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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Wellspring, a camp for overweight teens, trains kids to have a "healthy obsession" with food and exercise. Sure, they shed pounds on the 1,200-calorie daily diet, but what happens when they get home?
Sep 18, 2005 | It's a sunny Monday afternoon at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park south of Carmel on the California coast, and the kids from Western Wellspring Adventure Camp head down to the river for a swim. Back from a two-day, overnight backpacking trip in the Ventana Wilderness that included 11 miles of hiking and a close encounter with a rattlesnake, the campers are ready to get wet.
At least, the boys are.
The girls have just taken 25-cent, three-minute camp showers -- "I only shaved one leg!" -- and they're not about to get their still-drying locks soaked in dirty river water. Or maybe they just don't want to be seen in public wearing bathing suits. So they park on the bank, chatting, writing letters home or scribbling in their journals, while the boys horse around in the shallow water, splashing and laughing.
Millions of kids spend their summer at overnight camp, playing sports, building campfires and making friends. But the campers at Wellspring have a more urgent goal: to lose weight. Like other weight loss camps, Wellspring deploys a strict food and exercise regimen. But Wellspring's management bristles if you call their program a "fat camp," which they find derogatory, too negative. "We like the athletic metaphor," says Ryan Craig, a Yale-educated lawyer who is the president of Healthy Living Academies, which operates Wellspring. "We're transforming our bodies in the same way as athletes overcome biological barriers to transform their bodies." But unlike athletes, the kids aren't training for a big game or a race. They're in training for the real world after camp. Wellspring's motto is "Change for life."
The camp's method is to teach kids to deliberately fixate on food and exercise, to create a "healthy obsession," in the words of the camp's clinical director, Daniel Kirschenbaum, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, who has also written a weight loss book by the same name. Campers keep journals in which they write down the calorie and fat content of everything they put in their mouths, and wear pedometers so they can count and record every step they take. Campers get rewards for being diligent reporters, garnering not only praise from counselors but treats, like a field trip to Starbucks or time on the Internet.
As I sit with them on the riverbank, it's clear the Wellspring girls are obsessed with food, all right -- the food they're not allowed to eat. Their talk is peppered with paeans to waffles, Pringles, beef and chicken. One girl, who has been at the camp only a week, pledges defiantly to drink a gallon of juice when she gets home. But the food chatter comes to a halt when the campers spy a girl nearby whose body is everything theirs are not.
The object of their attention is a prepubescent girl, no more than 10 years old, wearing a red-and-white polka-dot bikini. The girl's stomach is flat, her waist narrow, and she carries not an ounce of excess bulge. She ambles on some rocks, oblivious to the Wellspring campers nearby examining her with undisguised envy.
"I want to be tiny like that," whispers one Wellspring girl. "I want to kill her," sighs another.
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In August, I spent two days with a dozen Wellspring campers trying to understand what it feels like to be an obese teenager, to have one's body deemed nothing less than a public health crisis. I met 13-year-olds who authoritatively discussed their body-mass indexes as they might the latest Kanye West CD. Teens who know about the threat of Type II diabetes, once called "adult-onset diabetes," to overweight kids because some of them already have it; kids who can recite calories and fat grams from meals they'd eaten days ago. Two 14-year-old girls challenged me to try to name a diet that they hadn't already been on -- and failed at -- back home. Certainly, the kids I encountered were informed about health and nutrition. But is that knowledge -- and only four to eight weeks at Wellspring -- enough to help them end the cycle of weight loss failure? Is teaching them to be obsessive about food and exercise really the best way to help them shed pounds? And will weeks of deprivation at camp just lead to bingeing on Pringles and waffles when they are finally unleashed from their summertime stint in food prison?
