Gut check

To be accepted at Wellspring, a child must be at least 20 pounds overweight according to his or her body-mass index. But you don't have to put them on a scale to know that many of the kids here are much heavier than that, sometimes by 50, 60, 75 pounds or more. (In 2004, the average Wellspring camper was 75 pounds overweight.) What's striking about these teens, however, is that they don't really look that different from their middle- and upper-middle-class peers in suburban malls and fast-food joints. They represent the leading edge of the new normal. Yet these kids are spending a big chunk of their summer vacation to try to change that, with their parents shelling out $4,350 for four weeks of camp or $7,450 for eight weeks.

According to Wellspring's Web site, campers last year lost an average of 3.9 pounds per week. But there are no rigorous independent studies of American weight loss camps; the data about them is generated by the institutions themselves for marketing purposes. So, not surprisingly, all of the camps, including Wellspring, claim that their campers lose a lot. But no one knows if there are any long-term results from so-called fat camps. Some critics claim that all the camps give kids -- and their parents -- is ample servings of false hope.

"The parents ship the kids off, and when the kids come home, they've lost weight," says Abby Ellin, a former fat-camper and counselor, and author of the new book "Teenage Waistland: A Former Fat Kid Weighs In on Living Large, Losing Weight, and How Parents Can (and Can't) Help." "The parents think that's the end of the problem, and it's not. It's the beginning." A skeptic about weight loss camps, including the ones she attended, Ellin is cautiously optimistic about Wellspring: "Wellspring is actually trying to teach the kids. They're giving them therapy. They're giving them pedometers and making them write in journals. They're making them hyper-hyper-vigilant, which is good and bad. Their whole thing is a 'healthy obsession' with food, which is how you have to live in the world if you want to be a thin person."

In some respects, Wellspring feels like a military boot camp, training kids for a lifetime battle with their bodies. The brass is an advisory board of pediatric obesity experts and nutritionists with lofty pedigrees. But in the field, the charge is led by an Outward Bound veteran, Ryan Madamba, 33, along with a phalanx of uniformly trim, super-outdoorsy counselors, mostly in their early 20s, who take the kids backpacking, surfing, white-water rafting, hiking and biking.

When kids first arrive, they're stripped of contraband like cellphones, pagers, food and makeup, which is deemed an unnecessary distraction that just adds weight to backpacks on camping trips. Phone and Internet time isn't a right; it's a privilege that you have to earn by excelling in the program. Daily wake-up is at 6:15 a.m. Meals and snacks are served at set times to ensure that even though the campers are allotted just 1,200 calories and seven to 12 grams of fat a day, they won't crash and go into starvation mode.

And every meal is a lesson.

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After their swimming and riverside lounging, the kids gather around a picnic table and cut up the fixings for the night's dinner.

Lily, 13 from Santa Fe, N.M., has a diamond stud in her nose and a mane of long, dark brown hair framing her pale skin. She expertly chops garlic while musing aloud: "Baked garlic is so good." Then: "Oh-mi-gawd: Baked garlic with mashed potatoes and a hamburger!" Needless to say, none of that is on the menu that night.

The garlic will go into a spaghetti sauce with onions, basil, oregano and canned diced tomatoes. Before it's served, the evening's designated nutritionist -- another camper -- will write the meal's fat and calorie content on a mini-whiteboard so that the kids can copy down the information into their journals. Dinner has just 234 calories and 1.5 grams of fat, but if you opt for a sprinkling of Parmesan, that knocks it up to 254 with two grams of fat. Counselors use measuring cups and teaspoons to dole out servings into each kid's bowl, with the goal of teaching proper portion size. But the kids cook most things themselves.

All food and drink -- even condiments -- at Wellspring is divided into two broad categories: "controlled" and "uncontrolled." Campers can eat as much as they want of the uncontrolled foods as long as they "self-monitor" -- writing down the foods in their journal, including the calories and fat content, which they dutifully look up in their personal, pocket-size calorie-counter books. Uncontrolled foods include fruits and vegetables, like this night's side salad of green bell peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes, with no dressing. This is the definitely the only place I've heard a teenager say with no irony: "Oranges rock." Broccoli and green beans are also all-you-can-eat this evening. Coffee and tea, as well as condiments like ketchup, Tabasco, mustard and the sugar substitute Splenda, which has no calories and no fat, can be used with abandon, too.

The camp could ration all foods, and just serve them to the kids and be done with it. But choosing to stop eating when they've had enough is one of the biggest challenges the campers will face back in the real world. So Wellspring introduces an element of choice, allowing the kids to eat as many, say, oranges as they want, perhaps even bingeing on them. Having to record what they eat in their journals is supposed to make the campers at least conscious that they're doing it.

Campers are instructed to consume fewer than 20 grams of fat a day (about the amount in one kid's serving of fries at Denny's), a goal they're supposed to try to maintain when they get home. No one expects them to record every morsel of food that goes in their mouths forever -- that's unrealistic. But in the best-case scenario, a muted version of a fat and calorie tape will always be running in the back of their minds.

Next Page: "Small pleasures become awesome"

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