THE BELLY GOES FIRST REPORT

Issue 01 · Monday, May 25, 2026 · Memorial Day · Del Mar, California

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.