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GUY FIERI IS preparing a sensible salad.
It’s nearing lunchtime at Fieri’s 42-acre compound in California’s wine country, a stretch of rolling Steinbeckian earth that is the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue of Flavortown, U.S.A.
Fieri is dressed in a black tee and dripping silver bling as he commands the outdoor kitchen in his backyard. Wood in a Santa Maria grill is kicking up flames. A bulbous brick oven is at full tilt. And Fieri, knife in hand, is hot on this salad. He slivers fennel into white toothpicks. He chops herbs, slices a Fresno chile thin, and cubes Medjool dates.
“All the colors! All the flavors! All the textures!” he says in the same near-yell you’ve heard if you’ve watched TV in the past two decades. Next, he rough-cuts grapefruit and orange slices. “And pistachios for crunch,” he adds, dumping everything into a big silver mixing bowl. “A quick vinaigrette of Dijon, vinegar, olive oil, fresh pepper, and salt” goes in, too. “You don’t need that much dressing. Flavor comes from the pink grapefruit and orange.” He uses tongs to claw and spin the mix together clockwise.
The resulting dish is a five-inch-tall rainbow-psychedelic pile of flavor heaped atop an ocean-blue platter. A salad with all the hallmarks of health: plant forward, nutrient dense, low calorie.
The side dish isn’t just damage control. Fieri serves it alongside a lean turkey Bolognese with shredded spaghetti squash. “How can something that’s so good for you taste so great?” says Fieri, taking a big bite. “The bit of cinnamon in that Bolognese,” he continues, mouth half full, “takes this to the next level.”
If you’ve watched his signature Food Network show, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, you’re already familiar with this scene: Fieri eating delicious food as he drops his famous catchphrases. But the major difference in the script isn’t just the food—it’s also the man devouring it.
Since 2020, he has lost more than 30 pounds. His five-foot-ten frame sports broader shoulders and tapers to a trimmer waist. Leather button-up shirts, which he often wears open, have replaced those bowling shirts he wore circa the first season of Triple D, in 2007. Fieri, 56, consumer of all things, is, amazingly, fit.
What’s powered his transformation is not unlike the ingredients in that salad: a little bit of everything. Fieri rucks the hills of his estate a few times a week. He hammers out group HIIT workouts with a trainer at least twice a week. He’s in the sauna and cold plunge daily. He’s a fan of intermittent fasting. And he talks—at length—about vegetables.
Weirdest of all: He says none of it feels like change. And in truth, his life hasn’t changed that much. Fieri just wrapped his 48th season of DDD, is soon headed into production on another round of Guy’s Grocery Games, and is gearing up for season 6 of Tournament of Champions. He’s still involved in menu creation at his 85 restaurants across the world.
But that’s just work. He’s been married to his wife, Lori, since 1995, and his sons, Hunter and Ryder, are now adults. Fieri has a robust social life, too, and is often spotted at everything from the Super Bowl to the NBA All-Star Game. The man keeps living the way Guy Fieri should—well. Just healthier.
In a world where health prescriptions usually come from waiflike organic-wellness types, carb-phobic gym bros, and health gurus with 27-hour podcasts covering 28-step morning protocols, Fieri might just be the voice of reason we all need. He’s not even advocating for anything you probably don’t already know: “I think moderation is a real thing,” he says without snark.
Maybe, with a little help from Guy Fieri, you can find moderation—and, more critically, the motivation for moderation, too
AFTER DEVOURING THE salad, we ruck. Fieri throws a black weight vest over his sleeveless gray hoodie and we hike from his home to the beginning of a fire road on his property. It’s entirely uphill.
Fieri says he’s never been that unhealthy—FFS, his parents were hippies who raised him on a macrobiotic diet (picture lots of steamed fish and seaweed). “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.’ ”
Okay, DDD grounds itself in greasy spoons across the country: classic Italian in Carlsbad, bomb barbecue joints outside Biloxi, kickin’ chicken shacks in Charleston. But if you’re more than a casual observer of the show, you’ll know Fieri regularly hits up Thai and Greek and Pakistani and vegan spots. “I’m just looking for as much authenticity in the food as I can get,” he says. Still, regardless of the style of restaurants, the calories can pile up.
Fieri says he used to mitigate what he ate with healthy habits he learned growing up: juicing, moderate exercise, portion control. And that worked until he turned 50 in 2018.
Around that time, Fieri, an avid hunter, started taking his sons with him to track deer and elk. There’s nothing worse than approaching one of those animals and being exhausted, he says. For a man as energetic as Fieri, that exhaustion stung.
Two years later, he used his newly acquired time in lockdown to fight that looming sense of slowing down. He hired a local trainer, Scott Butler, to work with him and—ever the team player—his entire family and crew. Butler led them all through timed, station-centric workouts that incorporated squats, overhead presses, med-ball slams, battle ropes, and burpees. Fieri slowly began losing weight and regaining energy. Then he found himself asking, What’s next?
“That’s when we started talking about intermittent fasting,” he says. “Once I started getting more serious about that, the quantity of food I was eating, and exercise, it really changed the whole thing.” A dietitian told him that the green juices he was downing stacked on empty calories. So he dropped the juice—and breakfast altogether—eating only from noon to eight. “It wasn’t as gnarly as you might think,” Fieri says. “I’m not a big breakfast fan.”
None of this is radical: Scientific studies suggest that all weight loss “works” when you eat fewer calories than you burn. While most diets constrict what you eat, fasting constricts when you eat. It’s not magic for weight loss, the catch being that if you eat too many calories during your window, you won’t lose weight. You could even gain it.
