the zurkie show - why change when it's easier to cope

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

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The real reason people keep being unhealthy is because they get away with it. And they continue to get away with it throughout their 20s, their 30s, even their 40s, until they hit a point where they look back and regret all of those small choices they made. And oftentimes in the moment, you don't really think about the impact of eating an ice cream or, you know, having a soda. It's not something that crosses my mind. But one thing I noticed when I got into adulthood is I started to treat my life like it was vacations. because in my mind it was a special thing to be able to indulge and eat out. So why not do it all the time?

I have my own money. That was a big thing too, right? When my parents would argue with me as to why we couldn't go, you know, out to have a burger, it was because, hey, it's expensive and we're eating what's at home. But what I didn't really understand is what I was eating at home wasn't ultra-processed, wasn't made for the most efficient amount of product and profit. therefore it was just drenched in sugar and syrup. What I was eating was made with love and appreciation.

And it was actually made to make me feel better, build my muscle, make my bones strong. I will continue to do things that I know are bad to me because I keep getting away with it. Why do I keep getting away with it? It's easy. These things are easy. It is so easy to get food delivered to your. door and the dopamine you get from it is the best. It is easy to tell yourself, you know what, nobody will love me. I'm going to engage in some material, you know, that makes me feel good for 30

seconds and then I question the rest of my life after I'm done. I am going to, you know, do these things because I can get away with it right now. But there will be a point. And you might hit it sooner. where you realize I can't keep getting away with it. Where when you wake up and you tell yourself, ooh, I wonder what's on the menu for me, you're going to feel weird tension in your stomach. And you're going to be like, oh, I don't really feel too good. And you're going to think, you know what,

okay, maybe I need to actually start working out again. And then you're going to start working out again, only to realize, oh, this is a lot more difficult because I haven't done it for a few years. There will always come a point where you, your bad habits and your bad decisions will come up and catch up to you. So I urge you to recognize it before you are forced to recognize it. This year, I want to make some very impactful changes in my life.

And that's, I think, part of the problem. I want to do it. I know that it will be uncomfortable. And that is what is preventing me from doing it. Because in theory, right? right now I'm in Miami, Florida. I can go for a walk, a run, whatever. I can even do some pushups on the side of the road. But there is something, something small in the back of my mind that blocks me from doing that and tells me, oh, you know what, you have a little more time. Oh, you know what?

You can take it easy. And I'm sure you have that little voice in the back of your mind, too, that tells you these things and leads you down a path of allowing the destruction to happen. And there's also a voice that tells you, don't. Don't. Go for a walk. Do it. Get out. I know you don't want to.

I know now that you've woken up, you feel really bad. You feel like sleeping in. But you told yourself you would wake up at 8. You told yourself that you would make yourself some kind of, you know, some kind of salad with some chicken. I've been really into Caesar salad recently. I don't know what's happening with my taste buds, but it's been hitting that. extra good. You know, you told yourself that you would take the time to read a little bit about how to maintain your cut, how to actually, you know, build a better chest, and you

keep delaying it. Why is it? It's because you're getting away with it. Well, It's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scary as Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now. We're running out of time and we still don't know the rules. Don't miss what

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procrastination. Some of the most efficient people I know are procrastinators by nature. They wait until the last minute to do things. I'm one of those people. I will wait until the last minute to get things done, but I will still get them done. And I think in a similar sense to the way in which you learn to work with yourself as a procrastinator, you realize, okay, I only really trigger that like panic monkey within me to start working and, you know, chopping the wood. When I feel the pressure of time, what if I told you you could do that same thing in reverse? If you get away with things because they are easy, maybe the way to build good change is make the good habits easier than the bad. If it's easy for you to drive and get some Peter Terries or some Pollo Tropical, maybe you could make it easier if you just had a healthier option meal prepped at home. It takes more time. I know.

