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What is Comprehensive Health?

Tom Holowka — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:11:43 +0000

The tagline for this site is “A Comprehensive Health Website” and I want to explain why I chose that tagline. There’s many websites that focus on a specific aspect of health, like fitness or weight management, but I haven’t seen too many sites that focus on the big picture of total health. Here I want to acknowledge all aspects of creating a healthy life.

If that’s still a little vague consider the following list from Doug Graham’s book The 80/10/10 Diet

The Fundamental Elements of Health

This list, although not necessarily all-inclusive, does a pretty fair job of outlining many of the topics I wish to cover in this blog. You can see as you look at this list health is not simply the absence of disease, the presence of high level fitness, or maintaining a healthy weight. It’s all those things and much, much more. The thing I love about this list is that it includes many things not typically associated with health creation, but which are undoubtedly essential parts such as creativity, self-mastery, and smiles

On this blog I intend to share information about topics like those listed as well as information about my own pursuit of comprehensive health. I hope you’ll enjoy learning and growing along with me.

-Tom

How I Decided to Start A New Health and Fitness Business

Tom Holowka — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:13:24 +0000

Up until this point I’ve used this blog for journaling, posting random articles and thoughts, and even applying for a scholarship. If you go through and look at my archives you can see up to this point that my posting frequency has been fairly random. I also started several projects and never finished them, like a polyphasic sleep experiment and a raw food experiment.

I attribute my lack of attention and perseverence to never giving the site a clear focus. I kinda wrote about whatever I felt like at the time. I feel like my lack of focus on the blog stemmed from my lack of focus on my career.

I struggled for a long time figuring out what I wanted to do in my career. After college I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I still couldn’t come up with something I felt really good about. I did come up with a lot of info about what I didn’t want. I knew that I wanted my career to be an outlet for contribution. I never wanted to feel like my career was meaningless. And I wanted to be able to help people directly.

During the time I was figuring out where my career was going, I got very interested in health and fitness. I experimented a lot with diet and over about three years I decided that I really wanted to include health, one of my biggest personal interests, as part of my career as well.

I met these two requirements in the middle and decided to become a personal trainer!

Over this past summer I studied to get a personal training certification from NASM (National Academy of Sports Medicine), and on October 1st, I passed my certification test. So I’m officially a personal trainer!

So now that I have a strong focus on where my career is going, I have a greater focus on how I want to use this website.

The site will be a medium for helping others get fit and healthy. I plan on updating the site consistently with posts on health and fitness and also some general personal development and psychology, because for a lot of people whether they exercise or not isn’t really about the exercise, it’s about their beliefs about exercise. I will start with just articles but as time goes on I may do more videos, or podcasting.

The site will also be a place to direct potential clients for information about training. As I train more and more people I’ll add testimonials to the site so you can see the fruits of my labor as a personal trainer.

In the near future I hope to offer online training as well. I’ll probably start with a small group, maybe 10 or 15 and grow from there when I see fit. Online training will consist of day to day workout plans delivered by e-mail, a video component teaching you how to do exercises in the workout plan and a nutrition program as well.

If you’re reading and you’ve got some extra body-fat hanging around that you wanna get rid of free to e-mail me @ Tom @ TomHolowka dot com and let me know a little bit about you and your health goals or some of your limiting beliefs about losing weight or becoming healthier.

I’m really excited about this career path and equally as excited to start getting some results for people who want to get healthy.

The Fallacy of Working Smarter

Tom Holowka — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:24:24 +0000

Have you ever heard someone say “work smarter, not harder.” That sounds pretty good right? Seems to make sense, but as a statement it’s incredibly overrated.

Work smarter not harder is such a misleading phrase because it makes you think that you can get by on smarts alone and you don’t have to work. The emphasis is the “smarter” part, not the work part, but the work part way more important than the smarter part.

You can’t work smarter if you’ve never started working in the first place.

Chances are you’re very smart (or at least you think you are), so being smart doesn’t help. Working helps.

If you’re overweight for example and haven’t exercised in three years, working smarter just means working.

You have to learn to work, before you work smarter.

I find that this shows most in planning. You can create the smartest goddamn plan in the world, but if you don’t follow it, it means nothing. Do you not follow the plan because you’re not smart? Maybe. It’s possible, but it’s more likely you don’t follow it because you know it’s going to be HARD.

Being smart is overrated, while working your ass off is extremely underrated.

Work smarter not harder is so appealing because most of us (me included) are allergic to hard work. It’s very comforting to be told that you don’t have to work hard in order to be successful or achieve a goal.

It’s also bullshit.

Sometimes working smarter, just means working.

Do you waste mountains of time on aimlessly surfing the internet? Is being smarter going to help you stop?

Are you addicted to drinking or smoking? Does being smarter help you stop?

Conscious effort is really the key, aka Hard Work.

