What Fat Camps Feed You
The concept at fat camps is that children have no choice but to lose weight when you severely restrict their diets and make them exercise for hours every day. It is simple mathematics: To lose pounds, campers need to burn more calories than they take in, and this happens if you control their environment to create the desired result.
The food at old-style fat camps is notoriously bad. Author Daniel Pinkwater satirizes fat camp food in his comical children's books, Fat Camp Commandos:
Shredded carrots with raisins. Every meal at Camp Noo Yoo includes shredded carrots with raisins. Except breakfast. Breakfast is one puny pancake and sugar-free syrup that tastes like mouthwash...and chopped orange salad with raisins. Everything is served at room temperature, and the tables at Camp Noo Yoo are always moist.Naturally, the kids at Camp Noo Yoo get so hungry they go out and kill rattlesnakes (tastes like chicken).
At old-style fat camps, it's not uncommon for children to eat all their meals off plastic trays divided into parts for each small serving of food. Every child gets the same tray with the same foods in the same small portions, with a total daily allowance of between 1,200 and 1,500 calories.
Tony Sparber, a long-time director of children's fat camps, recalled that in the mid-1970s, some camps used to serve foods like liver, fish, and alfalfa sprouts to stay under 1,200 daily calories. "We had the kids doing sit-ups and running as much as possible to achieve the maximum weight loss," he said.
Memories of the food served at fat camps and the constant hunger are still painful in the minds of former campers. As Abby Ellin writes in her memoir of life at fat camp, "Being deprived takes its toll. At dinner we would toy with our broiled fish or calf's liver and tantalize each other with talk of pizza and hot dogs and French fries smothered in catsup. Like sex-deprived soldiers who pinned up posters of Betty Grable during World War II, we taped up photos of cakes and cookies on the bunk wall."
One little girl told a New York Times reporter, "The first week all I could think about was ice cream." Another added, "A lot of people smuggle food into camp."
According to some reports, campers routinely pay unethical counselors for contraband food - a Snickers bar went for $5, a bag of chips cost $3. At night, they'd raid the dining hall and steal peanut butter and Weight Watchers ice cream from the refrigerators. "We lived for the day we could go out and buy our own piles of goodies," Ellin writes. "Food was all we thought of."
The bigger problem is that fat camps create a mindset of "real-life food" versus "camp food," and "eating at camp to lose weight" versus "eating in the real world." For example, in the weeks before camp, a child might go on a huge eating binge and consume tens of thousands of calories a day, because she knows she will not be eating anything tasty until school starts. When a child's parents or grandparents come to visit at camp, she may go out with them and binge even more.
"I would argue that those of us who didn't have eating disorders when we arrived at camp," Ellin says, "certainly had developed them by the time we left." One counselor told her, "I eat what I want during the year and end up gaining weight because I know I'm going to be at camp all summer."
Part of the reason these old-style fat camps fail children is that they send the message that healthy food can't taste good. In addition, these camps don't provide nutritional classes or teach campers how to make healthy food choices or order balanced meals in restaurants. As such, campers have no way of knowing how to maintain their weight loss. Fat camps also fail to get the family involved to encourage healthy habits at home. Attending fat camp ends up being just another way to feel bad about yourself, develop an eating disorder, and perpetuate a lifelong battle with food and yo-yo dieting.
