Yet, with an optimism and sense of humor unusual for his circumstances, Seidman persevered, not only changing his karma from bad to good, but dramatically turning his life around in the process. In 1997, he amazed his friends, who saw the former bad boy become a co-champion in the Experimental and Applied Sciences (EAS) Physique Transformation Contest, gaining 27 pounds of solid mass in 12 1/2 weeks.

And he says he owes the positive changes in his life primarily to bodybuilding. "Even when things got bad, I still went to the gym every day," says the 5-foot, 11-inch, 184-pound Seidman. "I liked being around people who were doing good things to themselves. Even when i was a bad person, I knew that's not who I was in my heart. I just didn't know any other way."

Seidman came from a rough and tumble beginning. Born in San Francisco on September 8, 1961, he was raised in sunny Monterey, California. But he found nothing sunny about his early years. His parents separated when he was very young and he and his siblings (three brothers born a year apart and a sister) were raised by a mother who was forced to live on welfare. Consequently, his childhood was not about eating right. It was about whether he ate at all. "We were really poor," he admits.

Money usually ran out by the middle of each month, so he and his siblings would turn to a variety of methods to fill their bellies. Those would include everything from trick or treating in August ("We'd go knocking on people's doors saying, 'Trick or treat,' with a bag to get something to eat. They'd say, 'What the hell is this?'") to stealing candy and other sweets.

Even then, his optimistic nature was surfacing. Like street urchins, Jeff and his brothers would regularly rummage around after hours in the back of the Safeway supermarkets, digging in the garbage cans to find discarded food: bread that had expired and vegetables and fruit that was no longer fresh. Yet Seidman was upbeat about the grim task: "I actually enjoyed doing that. It was like finding treasures."

Small crimes led to larger ones. "It got worse and worse as I got older," he notes. "I got into heavy-duty stuff, everything from stealing cars to breaking into businesses.It got to the point where I thought money was the answer to everything. It seemed like where I grew up, which was a middle-class neighborhood, all my friends had a perfect life. They had all the toys they wanted and all the food they wanted."

It was at about this time that Seidman's weight training began. Although he didn't know it then, the workouts would later become the one fixed point in his ever-changing world, his lifeline to a better life. At that point, however, he built up his muscles for practical reasons: he needed to defend himself.

"I was getting into fights all the time because kids teased me about being poor and wearing the same clothes every day," he explains. "I would also fight with my brother a lot. He used to beat me up every day. I started lifting weights so I could beat him up. After that, he started lifting weights and then started beating me up again."

There were also self-esteem questions involved. "In school, I liked sports, but I was insecure because I was skinny and couldn't compete. So when I was 12, I started lifting weights to be stronger," he notes. "I'd bench press and curl every day." Meanwhile, the crimes escalated: robberies, break-ins, even an accidental death. At 16, Jeff was stunned when his younger brother was killed on a stolen motorcycle. He vowed to mend his ways. Ingrained habits are hard to break, however, and knowing little else, Seidman soon returned to his old ways.

Finally, in his early 20s and a high school dropout now, the youth was arrested for breaking into a store and sentenced to a two-week stretch in jail. Sitting by himself for one of the few times in his life, Seidman reflected on his situation. "I was waiting there in my cell, praying to God and saying, 'Why is my life so horrible? Why is everything so wrong?' The answer came to me that my life was horrible because I was a horrible person, I did horrible things, and I surrounded myself with horrible people. And there was no way that any good could get in."

He resolved to change. Still, he had many mountains still to climb, and many challenges to overcome, all of which helped build his character as effectively as training built his muscles. "I didn't really have any goals," he recalls. "I just wanted to be a good person. I wasn't exactly sure how to go about doing it. I didn't even know what I wanted to do with my life. But I knew things had to be different."

After being released, Seidman thought a lot and finally decided to start his own business: a health-oriented frozen yogurt sandwich shop. He moved in with his mother so that he could save on rent and then, for two years, slept in a room the size of a roll-away bed, worked at odd jobs, and scrimped and saved every penny. "I lived in what used to be my mom's laundry room," he says.

It was a Spartan existence, but it seemed to pay off. After 24 months, Seidman had enough money for a security deposit and found a storefront near a high school. With great pride, he opened his first business. He was proud of his marketing strategy. "I selected the place for my shop because it was near that school," he explains. "I figured students would be my customers."

