Guy Fieri is fit and feeling good! The celebrity chef spoke with Men’s Health for a new story about his journey to healthier living and eating.
The 56-year-old revealed that since 2020, he has lost over 30 pounds thanks to a mix of more intense exercise regimens and a focus on eating healthily without compromising on his love for bold flavors.
He shared that one of the newest and most successful aspects to his workout routine was rucking, a physical exercise that involves walking or hiking with a weighted backpack, which Guy often did on a fire road near his home — and fully uphill.
Alongside the intense rucking, he also squeezed in HIIT workouts with a trainer at least twice a week, cold plunges and sauna sessions daily, intermittent fasting, and more of an emphasis on vegetables in his diet.
The Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives host explained that he’d never been that unhealthy to begin with. “But unfortunately, in the DDD world, people like to go, ‘Oh, you’re the chef that eats the deep-fried pizza burgers with the ice cream toppings and all those huge, fried everythings.'”
“My response is ‘I don’t want to say that you don’t know what you’re talking about. But you don’t know what you’re talking about,'” he responded, also adding that as far as he’s concerned, “moderation is a real thing.”
He opened up about having always balanced his more extravagant eating habits on his Food Network shows with juicing, diet control, and moderate exercise, but turned the volume up when he turned 50.
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Guy explained that one of the major motivations for him to go healthy was so he could spend more time with his sons with wife Lori, 18-year-old Ryder and 27-year-old Hunter (he also raises his late sister Morgan’s son Jules, now 22).
Once he hit that milestone, he realized that he would get more exhausted than usual when he went hunting with his boys, and wanted to remedy that by hiring a trainer. After he started seeing the results in the form of lost weight and regained energy, he turned to other means.
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“That’s when we started talking about intermittent fasting,” he shared. “Once I started getting more serious about that, the quantity of food I was eating, and exercise, it really changed the whole thing.” It led to him cutting out breakfast entirely, only eating between noon to 8 PM.
He also spoke about his 15 minute daily sauna routine, followed by at least three minutes in a cold plunge, comparing the latter to getting through a tough workout routine. “The thing about cold plunges is that you gotta get through the first 30 seconds.”
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“When I started, I hated waiting on the timer to go off. But now I breathe and get into the right mind space. The energy it gives you… it gets me fired up. I do it every day.”
He added: “It’s crazy how life sends us these analogies to live or die by. It’s the same thing with my workout class. I know that class is going to start at 7:30 A.M. And if I can just make it a commitment to get through the door and do the first 30 seconds, then I’m off and running.”