Fieri understands this caveat to intermittent fasting: “I still eat what I want to eat. But I just don’t eat as much of it.” And he’s found a way to make IF work on the job. Fieri’s crew shoots at three DDD locations per day. On those days, Fieri says, he takes a couple bites of each dish on camera—which usually adds up to a day’s worth of calories—and then skips dinner.
He’s also learned to get pickier. “I’ll use pizza as an example,” Fieri tells me as we reach the top of the hill. “Pizza is one of those things when it’s good, it’s really good. And when it’s bad, people still eat it. I’m now more inclined to not eat something that’s not that great than to eat it.”
These changes to his diet, coupled with his commitment to regular and intense exercise, have caused even his crew to notice a difference in Fieri’s lifestyle. Since 2014,DDD has visited 22 vegan restaurants, and half of those visits were in the past two years.
As we start our hike’s descent, Fieri explains that his transformation has been more than physical—and that it’s affected more than just his own life. When Covid lockdowns began decimating local restaurants, he tracked down the personal phone numbers of executives at many of the country’s largest corporations, like PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company. He sent those execs personalized video messages asking them to support the restaurant industry. That effort raised about $25 million, he says, which the National Restaurant Association distributed to 44,000 workers.
While Fieri’s dedication to charity work isn’t new, the pandemic—and his regained sense of energy from a better diet and exercise—amplified his drive. He wanted to do more good, in part because he felt so good.
POST-HIKE, FIERI needs a wardrobe change. In the course of an afternoon, he’s orchestrated a lunchtime feast, toughed out an hour-long HIIT workout, and rucked roughly three miles. So it’s off with the weight vest and into the house. He reemerges in a black Versace robe that features faint gold threads woven throughout. Now he’s ready for his recovery routine.
Fieri started getting into saunas and cold plunges thanks to Antonia Lofaso, another Food Network star. He spends roughly 15 minutes a day in his large wooden-barrel sauna, followed by at least three minutes in the cold plunge. “It’s a daily reset that keeps me going,” he says.
Using a sauna seems like a smart move for men. Finnish scientists have found that men who used one more frequently were less likely to die of cardiovascular disease.
Fully cooked, Fieri emerges from the hot box, a lather of sweat coating him. Then he cranks up Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” before sinking into the cold plunge. His tub comes to him via Renu Therapy (base models start at a cool $9,700), but he didn’t always own the Camaro of cold-plunge tanks.
Fieri’s HIIT circuit includes heavy-bag work, kettlebell exercises, calisthenics moves, and battle ropes.
His first was a tub-style food freezer, the type you’d buy at Home Depot, that he caulked and jury-rigged by watching a YouTube video. The contraption brought the temperature down to 40 degrees. He would, of course, unplug the unit in order to avoid electrocution. “Frigidaire does not give you a UL rating to put a human in it.”
Fieri says he feels awesome after his polar reset—and he even takes a portable plunge tank from Renu on the road. His face, which usually conveys frenetic enthusiasm, is entirely Zen and silent as the water envelops him—for a moment, at least—and then he’s back to talking.
“The thing about cold plunges is that you gotta get through the first 30 seconds. 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.”
It’s kind of a metaphor for getting healthy, he says. “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.”
AS WE CLOSE out the day, Fieri invites me to his living room for strawberries. I’m expecting (and, honestly, craving) something chocolate coated, peanut butter drizzled, and sprinkled. We sit on leather chairs in front of a massive stone fireplace. It’s like a scene out of Yellowstone—except for those berries.
“My wife got me a freeze dryer,” he tells me. His interest in the process, he says, started when he was looking for healthy foods to bring on hunts. “I sure as hell don’t want to go out for the day with a bunch of [candy] and other junk. So I’d take jerky.” Then he looked at dried fruit but said that it had too much added sugar.
As a result, Fieri picked up a new culinary skill—something that if he can do in his 50s, anyone can. And learning kitchen skills may improve your health. A study in Nutrients found that people with minimal cooking abilities were more likely to be overweight or obese. The scientists suggested that teaching people to cook might help them maintain or lose weight by improving the nutritional quality of their meals and giving them greater calorie control.
“Like today,” Fieri says. “I would have loved to have had that Bolognese with bucatini. But if I have spaghetti squash instead, I know that’s 500 calories I’m not consuming. And it’s still delicious.”
I think about this as Fieri pulls a freeze-dried strawberry from the bag. Here’s a man who has tasted almost everything the world has to offer—from Kenosha garbage plates to Baltimore pit-beef sandwiches—and he’s talking about the power and joy of simple, real food. I ponder something Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D., author of The Hungry Brain, told me: “I think there’s some evidence that we adapt to tastes like saltiness and sweetness. When we reduce them for a while, our taste becomes more sensitive again.”
Fieri passes me the bag. I take a few of the crinkled, slightly crystallized strawberries and pop them in my mouth. They’re deeply sweet—as if the dehydration has intensified the fruit sugars. They melt into an almost creamy texture, hyping all my taste buds. My synapses fire: more.
“Aren’t they good?” Fieri asks me.
The strawberries taste like candy—taken to the next level.
Cook Guy’s Recipes From This Story
Guy Fieri's Fennel & Citrus Salad
Roasted Spaghetti Squash, Turkey Bolognese, & Crispy Kale
A version of this article originally appeared in the May/June 2024 issue of Men's Health.
Grooming by Ariel Ramirez. Styling by Jessica Vohs