They were, and everything seemed to be going well. Then, about eight months down the line, bad luck reared its ugly head again. "The city closed down the high school because the building had to be condemned," Seidman recalls. "They moved the kids somewhere else. So I lost all the students. Maybe 90 percent of my business left. After that, I had to quit. I was losing tons of money every month."

The young entrepreneur was depressed and suddenly, once again, at sea. Had all his work and his planning gone for nothing? At a low point and with a return to crime a possibility, he got a grim warning from the fate of his best friend, Brad.

Brad had been Seidman's partner in breaking the law. Yet where Jeff had left his illegalities behind, Brad had continued and had ended up serving a seven-year stretch in prison. While in jail, and simply because prisoners could have conjugal visits, Brad wooed and wed Seidman's lonely mother. After his release, however, the ex-con began cheating on his wife. Bizarrely, the mother blamed Seidman - who had opposed the marriage from the start - for Brad's infidelities.

"My mom saw me as an influence on him and his screwing around," Seidman explains. "So she told the whole family to hate me." Caught in the middle of his warring relatives and confronting a failed business, Seidman turned for consolation to his weight training. He even tried to get Brad involved. "I thought it would be a good change for him. When he did it, the workouts took his mind off of other things. But, afterwards, he'd go back to his bad ways."

Then the first of two tragedies struck. Seidman and his newfound fiance, Shannon, went to visit Brad one night. They were shocked to find him dead from a drug overdose. "That really helped me decide to stay away from all the bad stuff. It just seemed to always end up in something horrible," he says. "So that really reinforced my idea of changing my life."

Nonetheless, things only seemed to get darker. Still recovering from his lost business and his best friend's death, another tragedy struck: his fiance was killed in an automobile accident. "About four or five months after I had lost my business, my fiancee died in a car wreck," he recalls. "That was the lowest point. I got really depressed. I had worked so hard to achieve everything and now it was all gone."

Yet, although he didn't know it then, his climb out of the valley to the peaks of success was about to begin. Looking back, Seidman sees Shannon's tragic passing as a kind of turning point, a change in his karma. "After she died, I felt like this huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders," he admits. "I felt like I had finally paid for all the bad things that I had done. Things began to be different."

A change of scene, hard work, and discipline also helped the process. Buffeted by events, Seidman, now 30, moved to San Francisco where he got his first comparatively high-paying job as a bellman at the St. Francis Hotel in Union Square.The effect was positive. "I got to be around guys my age and it was a great atmosphere; it was a really beautiful hotel. When I first went in there for the interview, I looked at it in the lobby and I said, 'Oh, my God, I'm not worthy of this place.'"

Encouraged by his new start in life, Seidman also got his high school equivalency diploma and began thinking about other career options. "I got my real estate license and was taking some broker's classes to sell real estate," he says.

And then there was his weight training. He had kept it up, and when his fiance died, it had helped him keep his sanity. "I still went to the gym every day. Partially, it took my mind off Shannon. Also, I was around people that were doing good things and were all positive. It helped."

At about this point, Seidman picked up the first issue of Muscle Media and was impressed by what he read. "It seemed to tell the truth about natural health," he notes. He soon obtained a license as a personal trainer Nonetheless, although he advised others on diet and training programs, Seidman began to feel like a hypocrite for not following his own advice.

"I had always worked out but I wasn't a hundred percent into my workouts the way I am now," he says. "When I had put 100 percent into it in the past, I had nowhere near the results I have today. That's because the information I had [from other sources] was incorrect and the supplements didn't work the way they were supposed to. But the more I read Muscle Media, the more I learned. As a trainer, though, I personally was a hypocrite because I gave out all this advice but was not putting it to use myself."

Once again, he decided to change. "The more and more I read and the more results I saw in the gym from other people taking the EAS products, the closer I came to doing it myself. Then I said, 'God, I'm going to start working out, and putting 100 percent into it again.' But I kept on coming up with reasons not to do it because I was working two jobs, plus I was taking real estate classes. So I kept on using the excuse that I was too busy to work out the way I should, even though I wanted to."

That all changed when he read about the Physique Transformation Contest, which offered a sports car and $50,000 in cash to the winner. Seidman loved cars and thought that the prize money offered could help him get ahead in business. He said to himself that he could - and would - win.

"That changed it all for me," he recalls. "I said to myself, 'I don't care how busy I am, I'm going to win that car.' So even though I was working 60 hours a week and going to school, I believed I was going to win because I wanted to win."

