Happy Memorial Day.

I hope you’re somewhere good right now. A backyard. A beach. A grill with friends. Someone you love within arm’s reach. And I hope, before you got there, you took a minute to think about the men and women who made this country, and the ones who didn’t come home from making it.

I’m writing you from Del Mar this morning before the day really gets going. Because today, of all days, is the right day to start something.

Welcome to Issue 01.

I’m starting something today. Every Monday — and I mean every Monday, the kind of every Monday that becomes a habit before it becomes a tradition — I’m going to sit down and write you a letter. A real one. Not a marketing email, not a list of links, not a “here are five tips for a flatter belly.” A letter. From me. From the desk where I write my books, from the kitchen where I drink Zero Hunger Water, from the gym where I lift heavy at five in the morning, from the road when I’m on it, from wherever I happen to be when Monday arrives.

I’m calling it the Belly Goes First Report. The logo sits next to those three words on the new section of my site, and I’ll tell you why in a minute, because the name matters more than it looks.

But first — because if you’re going to commit to reading me every Monday, you should know what you’re signing up for — let me tell you what I’m going to do here.

I’m going to take you behind the curtain of a movement I’ve been building quietly for years and am finally bringing into the open. I’m going to introduce you to the people building it with me. I’m going to teach you the science I’m staking the rest of my career on. I’m going to share the conversations I’m having — at lunch, in the studio, on the road, on the phone at midnight — with the doctors, scientists, builders, and friends who are pulling this whole thing together. And I’m going to invite you in. Not as a reader. As a member.

There’s a reason this is Issue 01. Something started this past week that made writing Issue 01 the only thing I wanted to do today.

So let’s go.

Lunch at Las Brisas

This past week I drove up to Laguna Beach for a lunch I’d been looking forward to for months.

If you’ve never been to Las Brisas, let me set the scene. It sits on the cliffs at 361 Cliff Drive, just north of Laguna’s main beach — the building itself goes back to 1938, when it opened as the Victor Hugo Inn and pulled Hollywood stars up the coast for the view and the privacy. In 1979 it was reborn as Las Brisas — Spanish for the breezes — and it has been Laguna’s most iconic cliff-top restaurant ever since. Sea-to-table Mexican. White stucco. Bougainvillea. That particular Pacific blue that turns silver at the edges, and a patio where the temperature is exactly right and you stop noticing the temperature at all.

It has also, quietly, become the unofficial Zero Hunger Water office.

This is where Stephan, Jake, and I meet. This is where the real conversations happen. Not in a conference room. Not over Zoom. On a cliff in Laguna with the ocean below us and three plates of something fresh in front of us. If a company is the sum of where it gets built, then Zero Hunger Water is being built, at least in part, at Las Brisas.

And this past week I sat down there with two men I want you to know.

Stephan Peeler — my cofounder

The first is Stephan Peeler.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ve already met him. Two weeks ago I published a letter introducing Stephan as my cofounder at Zero Hunger Water. If you haven’t read it, go read it after this — it’s the long version of his story, and it matters.

Here is the short version.

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 believed in Zero Hunger Water for years before any of this was official. And his family’s roots trace directly to the founding of Cheerwine — the legendary cherry soft drink created in Salisbury, North Carolina in 1917, family-owned for one hundred and nine uninterrupted years and counting.

If you’ve spent time in the American South, you already know what Cheerwine means down there. For everyone else: imagine a brand so genuine, so rooted in community, so trusted across generations, that families seek it out in every city they move to and pass it down to their children the way you pass down a family recipe. That kind of loyalty does not come from marketing. It comes from a hundred years of doing the thing right and meaning it.

Stephan grew up watching that happen. Not reading about it in a case study. Watching it — up close, as a kid, in the offices and at the tables where his family ran the business — 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 him.

And he is a builder in his own right. He founded Carolina Malt House, a craft beverage company built on that same generational instinct. He created Peelers Apparel — a luxury activewear brand featured in Maxim and LA Weekly, the Stoic Series cutoffs I basically live in. Now Zero Hunger Water is his next chapter in beverage.

What Stephan brings to this partnership is not a spreadsheet about beverage. It is a hundred and nine years of family memory about what it feels like when a community falls in love with a brand and keeps loving it for generations. That is the rarest knowledge in this business. You cannot buy it, you cannot study your way into it, and you certainly cannot fake it. You either grew up inside it or you didn’t.

He did. And he is at the table with me, building this.

Jake Solomon — our COO

The second man at the table that afternoon was Jake Solomon.

Jake is our Chief Operating Officer. And if Stephan is the beverage DNA of Zero Hunger Water, Jake is the hands that are actually building the product.

