lesson, and turn it into an affirmation anthem, a personal song you can listen to on repeat (we can even use tools like Suno).

I even created a song for my grandmother called “What You Gave,” listen below to the first example — as well as a few others songs. You don’t need talent. You need truth, repetition, and the right soundtrack. And best of all, you will be able to quickly do the same. Click here to learn morel

Together, these two systems, minerals for the body, and dopamine for the mind — you actually live, form the foundation of a truly sustainable transformation.

Pillar 3: Community for Social Hunger

The final pillar is community. Because the best plan will collapse in isolation or with the wrong people. Conditioned hunger is real. It’s the hunger that shows up because of your environment, your routines, your stress, and your people. Who you’re with is who you become.

When you show up, share, and get seen, your brain gets the kind of reward it used to chase through food or distraction. Community gives dopamine meaning. It’s what turns good habits into lasting identity.

Here’s what that looks like:

• Weekly Live Coaching Session: Mondays at 5 p.m. PT on Google Meets, 60 minutes, led by me, Jorge Cruise.

  
  

  

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  What This Looks Like in Real Life

• Turn off physical hunger with 12 oz of Zero Hunger Water® upon rising. Continue every 2 hours or when hungry.

• Avoid emotional eating with positive dopamine wins.

• Stop doing midlife alone and join us Mondays live at 5 p.m. Pacific Time (PT).

Result: hunger quiets, afternoons smooth out, evenings stop unraveling. You look and feel like you again.

My Invitation to You

Midlife hunger isn’t willpower. It’s signals. Here’s how we shut it down.

Step 1 Minerals:
Physical/Homeostatic hunger drops fast with Zero Hunger Water.

Each week, we explore the foundation of physical hunger. Learn how sodium, magnesium, and potassium regulate metabolism and hunger signaling. Discover how Zero Hunger Water transforms your energy and fullness. Hear real success stories and track your water intake as we build accountability and momentum together.

Step 2 Dopamine:
Emotional/Hedonic eating calms with a simple rewiring routine (yes, with AI music tools that work).

Transform emotional eating by flipping limiting beliefs into empowering perspectives. Using discussion, AI tools like Suno, and inspiring client anthems, we rewire your dopamine system for motivation, focus, and joy. Explore weekly dopamine wins from cold plunges, prayer, and curated habits that energize your body and mind without sugar or carbs.

Step 3 Community:
Social/Conditioned hunger, cue-driven hunger loses power through four LIVE Google Meets/month (4 hours) with me.

The power of connection drives lasting change. Each session strengthens your network, fosters accountability, and builds friendships. Engage in group chats, meet members by name, and participate in Q&A and introductions to support your growth every week.

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