Seidman began a rigorous training program, gaining 27 pounds of solid mass in 12 1/2 weeks. "I got a little bit creative with my time," he explains. "I kept my jobs and I kept on going to school. But I decided that I was going to win the contest. I was willing to sacrifice anything. So I just made sure I never missed a workout. I put 100 percent of my intensity into my workout."

He trained with weights six days a week, performing bench presses, barbell curls, dead lifts, squats, and pull-ups, changing his program regularly in order to keep his body from adapting. Since he was not trying to lose weight but gain muscle, he did not do aerobic exercise. "I've always been lean and skinny, so I didn't need it," he explains.

The training involved three days pumping iron in the gym, with one day off. His 10-hour-a-week workout schedule was straightforward: on Monday, he would train his chest and back; on Tuesday, his legs; on Wednesday, his shoulders and arms. He would take Thursday off, and then on Friday, start all over again, usually with his chest and back.

"I'd do that cycle no matter what," he says. "I did it at all different times. Sometimes, I'd do it at seven in the morning. Sometimes at ten o'clock at night. I didn't have a set time because my schedule was different every day. On some days, I'd have to split up my workouts because I didn't have much time. I'd have to do maybe the chest in the morning and the back at night. It varied every day."

As for nutrition, Seidman was eating every two to three hours. "I ate maybe eight times a day." When he would wake up in the morning, he would have a Myoplex Plus shake and eight eggs with only two yokes, oatmeal, and milk and water. Every two or three hours, he would have a selection from the following: lean red meat, fish, chicken, vegetables, potatoes, and rice.

He would drink a supplement shake between regular meals He would also have one an hour prior to his workout and immediately following it. Besides the Myoplex Plus, he would have Phosphagen HP three times per day. As he progressed in his training, the bodybuilder added more supplements: Phosphagain 2, V2G, HMB, and GKG. He would consume one serving of Myoplex Mass in the middle of the night to boost size gains. "I'd sleep for about six hours and I didn't want my body to go for six hours without any fuel," he explains.

Seidman noticed results almost immediately, and that only spurred him on further. "I got motivated every time I saw that and I'd work out harder." He had one setback, however: after about five weeks, he was laid up by the flu for a few days. "That really worried me," he says. He was soon back on track.

Nonetheless, exhaustion was his constant companion. "The most challenging thing for me was finding the time," he admits. "I had to make the time to do it, so I worked out no matter what. As a result, I found I was tired all day. I lacked sleep and sleep is really important to bodybuilding. I probably could have gotten greater gains if I had slept eight hours a day. But I was unable to do that and also do the contest."

Seidman was thrilled to be one of ten finalists. Yet he was stunned when, during the contest finals in Colorado, he was told that he had failed his polygraph test when asked about his use of steroids. It seemed as though the bad karma had returned.

The explanation was simple enough: Seidman had utilized steroids years before when he had first become interested in bodybuilding. A lot of it, he says, involved personal insecurity. "I took them 12 years ago," he explains. "I was a young guy. I was 23 or so and I was feeling insecure and I was feeling if i had more muscle I was going to have more of everything: more friends, more success, that kind of thing."

He had used the drugs from 1985 until the beginning of 1987. "They worked," he acknowledges, "but I wasn't really getting the results that I wanted. I wanted to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger and I was unable to achieve that. At that point, just prior to '87, steroids became illegal and they really started to prosecute people who were taking them."

So Seidman gave them up for the same reasons he abandoned crime: steroids were bad for him. "I started to worry about going to jail, and then about the health complications of taking this stuff. So I quit, which is actually hard to do because they're psychologically addictive.You actually get bigger and stronger - the thing I wanted for my whole life - so it was really difficult for me to get off them. I started to lose muscle and I started to get smaller. I thought, 'I'm going to lose my girlfriends. People aren't going to respect me.' But, of course, that wasn't true."

Once the facts came out, a minor brouhaha resulted, which was documented in the film Body of Work. Seidman was allowed to finish the contest. He looks backs now on the incident with the humorous optimism that seems to have gotten him through other crises in his life.

"At first, I was really, really depressed because I thought I had let everyone down, that no one believed me," he says. "But after a month or so of being home, when they finally filmed me for my little segment [in Body of Work], I finally got to say in the movie that I felt miserable because I felt I had put doubt in [Muscle Media executive editor] Bill Phillips' mind, and I felt better because Bill would hear that. And now it doesn't bother me; I'm kind of glad, actually, because I had more time in the movie." He laughs. "You know, people remember me because of that."