The universe handed me Jake a couple of years ago, and like most of the best things in my life, I didn’t realize at the time how important the introduction was going to be. He started helping me long before there was anything official to help with. He worked alongside me on the formulation, on the operations, on the unglamorous behind-the-scenes work of turning an idea into a real thing you can hold in your hand. He did it because he believed in what we were building. Now we’re official, and Jake is at the center of the operation.

Here is what makes Jake the right person.

While he was still in college at San Diego State, Jake cofounded a beverage company called Bold Brew Coffee. He didn’t write a paper about beverage. He built one. He took it from zero to over five hundred retailers across all fifty states and served as its CEO until 2020. Most people in beverage spend a career trying to do what Jake did before he had a college degree.

After Bold Brew, he founded Solomon CPG Consulting in San Diego, where he has spent the years since helping founders in the food and beverage world take an idea on a napkin and turn it into a real product on a real shelf. He is, in the language of our industry, a CPG expert — consumer packaged goods — and that is exactly what Zero Hunger Water is. A consumer packaged good. A stick you can hold. A formulation that has to actually work, taste good, dissolve cleanly, hold up in a supply chain, sit on a shelf, and survive a thousand details most people never think about.

That is Jake’s world.

I am so honored that Jake is not just a part of Zero Hunger Water, but is literally helping us create the beverage itself — bringing it from the lab and into the CPG space where real people will actually buy it. While Stephan brings the family memory and I bring the wellness science, Jake builds the thing itself.

Without Jake, Zero Hunger Water is an idea. With Jake, it’s a product.

So that was the table at Las Brisas this past week. Stephan, Jake, and me. The beverage legacy, the CPG operator, and the wellness guy who’s been writing about hunger for a quarter of a century. And what we were really doing there — past the food, past the catch-up, past the laughs — was kicking something off.

What we’re actually building

Let me tell you what Zero Hunger Water is, in the plainest words I can put it in.

It’s a stick. You tear it open. You pour it into a glass of water. You stir, or you shake. You drink. You do that three times a day, minimum — morning, midday, evening — and any time hunger flares between meals.

That’s it.

No GLP-1. No prescription. No side effects. No needles. No insurance battle.

A stick. Water. Three a day. Minimum.

But what’s inside that stick — and why we are building this — is the entire story of what I’ve learned in the last six years of my life. So let me tell you that part now, because if you’re going to be part of this community, you should understand what’s really going on.

Belly goes first. Insulin first. Everything else second.

Most people who want to lose belly fat have been told the same lie their whole lives.

They’ve been told it’s about calories. Eat less, move more.

They’ve been told it’s about sodium. Cut the salt. Drink more water. Wash it out.

They’ve been told it’s about willpower. White-knuckle through hunger. Eat the salad. Resist the bread.

And then they’ve been told, when none of that works — and it doesn’t work, for almost anyone, almost ever — that there must be something wrong with them. That they don’t have the discipline. That they don’t want it badly enough. That they’re broken.

I want to tell you, on the record, in Issue 01 of a letter I’m going to write you every week for a long time: they are not broken. The advice was broken.

Belly fat — the visceral, around-the-middle, you-can’t-button-the-jeans kind of fat — is not primarily a calorie problem. It is an insulin problem. Insulin is the storage hormone. When insulin is high, your body stores fat, especially around your belly. When insulin is low, your body releases fat. That is the lever. It is not the only lever, but it is the one that controls almost everything downstream.

And what controls insulin?

Two things, mostly: the foods you eat that spike it — sugar, refined carbohydrates, anything sweet that doesn’t have to fight to get into your bloodstream — and the minerals in your body that govern how your cells respond to it.

That second part is the one nobody talks about.

Because here is the secret almost nobody is teaching: when your body is deficient in three particular minerals — sodium, potassium, and magnesium — your hunger is not a feeling. It is a signal. It is a flare your body is firing up the chain to say we need something. And because most of us in modern life have no idea what our body actually needs, we answer that flare with the only thing we know how to give it — sugar, carbs, more food, another snack, another bite — and we send our insulin up, and we store the fat, and we feel hungry an hour later, and we do it again.

Hunger is not a moral failing. Hunger is a mineral signal that has been misread for a generation.

That is the science. That is what Zero Hunger Water is built on. Three minerals — at the right doses, in the right ratios, in a stick that dissolves into water and tastes good enough to drink three times a day — that turn off the physical hunger signal at the source. And once that signal goes quiet, the cravings for sugar and carbs go with it. And once the cravings go, insulin comes down. And once insulin comes down, the belly does what the belly was always going to do once you stopped storing.

The belly goes first.

That’s the name. That’s the report. That’s the whole thing in three words.

But here’s what I’ve also learned — there are three hungers, not one

This is where I want to go further with you than almost any wellness book on the shelf will.

