Daily Exercise 30 Day Trial – Update 1
December 6th, 2008Breakdown of days 1-5 for my Daily Exercise 30 Day Trial
Day 1 - Wasn’t feeling enthusiastic about starting this challenge, normally a bad sign. I delayed getting started all day and began a workout at home at 7p doing a variety of push ups, crunches, pull ups, dips and squats. My maximum amount of push ups was 26. Lets see how many I can get on December 30th.
Day 2 - Easier to get started. Went running in between classes at my the indoor track. I didn’t keep track of how many laps, just ran for time, ended up doing 26+ minutes.
Day 3 - Did a similar workout to Day 1, again feeling relatively unenthusiastic about the challenge. I waited until after 7p again.
Day 4 - Running at the indoor track again, 26+ minutes. Made myself exercise before leaving school because I felt like I wouldn’t wanna do it when I got home.
Day 5 – Got out earlier today, getting to the gym at 10:30a. My Shoulders were a little sore so I wanted to ride the stationary bike, but the gym only had two stationary bikes, both old and in bad shape. Using them was very uncomfortable. After a few minutes, I scrapped the stationary bike and shot a basketball in the basketball gym instead. I was the only one there so I shot alone. Shooting by yourself is fun when you’re as rusty at as I am.
Reflection
Quality
The workouts have been good quality except for today, basing that on a little sweat and muscle soreness. Today’s workout quality wasn’t great, but my goal isn’t to get efficient quality workouts everyday. Consistency is my goal, so I won’t feel bad about a poor workout. At least I know not to expect to use the stationary bikes at that gym..
Enthusiasm
My self-discipline’s been dragging me to my workouts so far. I haven’t been as motivated as I normally am for a 30 Day Trial, but I’m still having success. Guess I owe that to my self-discipline.
Start Time
All of my workouts were after 5pm except for today. It felt better to do the workout early and not have it looming. From This day forward I’m going to do the workouts as early as I can. Anything I can do to make the challenge easier on me.
Onward to Days 6-10
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What to Do if You Don’t Care About Your Life
November 29th, 2008You’re Screwed.
I can’t help you. Nobody can.
What I Can Do
I can give you reasons why you should care.
I can tell you life is beautiful. I can preach to you about how people have persevered through circumstances much worse than yours. I can read you inspiring quotes or show you inspiring movies.
I can speculate why you don’t care; You might feel powerless, like you have no control like nothing you do matters or like no one cares about you.
I can even understand why you don’t care. You’ve been conditioned by your TV, your parents, your classmates, your boss, your family, your coworkers, and finally yourself. Your whole world taught you not to care, then you taught yourself.
But none of the things I can do will make any difference.
You’ve Gotta Help Yourself
Ultimately the choice is yours.
That Choice is your most powerful ally, your only true possession.
If you have nothing else you’ll always have that choice. You can ignore it, pretending like it’s not there but it is. You can run away from it, but you won’t get very far. You can delay it, but it’ll be back. You can hide from it, but it’ll find you. That choice will always be there even if you’ve already made it. Even if you’ve already chosen thousands of times before. The choice is still yours to make again. It’s always there for you to make.
All you have to do is start caring.
Besides, do you really expect me to believe you don’t care if you’re asking?
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30 Day Trials
November 25th, 200830 Day Trials, a simple concept. You pick a habit you want to start (jogging) or one you’d like to stop (drinking alcohol) and focus on making it a reality for the next 30 days. The habit doesn’t have to be some huge undertaking, it could be as simple as making your bed everyday.
30 Day trials are great for building habits because you can focus on one change. When you try to change everything about your life overnight you often fail miserably, get discouraged and forget about it, wondering why you bothered in the first place (guilty as charged 
). By focusing on one habit at a time you make it easier to succeed, creating positive momentum to build on.
Another reason 30 day trials work well is because of the small commitment. 30 days, no big deal, It’s not like you’re going to do it everyday for the rest of your life. You’re just tryin’ it out. Temporary change is easier to wrap your head around then permanent change.
There’s already been awesome articles written on 30 Day Trials so here’s the links.
30 Days to Success
The Beginners Guide to the 30 Day Trial
ZenHabits.net
December Trial
I like to do a trial at the beginning of every month to build new habits and trash old ones. Starting December 1st, I’ll be blogging my latest trial.
