Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Passive Consumption


Have you ever thought about how passive we are?  For working as hard as we all do, we certainly have made up for it in our passive pursuits.
TV watching time (at least for those non-Millennials of us) is way up.  We watch what's on and flip channels to make sure we're not missing something good (which is pretty unlikely because there isn't that much "good" TV no matter how many channels we have on our cable package).  We watch whatever is put in front of us.
And many of us eat whatever is put in front of us -- and not in the polite way our mom's all taught us!  It's not because someone is offering us a piece of "delicious", homemade fruitcake and we don't want to hurt their feelings -- we're eating whatever happens to cross our paths.
Yesterday's meeting doughnuts left on the break table.  Cubes of cheese from the potluck 4 hours ago.  Drive-thru "snack wrap".  Candy from the bank.  Sample of something you wouldn't buy in the first place but you eat just because you're waiting for your deli order to be filled. 
We're not making active decisions here -- we're just reverting to the stage of infancy were anything that crosses our paths goes in our mouths.  It might be cute for a 9 month old (and it really is the way they learn about their world) but we're grownups.  We don't need (and indeed aren't) learning anything from the experience of all those extra bites.
It's time to mature past this stage -- it's no longer serving our development (indeed many of us have "developed" more than we need to ;)
Food is everywhere -- especially this time of year (but pretty much all times of the year now days).  Passive consumption only happens when you're on autopilot.  Start being more mindful and you'll notice these tendencies BEFORE the food makes it all the way to your mouth.  And once that happens -- weight loss here you come!

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