Because if minerals were the only problem, Zero Hunger Water by itself would be enough. And for some of you, it will be. For a lot of you, in fact, just turning off the physical hunger signal is the unlock you’ve been waiting twenty years for.

But for some of us — and I include myself in this, fully — there are two more hungers underneath the physical one. And if we don’t name them, we don’t solve them.

The first hunger is physical. That’s the mineral hunger. The signal your cells fire when they’re short on sodium, potassium, and magnesium. Zero Hunger Water turns this one off at the source.

The second hunger is emotional. This is the one we don’t like talking about. Emotional hunger is what happens when something inside you is hurting — old trauma, current stress, anxiety, loneliness, grief, anger you don’t know what to do with — and your brain reaches for the fastest, cheapest, most legal hit of dopamine it can find. Sugar. Carbs. Sometimes alcohol. Sometimes worse. The food isn’t the problem. The food is the medicine you’re using because nobody taught you a better medicine.

The third hunger is social. This one is even sneakier. Social hunger is the hunger that comes from your environment — the people you’re around, the cues in your home, the rituals you’ve built without realizing it. The dish of candy on the counter. The bottle of wine at six. The late-night TV ritual that turns into a snack ritual. The friend group that drinks every weekend. None of these are about your body. All of them produce dopamine. And all of them, unchecked, will keep your belly exactly where it is.

These three hungers are the framework of everything I am doing for the rest of my life.

Zero Hunger Water solves the first one. The next one I write is about the second. And I am building, right now, an entire coaching program for the third — which I’ll get to in a minute.

The doctor who got me here

I have to tell you about a book.

In the fall of 2020, in the middle of COVID, I was at a point in my career where I thought I knew most of what there was to know about hunger. I’d been writing about it for two decades. I’d been on television. I’d been a contributor at USA Today. I had eight million books in the world. I thought I had the picture.

And then I read a book called The Salt Fix, by Dr. James DiNicolantonio.

The cover alone stopped me. A salt shaker, photographed like a prescription bottle. Like a drug. The subtitle said Why the Experts Got It All Wrong and How Eating More Could Save Your Life.

[Image placeholder: cover of THE SALT FIX by Dr. James DiNicolantonio]

I want you to sit with that subtitle for a second.

Why the experts got it all wrong.

Not “why some experts got some things partly wrong.” Not “here’s a nuanced rethink.” The cover of this book is making a claim, in public, that every doctor and every dietitian and every public health agency that has ever told you to eat less salt has been wrong about one of the most fundamental nutrients in the human body.

And he was right. He is right. I read that book in three nights, and by the third night I knew that almost everything I’d been teaching about hunger control needed to be rebuilt from the foundation up. Because what Dr. DiNicolantonio had figured out — and what the data has now been backing up for years — is that minerals, and salt in particular, are not the villains. They are the deficiency. People are not overeating because they are weak. They are overeating because they are mineral-deprived, and their bodies are screaming.

This is the conversation that started everything. This is the chain. Dr. DiNicolantonio’s book changed my career. I went on to interview him four separate times, plus a summary conversation that ties them all together — almost four hours of footage that, taken as a whole, is the most complete public explanation of the mineral side of hunger I have ever seen anywhere.

[Link placeholder: Jorge’s four-part interview series with Dr. James DiNicolantonio + the summary episode]

If you want the deep version of the science I’m pointing at, that’s it. Watch one. Watch all four. Watch the summary. It will rewire what you think you know about food.

And on Friday — Dr. Jason Fung returns

Which brings me to the announcement I’ve been waiting two months to make.

This Friday, I’m releasing Part 2 of the conversation I recorded earlier this year with Dr. Jason Fung.

If you don’t know Dr. Fung’s work, you should. He is one of the most important voices in obesity medicine alive today. He runs a clinic in Toronto and has spent decades — decades — sitting across from real patients with real metabolic disease and figuring out, from the inside, what actually works. He is not a TikTok doctor. He is not a wellness influencer. He is a clinician who has been doing this longer than most of his critics have been awake to the problem.

And his new book, The Hunger Code, is — and I want to be careful here because I don’t say this often — one of the best things I’ve read on hunger since DiNicolantonio’s The Salt Fix.

What’s remarkable about Fung’s book is that he arrived at the mineral conclusion independently. From a completely different angle. As an obesity expert, in a clinic, treating thousands of patients, he kept coming back to the same observation: hunger is regulated physically, not just behaviorally, and the lever underneath the physical part is mineral. Two of the smartest people in this field, working in two different countries with two different patient populations, walking down two different paths, ended up at the same door.

That door is what Zero Hunger Water is built on.

