Imagination, the Cure for Obesity

It occurred to me tonight why the population of planet earth is growing exponentially more obese, and the reason isn’t poor diet, artificial hormones, or even lack of exercise. The reason is lack of imagination.

Q: Eh?

A: Take children.

Compared to adults, few children are fat, and yet their diets consist of the same percentage of refined starches, sugars, and oils as adults, if not more. Actually, the average child’s diet is almost certainly worse than the average adult’s diet. It’s a well-known fact that children hate eating vegetables and, given the chance, would happily subsist entirely on cupcakes.

Q: But don’t children have a higher metabolism, which allows them to get by on eating garbage?

A: Come on, you don’t even know what the word metabolism means. This argument was invented by the down and out as a mystical justification for their self-induced physical demise.

Q: But come on, it’s gotta be exercise. Kids run around all day while adults sit on their tushies.

A: Halfway there. While moving around enough may do the trick, a half hour of concentrated exercise can never burn enough calories to atone for a poor diet. I know from experience … and from observing more than one marathon runner with a pot belly.

Q: Are you going to get to your point?

A: Yes.

It’s not just that kids run around all day, thus raising their caloric output, it’s that compared to adults, they’re virtually uninterested in food, thus reducing their caloric intake. If you have children, you know what I mean. They’re far more interested in digging holes to China, erecting tents, and even running around in circles than titillating their taste buds and gorging their stomachs.

Again, the reason is imagination. The world is still exciting to children. There’s endless possibilities before them. They want to explore and become, not sit down in a chair and refuel. So many adults, on the other hand, having had their imaginations beat out of them through thirteen to twenty years of formal education and the relentless drudgery of 9 to 5 jobs, have long-since given up on their dreams. Food, therefore, becomes comfort and relief. Lots of food. The more the better.

Deep down, I think we all know that adults never lose their need for imagination. I mean, given our sorry states of life, we may need it more than children do. The difference here between children and adults is that children use their own imaginations while adults have others do it for them in the form of books, TV, movies, video games, and so on. While there are plenty of prepubescent media-junkies (through the fault of their parents), when the TV is turned off, children still know how to live out their fantasies.

When you have dreams to make reality, and life is so exciting that you can’t bear the thought of sitting still until absolutely driven by hunger, how could you not lose weight? If you’re looking to drop a few pounds, don’t call Jenny Kregg. Don’t buy into expensive pills or any other form of magic. Go jump on a trampoline, point your fingers, and make machine gun sounds.