Are You Living Life In a Television Comfort Zone?

You are the author of your life. Everyday that you live, you write the script in your head and play it out during the day. As you write your life’s script, your mind constructs everything it needs to complete the story. A big part of that story is its setting. Where does the story of your life take place? What kind of scenery have you constructed? In the theatre, the scenery is often taken for granted but it can make or break a production. The mental scenery that you create for your story has enormous impact on its outcome. Does your story take place mostly in the “The Comfort Zone”? The truth is; most of us live in a perpetual comfort zone. We tend to find comfort in the scenery of familiar places, people and, most of all, habits. It is the warm light of this “scenery” that brings us comfort and familiarity.  Like that worn old baby blanket or that shabby favorite sweater, this environment envelopes us and make us feel safe.  Although this scenery makes us feel comfortable in the moment, it doesn’t always serve our best interests. Sometimes we keep the old ratty sweater simply because we are used to it. We cling to it even though it has an odd odor and is riddled with holes. Its familiarity gives us a sense of comfort. Often the warm glow of our “scenery” is dim and dirty, but our familiarity with it keeps us from exploring change. The feelings we have when we are in the “zone” are so familiar that we seek them out over and over again, even when they are not doing us one bit of good. Staying in the “comfort zone” rarely brings growth or happiness.  We need to realize that that comfort zone only makes us comfortable for a small moment in time.  Living in this zone does not support growth or allow us to reach our goals. For many of us, our comfort zone is our prison. Your comfort zone could take the form of a bad habit, a tendency toward inaction or a propensity to hang around people that constantly deflate your attempts at self improvement. Even the most comfortable prison is still a prison.
Living in the “zone” makes us sit down and watch television instead of going out and taking a walk.  In fact, if you go out and take a walk you may find that you actually feel better and, as an added bonus, you have done something good for yourself.  How much have you honestly accomplished for yourself while watching TV? Was it really time well spent? Do you honestly believe that it has enriched your life?  Add up all the hours you have blown passively watching TV. Have those hours really amounted to anything? Be honest! 

What you may not know is that the most the best experts in the field of weight loss have never even attended college. They have, however, graduated with honors from the school of hard knocks. These true experts are the people that have successfully lost weight and are keeping it off.

            The National weight loss registry is a list of over 6,000 people that have done just that. This is one of the largest studies on weight loss in the world. A couple of times a year the researchers design a survey for the participants to answer. They ask all kinds of personal questions and then hound you to send back the survey. The information they gather is then interpreted for the scientific community and spit out in the form of reports and journal articles. We weight loss professionals wait for these journals with the same level of excitement that most people feel when they are waiting for their EBAY purchases to arrive.  As a member of both the scientific and the participant sides of this study, I fill out the surveys and get the results. When the studies are released, I am particularly excited to see how my answers stack up. It turns out that, according to the latest weight loss registry report, these weight loss “experts” (you know, the ones that actually lost weight) don’t watch that much TV. As it so happens, these folks spend a lot more time living than they do watching life on a small screen. In most cases, the life they live makes a more exciting story than those they are missing on TV. These same people also have managed to limit their addiction to the internet. I guess these people are so busy “living” that they don’t have time to waste surfing EBAY for exercise equipment they will never use.