About

My story begins in 1982

That Christmas photograph is me at eleven, wearing a Santa hat beside my mother, sister and father. Before there was a book, a product or a career in wellness, there was that kid. I was overweight, but that was only part of it. I felt like a misfit. I wanted to understand why something that seemed so easy for other people could feel so hard for me.

My career did not literally begin at eleven. The question that would become my life's work did.

I grew up in the 1970s and '80s with ADHD, although I did not have those words for my experience then. I was the kid who could not sit still. Food became comfort, distraction and a reliable place to turn. For me, it was ice cream, cookies and every sweet thing I could get my hands on.

Today I have a better framework for understanding that restless kid: attention, reward, dopamine signaling and the brain systems that help us plan, pause and regulate our behavior, including the frontal lobes. I cannot look at a childhood photograph and measure what my dopamine was doing. But I can look back with more compassion. I was trying to feel better, not failing a character test.

Finding exercise changed my relationship with myself. It gave my energy somewhere to go. It helped me feel stronger, steadier and more capable. Eventually, the thing that helped me became the work I wanted to share with other people.

That is why I created Zero Hunger Water for myself first. And it is why my work as an author, coach and wellness founder has never felt separate from my own life. The mission began before the book or the product: make caring for yourself feel more possible.

My family and the promise

I was born March 6, 1971 in Mexico City — the son of a film star, a girl from Bogotá whose own mother gave her an education, a road out, and the instruction to never settle, and an incredible American electronic engineer. Food became my best friend. I was a fat kid, never athletic, always picked on — and when I got to college, the buffet became my new best friend.

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Luckily, by the time I graduated from UC San Diego with a Bachelor's — plus credentials from the Cooper Institute, ACSM, and ACE — fitness had become my new love. I began my career at the ultra-elegant Sporting Club at the Aventine in La Jolla, and Anthony Robbins and his family were among my very first clients. Tony taught me that you get what you focus on. When my mother, Gloria, died at 64 in February 1998, she asked me for one favor: meet Oprah Winfrey, so this work could reach more people.

Nine months later I was on The Oprah Winfrey Show — and everything changed.

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Thirty years of work

Since then: 13 New York Times bestsellers, 39 titles, over 10.5 million books sold in more than sixteen languages. Contributor to Good Morning America, Today, Rachael Ray, EXTRA, LIVE with Kelly and Mark, The View, and Khloé Kardashian's Revenge Body, with columns in USA Today, AARP, First for Women, and Woman's World. I host the Jorge Cruise Podcast (125,000+ listeners) and created Zero Hunger Water.

My protocols have followed President Bill Clinton, Steve Harvey, Jennifer Lopez, Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu, Kyle Richards, Eva Longoria, Brooke Burke, Tony Robbins, Countess Luann, and Dorinda Medley.

The evolution of longevity — 2008 and 2011

That is me 15 years ago, at 39, poolside at the Beverly Wilshire, one of my favorite places to disappear whenever I am in Los Angeles. There, in those tropical poolside vibes, I remember reading the TIME cover story in my hands: "2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal." It changed my thinking forever. I was not even 40 yet, and I was already thinking about 2045. The year was 2011. It is now 2026.

We are only 19 years away — and Ray Kurzweil, the futurist behind that cover, says we are still on schedule.

And what I am about to share with you, what this entire website is about, what my entire life's work is now about, is getting us to that time period in the healthiest, easiest way possible, using what I believe is the most powerful tool we have: waist circumference science.

I first learned it in 2008 from my dear friend Dr. Mehmet Oz, before the talk show, before the magazine, when he was still performing heart surgeries at Columbia University. In his office, on my little Canon ELPH camera, he wrapped a tape measure around my waist and explained why that one number tells the truth better than any scale. That moment is captured forever, and I love sharing it. Click here to watch the video on my Substack.

To my amazement, the expert of experts confirmed what I had sensed with my clients for years: waist circumference is everything.