On Sunday, you have to wake up and make a bunch of food and tell yourself, I'm not going to. to eat this, I'm going to prep this for later. But in that moment when you are given that decision, it makes it easier. It's also easier, right, to go for a run when the only thing you need to get you out of the door is slipping on some running shoes. You don't have to think about, oh, what am I going to wear? Where am I going to run? You have it pre-plant. In my opinion, I think that there are things that you can do within your control to make. it easier. And that is the only way you're going to make change. Because what a lot of us do when it comes to healthy habits, I know I do this all the time, is we say, you know what, we're

going to start tomorrow, we're going to do this, we're going to figure out, okay, we want to be better at, you know, at what we consume, so we're not going to consume the bad stuff. But then the bad stuff becomes more tempting. I don't think it's about cutting things out. I think it's about making the alternative option that's better for you stand out as the easier, more convenient option, 100%. You know, it's simple, but in practice it's harder. And there is a tough love aspect of it where you can just tell yourself, you know what, screw it. I'm locking in. And that that will carry you over for a little bit of time, but you will hit a point where it will be easier The decision will be easier for you to make to get off your diet.

It will be easier for you to skip a gym day and when you skip one, you will skip five. You just saying, well, it'd be cool to have a chiseled body or it would be cool to read every day or it would be cool to be able to wake up at 5 a.m. isn't a strong enough purpose. That's why you fall short. And that's why you are so accustomed to getting away with it because it fits the old identity within yourself. if your reasoning is I want to be more fit than my parents were. We're getting somewhere. Okay, that's something you can tangibly measure and be like, all right, I want to do this for that.

For me, a lot of my purpose came from feeling inadequate. I felt like, wow, I want to be the best soccer player I can be because I want to feel like I belong in the top elite sphere of soccer players. And although I didn't achieve that by any stretch of the imagination, I was able to kind of push myself up and continue to push myself because I had some kind of common purpose to keep me going. And in the same vein, maybe for you, it's about getting stronger. I want to be stronger. I feel like I'm weak. I don't feel like I'm, you know, able to really... Oh, wow.

They're sending the chopper after me. I wonder if you guys can hear that. Maybe for you, it's about the fact that, like, you feel weak mentally, not even physically. It's not like, oh, I can't bench 225 for reps. No, you just, you feel mentally weak. You feel like you wake up with brain fog. You don't know what's going on. You just don't have some kind of baseline to feel like, okay, I'm good, I'm chilling.

I can exist in the society. That's a good enough for real. reason. Now, okay, what are the characteristics that somebody who isn't weak in your eyes would embody? Well, they would be somebody that wakes up early. Okay. What time? 5 a.m. Would they actually wake up at 5 a.m.? Because they would, you know, because you've heard that, you know, from a motivational compilation where somebody wakes up at 4.30 a.m. and looks at their, you know, watch every morning being like, oh yeah, I'm locked in. Be realistic. It's good to dream. It's good to dream. dreams are awesome but what can you actually tangibly do because if you do actually want to wake up at 5 a.m.

that's great you got to build up to that and this is the non-glamorous part of change you have to do it every day and it's not fun it's not easy and that's why you go towards the things you can get away with because in your mind that's way easier it's easier to like get two double doubles right with animal style lettuce wrapped destroy them, delete them, and go to bed after you've slurped a milkshake, right, and wake up all bloated. It's easier to do that. You just forget about it. But what's harder is setting a deadline of like, okay, I'm not going to ingest any more calories after 8 p.m. That's my cutoff. So I can chill out so my stomach can start doing its thing and I can go into the next day chilling. Like, it's that sacrifice, right?

So then you have to realize that it's about building a world around you that can actually support the person you want to be. If the person that you want to be has a job or goes to school, then you have to figure out where in the day would the person that you want to be go for a run. Go lift. Go talk to people. Go write. Go take photos. And you have to make it easy. You cannot make it, I'm going to go run at this forest preserve that's 30 minutes away. You're doing too much. Because guess what? When you have some kind of resistance and you have a little bit of, oh, I have to drive there. That's already giving your brain evidence as to why you shouldn't do it. Whereas if you have a simple plan, I'm going to wake up, put my shoes on, I'm going to go run around my block, around my campus.

