Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet

by Jesse Itzler

He’s another character in my life that my wife tolerates. Every time we talk, he ends the call with “Fruit till noon, brother.” One of the main underlying philosophies in his book is that we use more energy for digestion than all other bodily functions combined. That’s why we are usually tired after a big meal. That said, the average American will eat seventy tons of food in their lifetime. Imagine how hard the body has to work to process and break down all of that food. The more efficiently we can digest all this food and the less stress we put on the digestive process, the more energy we will have for everything else. According to Fit for Life, fruit is the perfect food because on top of being sweet and delicious, it’s super-easy to digest. In fact, it is the only food that bypasses the stomach and is digested in the small intestines. It unleashes all its nutrients and goodness without using much, if any, energy, which frees up your energy for other things. As long as you eat fruit on an empty stomach, you can reap amazing benefits. According to Diamond, you don’t have to look beyond the animal kingdom to see evidence of this. The strongest animals in the world thrive on a fruit-and plant-based diet. Silverback gorillas, for example, are thirty times as strong as man and three times our size. Their DNA is 99 percent similar to that of humans, and they are our closest living relatives next to chimps. How are they so strong? Oh yeah, their diet is made up mostly of fruit a...

until noon every day for ten days. After noon I generally kept it pretty clean—no fried foods, no dairy, no meats, but I didn’t waver from the fruit only in the a.m. I had an enormous amount of energy during that span and very “efficient” digestion. I felt so good that the ten-day trial period turned into twenty-plus years of following this routine. It doesn’t matter if I’m running a full marathon in the morning; I still stick to this program. Fruit till noon!