Seidman says he learned a lot from the Physique Transformation Contest - and not just lessons about physical health. "The actual competition, that was a lot of fun. Being there sort of changed my perspective on why I was doing it. Initially, I just wanted to win the whole thing and screw everybody else. But once I met everybody, I saw that they were all cool people. In the end, I really wanted everybody to win because they were such great people and they'd all worked as hard as I had. Their goals were just different from mine." He was also moved by how supportive everyone was during the steroids controversy.

Since winning $50,000 and a Corvette, Seidman and his girlfriend of three years, Rowena, have moved from California to Florida. "We came to Orlando about seven months ago because, in 1985, we had bought four homes here as rental properties. We had wanted to start some long-term investments. We came here to manage the homes and get more heavily invested in real estate. Once we got to Orlando, we figured it was a good place to live."

The two are planning a move to South Beach in Miami where Seidman hopes to capitalize on his newfound fame to promote his beliefs in fitness and bodybuilding by opening a bodybuilding center. "I love South Beach and I loved doing personal training, so I thought that a personal training center would be the best thing," he explains. "And I believe that we will be successful, mainly because of what bodybuilding and Bill Phillips did for me."

As sunny in success as he was in failure, Seidman is convinced anyone can take the path he took and find better living through exercising and eating right. "There's no secret to getting in shape. It's just basically nutrition, supplementation, and weight training," he says. "That's it. Everybody thinks there's a special secret. Everybody asks me all the time at the gym, 'What do you do?' I don't do anything differently than anybody else. I'm just more strict about it.

"But a lot of people are looking for a quick fix or some easier way to go about it. They're fooling themselves. If you set a goal for yourself - the way I did when I dedicated myself to three months of training for the contest - you can change. It took me only 12 weeks, which compared to the full time that you're here on earth is nothing. You're going to have dramatic changes in your body. That alone will change your life and motivate you probably for the rest of your life."

Besides setting a time table, Seidman thinks the key to training and transforming is to stop fooling yourself. The bodybuilder himself has had firsthand experience with reasons not to succeed - bad circumstances, bad luck, and bad karma - but he didn't let that stop him.

"People think it's so complex and they make up excuses. It's much simpler than people think. I say, don't count on finding time, make time. I found that even with my busy schedule, I could make the time I needed to transform my physique. To be successful, you have to stop making excuses. The physical workout is part of a mental process because really to push yourself hard enough to really get major results you have to mentally push yourself. You just have to find something that will motivate you enough so that you can find time to do it."

Indeed, Seidman believes that self-motivation is crucial. He cites his sister as an example. "Some people can't see their progress and that discourages them. My sister had started the [Physique Transformation] contest, but she didn't finish it. She got discouraged because she looked at herself every day. It's hard to see progress every day. But I had her take some photos of herself. After about five weeks into the contest she looked at the photos of her then and now, and she realized that she had changed quite a bit. She hadn't realized it because her body weight hadn't changed but her physique had. Dramatically."

If you want to improve your life, he adds, find what works for you. Everyone may be different, but the solution is the same: dedication, hard work, and patience. "Anybody can follow my routine and get great results. Or make up your own. There's no perfect routine," he notes. "That's a myth. Because all ten of us who did this contest had completely different routines as far as working out went. I developed mine on my own, and I went by how my body felt. I developed it by reading and researching. I trained more than anybody who was in the contest, I think. But all ten of the routines worked. The similarity we had was in what we ate: we all had almost identical nutritional and supplemental programs. We all had very healthy food and were very consistent with that."

It has been a bumpy road, but for now, Jeff Seidman, man of bad luck and bad karma, sees only a bright future, one in which he has finally taken charge of his life. Despite the odd and despite the difficulties, he has succeeded in bettering himself and his environment. And he hopes that others can learn from his example.

"I was always optimistic, even at the worst of times," he says. "It was hard to change from being a criminal. When I went to get a job, I was getting minimum wage because I didn't have the education. I was making so much more money stealing and the stealing was much easier. But I always knew inside that the bad person wasn't me.Everyone should look at their life. I mean, I really believe you become what you surround yourself with. And you can change. Once you become an adult, you can take total control. When I was younger, I made excuses. I blamed my parents, my friends, whoever. But once I got older, I realized I was in charge of my life. I could make it anything I wanted."