Of all the covers, this one is personal. San Diego Magazine is my hometown magazine — the city where I grew up, where I trained my first clients, and where every book I’ve written was written.
In May 2009 the magazine built its annual fitness issue around 8 hot fitness trends and asked me to help frame them: what was real, what was noise, and what an ordinary person with a job and a family could actually keep doing past week three. My answer then is my answer now — the trend that wins is the one that fits inside a real life.
The timing mattered. This ran the same year The Belly Fat Cure was taking hold nationally, and it was a reminder that the work had started in a San Diego gym long before it reached national television. Louise Hay built Hay House here. Nearly twenty of my books were published here. This city has been the whole foundation.
San Diego has been called America’s fittest city for years, and I have never stopped being proud to be part of that. It began here — first client, first book, first cover — and I’d happily do it again with these readers.
Seventeen years on, the trends have cycled through and back again — but the underlying idea has only sharpened into the two-hour method in MORE TIME: belly goes first, and simple beats perfect.
At the very end of that column the magazine printed one small line: jorgecruise.com. I didn’t ask for it, and I didn’t expect what came next. Readers typed it in, wrote to me, and a room full of San Diegans signed up for the six-week challenge that became The Belly Fat Cure. Unexpected, and completely wonderful.
I’d love to do more here. And now it doesn’t have to be here — the same six-week room runs over Google Meet, so whether you’re in Point Loma or Pittsburgh you can sit in it. On Monday, November 2 I announce the next group — just 100 people worldwide — and we begin together Monday, November 9. Applications close November 2.