I’m sure all of you have heard the famous quote, “You are what you eat!”, but how many of you understand the depth of what that actually means. Of course, the simple way of putting it is that every single cell in your body is built from what you eat. So if you eat bottom feeders, such as catfish and shrimp, then you are supposedly polluting your body with the trash that they eat. Now try dissecting that quote into your everyday life.

Look around you. All you do from the time that you are born until the day that you find your resting place, you are ingesting something. Absorbing every sight, sound, smell, and feeling and putting a meaning to it. What you eat, what you watch, what you touch, and what you listen to. Everything literally affects your body and your mind. So, just like the trash that you are consuming into your body, you need to think about the other forms of trash as well.

View today’s society. Look at the people that you hang around with. Look at what you watch on the television. The music that you listen to. The crowd that you surround yourself with. Just like junk food, If you eat badly, you are more than likely going to feel bad later. Do that for a very long time and now you have bad things happen to your body. High blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and the list goes on. If you feel yourself always in a bad mood, or always feeling negative and seems like drama surrounds you, look at what you are ingesting. Your friends. Your co-workers. Your spouse and even your family can be the reason why.

If you surround yourself with trash, you will never get anything but trash.

I was told by an old friend “You won’t know how bad you feel until you start feeling good!” I never really understood that until I journeyed into bettering my eating habits and going back to the gym. As soon as I started forcing myself out of bed and becoming active, all while eating better, VOI-LA. it hit me like two sumo wrestlers charging together with me directly in between them. I started feeling better and it was a feeling that I did not ever want to lose.

I then started incorporating that into my everyday life. What is making me feel bad? I started looking at my surroundings. Looking at things that I could possibly change and then figured out what I could do to change them. Hell, I was even looking at things that I felt I couldn’t change, such as my jobs, and worked on getting a better one.

Slowly but surely everything started to get better and better and eventually my life started to go on autopilot. My ending destination would eventually lead me to pure happiness. What I mean by autopilot is, everything happens for a reason. Once you start bettering yourself and doing for yourself, naturally the weaker can’t keep up and is replaced with the strong. You will start noticing that the individuals that you currently hang out with will start drifting away. With that drift, you will be pushed into people that are doing what you are doing. Bigger and better opportunities will arise and before you know it, you will be looking back at where you were and not even realizing how you were ever so happy living that lifestyle to begin with.

So remember that everything that is in your surroundings will eventually become a part of who you are. Intentionally become aware of what you put into your mind as well as into your body and see if it doesn’t change you for the better. This is the end of part one, but to get a better idea of what I am talking about, stay tuned for part two. It is a story of a young man named Shane and how his life went from feeling like trash to living like a king just by changing parts of his environment for the better.