I'm not going to go somewhere special. I don't need to do anything special in order to make change. It's about winning the battle right here within myself. That's what matters. then you will get to a point over time where going and driving 30 minutes to some kind of forest preserve so you can run will feel like something you've achieved

and you're able to do. But again, right now it is so easy to go and just be like, well, I'm just going to get away with like eating bad and being unhealthy. Rosen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time. Let's play. Feel the fun with.

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Play. Post. View and enjoy. Via rail. Love the way. I say this because I find that my bad habits reveal themselves in the underlayer of my thoughts that are really, really bad about myself. And it isn't something that I like wake up in the morning. I look in the mirror.

I'm like, geez, I'm so big. And it's not that I'm big. Like, you know, I'm a big back by a definition. Like, don't get me wrong. I like to eat. But I think that I've conflating. liking to eat with being big, when in reality, it's a blessing that I like to eat. It's a blessing probably that you do too.

It's just that you cannot justify maybe eating some of the more boring foods. That's my problem, right? I'll be like, why would I be eating food that is going to be nutritious and good for me if there's so much incredible stuff I can experience with my palate? But then again, the more that I get in these habits of eating bad things that are not good for me, but tastes really good, it takes away the novelty and the beauty of when I do eat it. And I actually want to experience it. There's something to be said about the specialty of being able to, like, go out to eat once in a while. Yes, you know, I think part of a, you know, some of us are also sold this idea that, like, if we're successful and we're rich,

then we can go out to eat all the time and it's like it's it's fine but that doesn't make it healthy just because you can do it doesn't mean you should and in my own life a lot of the things that i can do i wouldn't do because it wouldn't it wouldn't be good for me at all at all and the more that you realize, I got to control these things. I got to figure out what my relationship to these things are, to intimacy, to food, to people, to exercising. The more you realize that if you neglect these relationships, just like with people or you, you know, are around the wrong crowd. Like you go and eat the foods that make you super bloated and just like, you know, harm you real talk. And the same thing, you don't respect your sleep.

And instead you just kind of let it happen, whatever. These things won't treat you well back. You aren't giving a good input. So why would your output be any good? And some people do get away with it in certain regards. Again, right? like they're able to have a high calorie diet, but because their metabolism is fire,

you don't ever see it. But they don't feel good. Don't get it twisted. It's not like these things, you know, just magically don't affect you. They will over time. For me, making lasting change in this new year is going to come down to making it easy.

And just because I'm making it, well, I shouldn't say easy. easier, doesn't mean it still won't be difficult and it still won't be annoying. I just have to make that option more appealing. And the way in which you do it is lowering the amount of friction to it. You tell yourself, I want to run first thing in the morning. It's a great idea. You know, for me, especially as I've gotten older, my brain doesn't even boot into gear one like an hour in. I'm like, I'm just walking around like, ooh. But running gives me that oxygen. It gets me kind of going. It gets me in a flow. I can listen to some SD kid, which now everyone in

their mom listens to SD kid. I was literally, I was like, you know, in Palm Beach and this like old dude is like driving around and like a, you know, vintage Mercedes listening to Phantom. What happened to SD Kid, bro? It's like it leaked from a lab or something. No longer niche. Blacked out like a phantom. Like, bruh, come on, bro. No, no. Respect to SD Kid, man. I mess with the music and I mess with the vision. No, but make things easier for yourself. You have a goal. Oh, I actually want to get super consistent with writing.

Why are you not writing every day? Well, it's like my things take a longer period of time. Like, I don't know. You're doing too much. You're doing too much. You're going to the gym for two hours. It does not take two hours, I promise you. Want to go electric without sacrificing fun?

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These days, the power move isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate launch. The real power move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks. Level up your business with FedEx, the new power move. It takes an hour. 45 minutes even for just lifting. Maybe if you're doing some cardio, okay, respect, but, you know, it doesn't take that long. I want to be better at turning off my brain at night and, like, being one with my chakras. Sick, dude.