The conversation Jason and I recorded in studio earlier this year is — I’ll just say it — the best podcast I’ve ever made. Part 2 drops Friday. I’ll send the link when it’s live. If you’ve been waiting for the science behind the brand, this is it.

I wanted to release it sooner. I held it because every ounce of my attention for the last few months had to be on Zero Hunger Water — the entity, the formulation, the team, the launch on April 8. Now that the company is real and the website is live and Jake and Stephan are at the table, I can finally hand you the rest of the science.

Friday. Mark your calendar.

Now — here is what happens when you join us at zerohungerwater.com

This is the part I want you to read twice.

We just launched zerohungerwater.com — a brand-new home for the community we are building around this product. And today, on Memorial Day, I want to invite you to put your name in.

There are already over a thousand of you following along on Instagram and around six hundred on email. If you’re one of them and you have not yet added your name at zerohungerwater.com, do it today. That’s the list. That’s the room.

Here is what you get when you join.

One. Early access when we launch this fall. Zero Hunger Water is coming to market this fall, and the people on the zerohungerwater.com list get first shot. Before the public. Before the press. Before anyone. When the doors open, you walk in first.

Two. A seat at the focus group table. If you want to actually taste Zero Hunger Water before it’s out in the world — give us your real-time feedback, help us shape the final product — there are a handful of seats at the focus group. You sign up at the community, and if we need your taste buds, we reach out. You will be among the first humans on earth to drink this.

Three — and this is the one I really want you to hear. My weekly coaching, free.

Here is what that means.

Every Monday at 5 PM Pacific, I do a live coaching call with my community. Not a webinar. Not a pre-recorded video. Live, with me, with my actual face on the screen, taking actual questions from actual people. This is normally a ninety-seven-dollar-a-month coaching program — the same one I’ll be offering as part of the Zero Hunger Water subscription when we launch this fall, alongside the three-pack-a-month plan that gets the product to your door automatically.

If you join the community at zerohungerwater.com now, before we launch, you get those Monday calls for free. Starting now. Today. As in: this coming Monday at 5 PM Pacific, you can be on the call with me.

Honor system. You sign up. You show up. You’re in.

Here is what we actually do on those calls.

We cover the first hunger — physical hunger. The science of minerals. How to actually use Zero Hunger Water in your day. How to read your own hunger signals and tell the difference between a flare and a craving.

We cover the second hunger — emotional hunger. This is where I go deeper than almost anywhere else in my work, because this is where I have lived. When your dopamine system is starved — because of trauma, because of stress, because of a hard season of life — your brain will reach for sugar, carbs, alcohol, or any of the other cheap dopamine hits modern life is happy to sell you. The work in the call is teaching you how to replace those hits with wins that actually heal you instead of harm you. And one of my favorite tools in that toolbox — I’ll just tell you because it’s coming up almost every week — is teaching my clients how to use artificial intelligence to write their own anthems. Songs about their own lives. Songs that sound like a top-tier artist made them just for you. I have done this for myself, under the name Victor Sol. My album Needed This (Deluxe) is on Spotify here — listen to it and you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about. This is the kind of tool I’m teaching people to build for themselves. It is doable. It is powerful. It turns off emotional hunger in a way nothing else I have ever tried has.

And we cover the third hunger — social hunger. The environment. The cues. The people. The rituals. How to redesign the small architecture of your day so that your home, your evenings, your weekends, and your friend group are not silently undoing the work you’re doing during the day. This is the piece almost every wellness book ignores. We do not ignore it on the Monday calls.

That is the program. Four calls a month. Live with me. The full three-hunger framework. A ninety-seven-dollar value, free for anyone in the community right now, before we launch.

You will not see this offer again the way I am putting it on the table today.

Go now. zerohungerwater.com. Put your name in. I’ll see you on the call.

What this letter is, finally

I want to close Issue 01 the way I plan to close all of them.

This report is not a newsletter. It’s a window into what I’m building, who I’m building it with, and what I’m learning in the trenches as I build it. Some weeks it’ll be science. Some weeks it’ll be the inside story — like today. Some weeks it’ll be one of my doctor friends sitting in for an essay. Some weeks it’ll be a conversation I had on a Tuesday with somebody who changed my mind about something.

But every Monday, it’ll be here.

If you read it and it moves you, forward it to the one person you think needs it. That’s how this community gets built.

The belly goes first. The hunger turns off. The fat releases. The story changes.

I’ll see you next Monday. And on this Memorial Day, take care of yourselves, take care of the people you love, and take a quiet moment for the ones who gave us this country.

— Jorge

Del Mar, California

The Belly Goes First Report is published every Monday morning by Jorge Cruise. Zero Hunger Water launches this fall. Join the community at zerohungerwater.com.

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.

DOWNLOAD

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.

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.