So here’s my suggestion, next time you hear “work smarter not harder” focus on the WORK not the smarts.

Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

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Your Great Great Grandkids Will Know Everything About You

Tom Holowka — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:38:56 +0000

Gary Vaynerchuk, always says “legacy is greater than currency.” Today you have a responsibility to make sure you leave behind a positive legacy.

In the online world, your life, the data that makes up your online identity is stored forever. Everyone is going to be able to see everything you’ve ever done. Not just now but forever.

Think about this from the perspective of a little kid today. My 9 year old brother has a Facebook now. My little brother is going to have everything about his life from this point on documented online in some form. Crazy right?

I have some new mother Facebook friends and they post pictures of their kids and status updates about what their kids are doing all the time. These kids are having their entire lives documented online from Day One!

Guess what? You’re going to have your life documented online for the rest of your life too.

In the past legacy was for history books, famous people and word of mouth stories from your parents. This is such a huge change from how it used to be. Now everyone has a legacy, and everyone can see it.

When my great, great, grandkids want to see who their great great grandfather was, all they’re going to have to do is go to google (or the future’s equivalent) and type in my name. Realize that!

Leaving a Positive Legacy

You’re the ultimate authority on your online identity. There will likely always be somebody out there who wants to trash you, but if you’ve put enough good stuff online to back up who you are, it won’t matter.

Think about the legacy you’re leaving from time to time.

Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

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How Do You Handle Your Online Privacy?

Tom Holowka — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 04:41:35 +0000

As the world becomes increasingly more connected, what is the role of privacy in your online identity? If you have any type of online identity at all, people probably know more about your life than ever before. How do you feel about this? Is it important to you to maintain a level of privacy?

I feel a bit conflicted on this. I don’t feel like I have anything to hide but currently I keep certain elements of my Facebook profile hidden. As an example, I only let certain friends view my photos. I do this because I only want certain people who I feel comfortable with to be able to see tagged photos of me.

At the same time though this I realize this is dumb.

I can always untag a photo of me if I don’t want people to see it right, but if the person who took the picture of me doesn’t take it down than what’s the point? The photo is still out there on the internet to be found. I’m just burying it a little deeper.

How do you handle this?

I think you have to be transparent. You can’t expect to bury anything and have it just go away. You’ve gotta be a PR person. Address it and move on. Don’t hide.

Everyone’s in the media business now.

There’s pictures of me on my facebook drinking alcohol, eating fast food, and making obscene gestures. (someone’s going right to Facebook to find these, haha) I don’t do any of these things anymore, so should I hide all of those photos because they don’t align with the person I am now? I suppose I could and I guess it’s really a personal choice, but I think it’s better to leave them up and not hide who I used to be.

I’m not proud of those things (although I did have some epic nights as a drinker) but it’s part of my story, ya know? Yea I got drunk, and did some stupid things. So what? I bet I’m not the only one

So after writing this I’ll probably be a little looser with my online privacy settings and see what happens.

Consequences

Do you see any possible consequences to this?

My hope is that through transparency our society will become a lot more accepting.

For example if I’m going through a tough part of my life I’ll be able to share it online and have support during that time. People will use their social networks for growth and development.

There could be negative consequences too. Maybe I’ll become unemployable because of my lack of privacy.

Here’s some questions to think about for comments:

How do you handle your privacy on social networks?
Do you think transparency is a good idea or bad idea?

Looking forward to you answers! And Happy New Year!

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The World Changes Fast

Tom Holowka — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:48:12 +0000

Yesterday I was thinking about when I first started college. I graduated high school in 2004 and went to Seton Hall university. I hadn’t chose a major but I lived in a dormitory on a floor with all the communications majors. I can specifically remember a conversation with my friends and floormates about how they were worried about finding jobs after they graduated. I agreed with them that things didn’t look promising.

Looking at it now that conversation seems unbelievably stupid. There’s more media outlets now than there’s ever been. You can build your own media outlet from scratch on WordPress or Youtube. Plenty of people have and plenty more will.

But remember this was 2004 when we had this conversation. When I was thinking about this I asked myself was I really that stupid? How could none of us have seen this?

Back In 2004

Fast Forward back to 2004 for a minute and think about it with me because chances are you don’t realize how much the world has changed since then.

Back in September 2004, when I started college, Myspace was the social network of choice, before the phrase “social network” was even on the radar.

Blogs had been around for awhile but were nowhere near as popular as they are now.

Facebook was .edu for college students only and hadn’t even reached Seton Hall University yet.

What about Youtube? Non-existent. The first youtube video wasn’t uploaded until April 2005. That’s close to two full school years after we had that conversation.

Twitter? Nope. Not until 2006.

So looking back on it maybe we weren’t that stupid. Maybe we just didn’t realize the how quick the world was changing.