Stop the habit of, like, when you're bored at 8 p.m., flipping the phone on. No, other room. Read, hang out. You have to stick with these things, and it doesn't make it easy if you kind of find ways to like, oh, well, I usually put my phone in my room, but today I can kind of leave it out because somebody might call me or something. Like, no, these are excuses. And another thing, you don't need to be by your phone all the time. Maybe you have a specific instance where you're taking care of somebody that you do need to be by the phone. Things can wait. You texting your friend

back can wait. Because these things, whether you like it or not, they might trigger certain actions. You're a creature of habit, right? And if you have a bad habit of being on your phone at night, if you're waiting on a text and you have your phone at night in front of you, what do you think is going to happen? So setting those kind of boundaries and making it easy for yourself. You might not be able to have a phone with you, but something my roommate does, he'll have a little Kindle, a little book, and he just dedicates that time to reading before he falls a sleep. Okay, that's a great thing. For those of you that think reading is boring, you will get tired very quickly and you will have the best sleep of your life. I promise you, okay? I did that for a little bit.

I want to get back into it. But you need to make it easy. This whole thing of romanticizing how hard things need to be. I need to win this challenge. Like the pain and the hardness, what the hardness come from doing it every day and having to do it every day and it being uncomfortable that's where you win the battles but it doesn't come from just making it so difficult to the point where you don't want to participate you should have the perfect level of threshold where it's like okay i'm doing everything i can but i'm not overdoing it to the point where i'm not feeling like it's worth my time because the minute that you just occupy something as your personality you want to go on a gym mark and all you do is go to the gym,

it will take a string of events, right, where you fall off course. You are no longer as consistent as you thought you were going to be. To get you to a point where you just quit altogether. And I promise you this happened to me. I have to now re-fall in love with why I like the gym and doing things that I like. And it's been difficult.

I'm not going to lie to you. It's been very, very difficult. So, again, I think, think part of it is I've been trying to live it through this new identity of like who I, or live it through this old identity, I should say, of who I was and how I had this relationship with the gym when that is no longer who I am. I'm not doing it just to get a body haughty. Like I'm doing it for my mental. I'm doing it for me. I'm doing it so I feel good. I feel like an athlete. I feel like I'm making some kind of progress. And I feel like good. I like being

sore. I like that. Making it easier to do those things and getting crafty with it is where you are going to build that good habit. You cannot just think that forcing yourself into doing something is going to make a change. It's not going to. Sadly, find a way to do it now, do it today, do it tomorrow in a smaller scale. When you make it bite size and you make it something that you can handle. You can stack the winds. When you make it something huge that you need to scale, you're going to keep scraping on the sides of the rock and you're going to fall off. You have to build it, not scale it, okay? This year, Zerke's getting fit. Trust me, Daddy. I'm getting fit this year. That's all I'm going to say on that. I'm not going to be like, I'm going to go this, these many times because that's

all, that's, that's me yapping about the goal and not doing it. But change is incremental. I acknowledge that. And what matters is the consistency Zerke show. If you have a similar goal, drop it down below. What are you guys doing this year? Is it something health related? Is it something creative? Is it something job, school? What is it? Let me know down below. Stay consistent. And remember, you will continue to get away with the bad habits until you'll hit a point where you wish you never did. Today's episode of the Zerkees show was filmed in beautiful Miami, Florida, here in Coral Gables. Behind me, I got some yachts.

I might own one or two of them. Just kidding, I don't own any of them. Miami is gorgeous, a wonderful place, beautiful weather, beautiful people, beautiful beaches. Come check it out if you ever have the chance in your life. Did you know that the Zerkey Show is everywhere you go? That is correct. You can watch it. You can scroll it.

You can stream it. The choice is yours if you want to tap in. These are the best ways to tap in. Well, the only way. It's the Zirky Show everywhere you go. Dapper. Do the things that bring you joy and be intentional with what you consume. Not just diet-wise, but also just like media, literature, the things that matter to you.

It's so important that you do treat your mind like a muscle and you have to test it from time to time and give it new information. If you're trying something new, just know that I believe in you. And as always, Erki Show, I am sending you lots of love and... The chopper's here for me. Take care, guys.