Now jump forward to August 2026. On one quiet Sunday morning I turned on Good Morning America and watched an ABC News medical correspondent present a landmark new study in JACC, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: more than 250,000 adults followed for 20 years, waist size flagging heart attack, stroke, and heart failure risk even when BMI looks normal, and nearly 1 in 5 people with a "normal" BMI carrying hidden risk at their waist.

Watching it felt like 2008, 2011, and that Sunday morning all shaking hands.

And I knew the way to act on it was exactly what I have spent the last 6 years building: my new book, MORE TIME PROTOCOL, designed for precisely this purpose.

These moments gave a new direction to a question I had been carrying since childhood.

2020 — When the old solution stopped being enough

During COVID, gyms closed and my New York trips stopped. Exercise had helped me stay level for decades, and suddenly my routines were harder to keep. I found myself overeating again. All the knowledge I had built a career around did not make me immune to struggling.

That experience changed the way I approached my work. People do not need another lecture about willpower when their routines, relationships or circumstances have fallen apart. They need something practical enough to use in the middle of a real life.

2018 to 2021 — Conversations became a kitchen experiment

The questions had already begun changing before COVID. In 2018, my interviews with Dr. James DiNicolantonio and conversations with Dr. Jason Fung, Mark Sisson, Paul Saladino and other thinkers gave me new ways to consider fasting, minerals and hunger.

Dr. James helped me look at sodium, magnesium and potassium as more than ingredients on a hydration label. I became interested in whether a simpler mineral routine could help people manage their waking fasting hours. That was an idea to explore, not a conclusion that every craving comes from a deficiency.

I also became curious about changes in food, farming and the minerals we get through our diets. At fifty-five, looking back over a lifetime of hunger, those questions mattered to me. I wanted to understand my experience more fully, while recognizing that hunger has many causes.

In 2021, I went to work in my San Diego kitchen while working on my fortieth book. The early mixtures lived in small Container Store cups and traveled in a Ziploc bag. I shared the homemade recipe freely and refined the idea with coaching clients. I trademarked Zero Hunger Water that year.

This was personal before it was commercial. I was trying to make my own routine easier, then exploring whether it might help other people too.

The friend who showed me what a product could do

During my Malibu years, Mark Sisson became a brother and close friend. His journey from author to co-founder of Primal Kitchen showed me that an idea could become something people used in their kitchens every day. Kraft Heinz's 2018 agreement to acquire Primal Kitchen made that possibility feel tangible.

Books could change how people thought. A useful product could help them act on it.

2021 — The homemade idea reached the newsstand

My dear friend Carol Brooks and the Woman's World team gave the homemade protocol its first national spotlight. The February 8, 2021 cover featured Sandy Rosser and her reported 93-pound transformation. Her story was an individual experience, not a promise of what everyone would achieve.

The response gave the recipe a life beyond my kitchen. People shared it with friends long before we had a finished commercial product. First for Women and other national coverage helped carry the conversation further.

The people who made the idea simpler

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Michael Fishman helped sharpen how we talked about the consumer experience. Dave Asprey encouraged the bold black-and-white visual direction. Mike Koenigs kept pushing me toward something affordable, useful and portable. He also introduced me to the possibilities of AI and helped inspire Virtual Jorge.

Dr. Will Cole was an early interviewer who took an interest in the idea before there was a finished product. Dr. Mindy Pelz welcomed me and my team into the fasting conversation and raised an early toast to Zero Hunger Water. Those friendships gave me encouragement while the practical work was still unfolding.

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Some of the most important advice happened over lunch. My fraternity brother Dan serves on our advisory board. Rich, my closest friend, has helped me think clearly through difficult stretches. Niki, my college girlfriend and dear friend of thirty-five years, brings a demanding palate and a lifetime around family food businesses. Her feedback matters before a flavor earns a yes.

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And my dear friend Luann de Lesseps brought her joy to the idea back when we were still imagining it in a can. Every person in that story helped shape the next version.

The format had to change

We first imagined Zero Hunger Water as a ready-to-drink can. At four or five dollars a can, the daily routine was too expensive for the people I wanted to serve. The mission had always been to make the idea easier to use and afford.