I’m not going to update daily, but I’ll make a post on my progress every fifth day, recapping the previous five days.
December’s trial will be 30 days of exercise, so for the month of December I’ll exercise everyday for 25 consecutive minutes.
In high school, (doesn’t that sound like something you’re only supposed say when you’re over 40?) I exercised at least a half hour per day, running on the cross country and track teams. Now, I go through spurts where I’ll exercise everyday for two weeks and then not again for the next three or one day of exercise four days of none, so this for me this challenge is about making exercise a consistent daily habit again.
I decided on 25 minutes because 20 minutes seemed too easy, but 30 seemed like a big commitment, 25 is an adequate challenge.
I’m trying to build a habit of getting some sort of exercise every single day, running, basketball, body weight exercises, basically anything that gets me moving. I’m being flexible because the most important thing to me is consistency, not the results of the actual exercise. If I were training for an event like a 5K, I’d focus on the exercise itself, but this is about the habit.
December 1st is Day One.
Give it a try? It’s only 30 days…
I welcome anyone who wants to participate or start a trial of their own, just post a comment stating your trial and post your updates in the comments every fifth day when I post mine.
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What is the Raw Glow?
November 18th, 2008Yesterday I saw some relatives at a cousin’s birthday party. When I arrived my aunt and her mom ran over to me telling me how fantastic I looked and that they barely recognized me. Even my aunt’s stepfather told me I was looking good and he’s not somebody who throws around compliments about another man’s appearance.
Last time I saw those relatives was about 11 months ago and except for having longer hair I don’t look much different. After thinking it over I remembered other people reacting similarly seeing me for the first time in a few months. It made me wonder why people were telling me I look good and different when I look the same.
I’ve been eating raw vegan for just over a year now. Maybe I’ve got the glow.
The Raw Glow
I’ve read about the raw glow before, but never an explanation of what it was, just that it happens to people. Some people like Philip McClusky and Angela Stokes have lost over 150lbs eating raw and look great. As far as I know they don’t glow in the dark. That’s because the raw glow isn’t something you see, it’s something you feel.
The raw glow is actually non-physical energy. People around you subconsciously sense positive energy in your presence. They have no other way to reciprocate feeling your energy than saying “you look fantastic!” even though you look the same.
The energy doesn’t come from raw food. The energy exists within you, but when you eat unhealthy food you block it. Instead of radiating outward, the energy is absorbed by other processes like heavy digestion and toxin elimination. These processes use up your energy when you eat toxic food. Cleaning up your diet allows your energy to flow freely, unblocked.
When you eat toxic food you take in toxic energy too. Negative energy coming from the suffering, the mercilessness, and the human indifference of animal production and the negative effects on the planet as whole. This negative energy blocks your natural positive energy, canceling it out or even producing a net-negative energy. Could that be why it seems like we live in such a negative angry world? 
So are you wondering what makes people compliment you? They’re simply reciprocating the positive energy you’re broadcasting to them. Your lifestyle change causes you to become a beacon of positive energy. Others receive your positive energy and wish to reciprocate it, so they compliment you, telling you you look fantastic.
It has nothing to do with looks. I look almost the same as I did last time I saw my relatives. I was wearing sweatpants and a hoody when I saw them yesterday. Not exactly fantastic by traditional standards, right?
Other people sense that you are fantastic, even though it has nothing to do with the way you look. They feel the positive energy. They feel it so much it makes them think they see it, and that’s what the raw glow is all about.
This might sound a little hokey to you close-minded folk and I understand your skepticism, but I’ve heard and experienced this phenomenon too often lately to not at least consider it possible.
So what’s your experience with The Raw Glow? Does it exist? Comments?
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The First Post (again)
November 16th, 2008I’m (re)starting this blog to write about life and society. I’ve been very apprehensive about writing articles because I feel the blogosphere is over saturated with information. After two years of reading other blogs I’m realizing I have originality to offer.
In need of more proof my blog wouldn’t be the most useless blog on the internet, I found on Technorati almost 9,000 blogs about cats. If 9,000 cat bloggers can write about their pets, there’s no reason my blog can’t be more useful than one.
So, if you subscribe I offer you the TomHolowka.com Guarantee:
I guarantee my blog will be more useful than 1% of all cat blogs or your money back!
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