Get After It
January 19, 2022
What are you waiting for?
What, exactly, are you waiting for?
You get 24 hours a day, 1/3 of which you are sleeping, to do something. To make a difference in somebody’s life. To make your life better.
How the fuck are you not jumping out of bed to Get After It?
Is it because:
- Your diet sucks.
- Your attitude sucks.
- Your job sucks and is not your passion in life.
- You don’t exercise enough.
- You don’t give a shit about anybody else but yourself.
- You spend your whole day worrying about what other people think about you and adjust your habits around making other people like you instead of liking yourself.
All those things I bullet pointed above, do they ring true at all? Is it time to quit blaming other people for your unhappiness and stop relying on anybody else but yourself to bring your happiness?
If so, it is time to Fix Your Shit and Get After It.
We are ALL a work in progress. All of us.
I was a cook for years and ate nothing but garbage. Greasy burgers or hot dogs. I was overweight. I drank and did drugs daily. I smoked weed: before work, at work, after work. I would make pipes out of apples in the walk in fridge at the hotel I worked in. I drank cooking wine on the line on a busy Saturday night. I tried to hook up with every hot waitress I worked with. I snorted coke, smoked coke, did mushrooms and acid, ecstasy, molly, ketamine.
I was selfish and completely out of my mind.
I admit I still fall back into what John Joseph (author of The PMA Effect, read it) calls The Enemy Mind: Sometimes I still blame others for shit I have done and later regret it. Sometimes I take a hit of weed and regret it. Sometimes I have a beer after a long day of skiing or biking and later, lying in bed unable to sleep, I regret it. I don’t stop to help someone in need or take the time to teach someone something that needs it and I regret it.
Enlightenment is not a straight line. Two steps forward, tiny steps back. It is realizing you are doing it and fixing your shit before that negative mindset takes over again.
I still have a ton to learn, my path wasn’t nearly as hard or dark as John Joseph’s but it wasn’t great either. I was raised by a single mother and disappearing father, two older brothers who considered me a nuisance and an afterthought. I screamed for attention. I yearned to be harder, cooler, more popular than my brothers. Everything was the Corey Show. Everything was a cry into the dark for Eyes On Me. I would drink to black-out, do stupid shit for attention, use people to make me look better.
I was a joke. A fucking disaster waiting to die in a DUI accident and everyone knew it.
BUT…
I will not let this define who I am right now.
Get After it.
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Diet
I changed my diet a few years ago to a mostly plant-based diet. The guys in the gym and almost every guy around me lost their minds. These fools acted like it was an attack on them personally.
“How are you gonna get your protein? What, you gonna eat rabbit food all day?” They would ask, smugly.
How about it’s been almost three years and at 51 I’m in better shape now than when I started at 20?
I am living proof all those ads you see about how meat and dairy makes a strong body is total bullshit. Back in my younger years when I first started to really exercise and saw the connection to losing my beer gut and food, I trained for body building shows. I ate nothing but boiled chicken and bottom feeding steamed fish. I carried around a cooler full of tupperware meals and a gallon of water. I lost weight and started to see abs and veins. Yet, my breath stank, my pores oozed the nastiness that this diet produced. I was gassy and my ex girlfriend wouldn’t even sleep in the same room with me.
I was brainwashed into thinking this was healthy since other guys and mentors I worked with said so. Damn, I have a six pack now so it must be healthy! It was a twisted view on health and what was considered good for your body. It was the 90’s after all but yet even now people I know still do the same bullshit diet to get lean for a show.
Hell, the “sport” of bodybuilding alone goes against anything “healthy” for your mind and body. Yeah, just because you are wearing speedos and have orange tanner on and you are pumped and leaned out to the point of risking disease, jacked on whatever to get an edge, and haven’t even drank water in two days, does not mean you are healthy.
I can guarantee you that garbage fad Keto/Paleo diet these people are on is jacking up inflammation and leading to a host of chronic diseases and injuries in their bodies. Yeah, At 30 it’s easy to talk shit like you know what’s up. Talk to me when you get to 50 and can still Get After It.
All that rotting flesh in your digestive tract is gonna catch up to you. Next thing you have a bad back, bad skin, aching hips and knees. Inflammation and rust never sleeps. Trust me on this one.
Changing your diet is the door that opens to the path to enlightenment. All the other things that make you a better person on this planet are on that path, sometimes it takes longer, sometimes it smacks you right in the face. You will feel better, you will look better, you will have the energy to make this world better.
I am not kidding. I am not being hyperbolic.
You can sit there and smirk and say “fuck that, this guy is full of shit” or you can try it and see what all the fuss is about.
Life is too short. Start today. Start right now.
Get After It.
Written by Corey Smaller Follow me on Instagram