So we went back to the drawing board. A portable water add-in offered a different path: four sticks, carried with you, mixed into water as part of the daily routine. The convenience mattered as much as the formula. A habit is only useful if people can actually keep it.

April 2026 — Zero Hunger Water partnership with Stephan Peeler

In April 2026, I joined forces with my Sigma Chi brother, Stephan Peeler, to relaunch Zero Hunger Water. His background in beverage and entrepreneurship complemented my background in wellness. In June, we shared the science, the rituals and our story with fraternity brothers in San Diego.

The playful Empire State Building illustration of Stephan and me is AI-made, but the partnership and the work behind it are real. We are developing the flavors, packaging and experience for the next chapter. A planned launch remains a plan until the product is ready.

Zero Hunger Water is one expression of this larger mission. It is not the whole of it. My books, coaching, podcast, More Time Protocol and Virtual Jorge all grew from the same question that eleven-year-old boy was asking: how can caring for myself become easier to understand and easier to do?

The work I am building now

Thirty years later, seven out of ten people I coach are mothers and grandmothers — the women who take care of everyone else first. The other three? Usually gay men like me, LOL. But I always get a few famous straight guys, too — Steve Harvey, Tony Robbins, even President Bill Clinton. Straight guys want to look good, too — and they should.

I've learned to be grateful for my wounds — emotional eating, a parent's death, divorce, financial pressure, an empty nest. Whatever wounds you carry, this is part of the work we can do together. It lives in my first principle: the belly goes first, because not all hunger is physical. Some is emotional. Some is social. I've got you covered.

Thirty-nine books and 10.5 million copies later, at fifty-five, I am still the case study for my own work. The core idea hasn't changed: hunger is a lever, not a personality trait. The essence of my entire career now lives in one book, my 40th, MORE TIME PROTOCOL, whose promise is simple: shift your lifespan to its maximum.

The 2-hour method — three essential minerals every two hours across an eight-hour fast, to make time-restricted eating easier to practice — plus two bonus protocols, muscular repair and circadian repair. Belly goes first for a reason I learned years ago: your waist circumference is one of the most accurate predictors of life expectancy there is — in large cohorts it tracks with mortality independent of BMI (see the MORE TIME PROTOCOL science).

My goal is a daily routine of autophagy people can follow over time. Prescription treatments and a mineral routine serve different purposes; Zero Hunger Water is not a replacement for prescribed medication. The book's planned release will bring together the practical method it supports and the lessons I have learned from coaching.

And the water add-in I developed to support that routine is Zero Hunger Water^®, The Hunger Eraser^™. It is the combination of everything above, and you may have already heard of it, or even tried the recipe, since I have been sharing it for the last 6 years and it has been featured in national magazines like Woman's World and First for Women. Click here to get the free recipe.

Our new company, the Zero Hunger Water Company, created with my co-partner, Stephan Peeler, is the embodiment of our ethos of daily autophagy — as you can see in this gold coin that serves as its ethos.

And soon it arrives premade and ready to go, one of the proudest accomplishments of my life: 30 years of my career, the same lever, in a glass, as an easy water add-in. This site, together with Virtual Jorge, the AI I trained on my life's work, puts the whole method in your hand.

In early 2026, I released Needed This, an EP by the AI artist Victor Sol — a persona I created (Victor Sol means "victorious light") to take the trauma of the past, for anyone who suffers emotionally, and transform it into power. It is my first digital album. Listen on Spotify for a sneak peek at how to overcome emotional hunger from my forthcoming 40th book, MORE TIME PROTOCOL.

And I can't wait to hopefully work with you and become your coach. Get ready to pull the lever — and shift your lifespan to its maximum. That's my goal for you.

One more thing. Every so often I coach a small group myself, free. I am doing it again now, for the first time in 15 years: a 6-week challenge for just 100 people worldwide. Applications close Monday, November 2, I announce the 100 that day, and we begin November 9. A few members will be featured in my next book and media campaign. If that sounds like you, apply here.

Welcome.

Con todo mi corazón,