Yes, according to one of the most familiar platitudes in English, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Probably every other human language on earth has an equivalent old saying, because it is just so ridiculously, platitudinously true.
In this context, the meaning is obvious. We try to tell kids: Please make every effort to not be an obese child, because as you grow up and inevitably grow older, something unpleasant is programmed to occur. Most likely, you will wake up and realize it is time to shed those extra pounds, because you’re not a kid anymore. In addition, the effort to lose those pounds will make your life much more difficult than it would have been, if you had never added them in the first place.
Of course, kids never listen anyhow. Maybe some grownups listen, and if they have kids, they might take that warning to heart — especially because they probably know the truth firsthand. It behooves every parent to try to figure out how to get this message across in a way that might penetrate the juvenile mindset.
The oldsters do not say “You’ll be sorry” out of love for the lilting rhythm of the phrase. Hey kids, we know for a certainty that you will be sorry, because we made the same stupid mistakes, and we are now sorry, and we don’t care who knows it.
Monkey see, monkey do
This cannot be said too often: Children are much more likely to imitate what they see at home every day, than to follow precepts that are taught in any other way. A childhood that features unmonitored eating habits is awfully hard to overcome. Not to become a fat kid is a very difficult life challenge. Careless and excessive consumption makes it almost impossible to ever stop being a fat kid.
The great majority of grownups probably have a profound personal understanding of how difficult it is not to remain a fat kid. In other words, most adults grasp, from their own experience, how hard it is to retreat from the categories of “overweight” and “obese.”
But as Werner Erhard has said, “Understanding is the booby prize.” An adult can realize how difficult it is to lose body weight, and grasp the meaning of the sentence all day long, but none of that can help much. It is probably already too late for them, and their awareness and experience do not seem to go very far toward helping the next generation.
Plenty of words out there
There are a lot of words we can use in trying to convey to a child the importance of eating only worthwhile foods, and even then, not too much of them. Here’s the catch. By the time a child can understand the words, she or he has already logged several years of much more convincing communication. Mr. or Ms. Grownup, that kid has had an eye on you from Day 1, clocking your every move. Every single treat, snack, and third helping. It’s all there, on the shelves of their brain libraries.
Why must so much emphasis be placed on the prevention of childhood obesity? Because of a fact that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore with each passing day. We cannot avoid noticing that childhood obesity almost inevitably leads to adult obesity.
Okay, admittedly, there is another possibility, one that is equally damaging. A person can spend an entire lifetime tirelessly, devotedly taking measures to fend off adult obesity; every minute of every day being acutely conscious of the weight-related consequences behind every bite of food. That sounds like zero fun.
A grownup can be in therapy, able to recall and comprehend in exquisite detail every single factor in three decades of life that led to being a 30-year-old who weighs 350 pounds. But… Understanding is the booby prize.
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