Maintenance Phase - Fat Camps

00:00:00.000 all I can think of for a tagline is na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na fat kids

00:00:17.100 that's not a sentence

00:00:19.780 leave it in i love it

00:00:24.280 welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that would never take you out of where you're comfortable

00:00:30.720 and make you feel bad about yourself oh i like it because we're nice we are nice uh i'm abri

00:00:37.400 gordon i'm michael hobbs this month if you join our patreon your bonus episode will be our first

00:00:44.920 ever annual grifty awards where we are giving awards for the best and mostly worst of health

00:00:52.980 and wellness in 2021. Gwyneth gets involved. Nicki Minaj's Cousins Balls get involved.

00:00:59.340 It is a romp of a time. But today, we are talking about... No, no, no, no. I'm not gonna do the

00:01:05.120 whole thing again. Fat camps. We are talking about fat camps. Mike, tell me what you know

00:01:11.380 about fat camps. Very little, actually. A couple years ago, I had an idea to do an article on fat

00:01:18.440 camps the idea was i was going to go to a fat camp and live there but once i started reaching

00:01:23.800 out to fat camps perhaps unsurprisingly they like didn't want me to go nobody would acquiesce to

00:01:29.280 having this random journalist going there asking kids questions and like doing archery so it didn't

00:01:35.320 get very far but it always seemed like a huge tragedy to me because when you hear the phrase

00:01:41.380 fat camps you think of something like a normal summer camp but like with fat kids like a place

00:01:47.780 where they can feel comfortable with themselves we know that weight is the number one reason that

00:01:52.300 kids are bullied and so the idea of somewhere that actually helps to heal that a little bit

00:01:57.900 and form a community and create some solidarity between fat people always seem like something

00:02:02.460 that has the potential to be really lovely but the problem is is that they're not fat camps they're

00:02:08.080 not camps of fat people yeah weight loss camps they're boot camps for children yeah uh what is 0.87

00:02:13.220 your experience i don't know if you and i've talked about this i went to a fat camp shut up 0.84

00:02:17.680 So I went to a fat camp that was a day camp. So it was not a sleepaway camp, which means that I was spared a lot of the worst of it. And we will talk about some of the worst of it. I went when I was in grade school, and it was a fucking shame factory.

00:02:36.220 When I was researching the book, I tracked down the workbook from the fat camp that I went to to see if I wanted to write about it. The workbook had all of these stories in it, which were mostly just like, Clara, this fat girl, gets teased at school for being fat. And she has a conversation with a magical cookie jar. And the magical cookie jar tells her that she needs to just stop eating as much and she needs to lose some weight and then other kids will ease up on her. 0.98

00:03:05.660 oh no so it was like overwhelmingly there were stories about physical solutions to social

00:03:11.620 problems right the problem was never like you need to ask that person to treat you better you

00:03:16.220 need to get an adult involved it was always like that will stop when you lose weight that cookie

00:03:21.180 jar now has an instagram account it's just thinspo hashtag stop eating part of why i thought it would

00:03:28.700 be interesting to talk about fat camps is it does feel very illustrative when we allow bullying of

00:03:35.400 kids right like when are we willing to excuse bullying of children it's bad unless they deserve

00:03:41.800 it yeah exactly my understanding of the general ideology yes correct and because there is this

00:03:47.400 belief that you and i have talked about extensively that is pretty well debunked that like weight is

00:03:53.420 entirely within an individual's control we sort of extrapolate that and apply it to children

00:03:59.660 and extend the same kind of logic of this sort of idea of an adult responsibility to maintain your

00:04:07.040 weight then gets projected onto kids. Which is super fucked up because kids are not responsible 0.98

00:04:12.240 for anything. They're not responsible for their parents' incomes. They're not responsible for 0.99

00:04:16.500 their parents' education or food choices. They're not responsible for their school lunches.

00:04:20.840 Yes. And the flip side of that is that people will also talk about this, is that people will

00:04:24.780 project that onto parents as well and be like, well, okay, then it's the parents' individual

00:04:29.000 responsibility yeah that's also not great there's a lot of bad moralizing around parenting often

00:04:34.760 from extremely limited information yeah you'll hear people say like i saw a mom at the grocery

00:04:39.740 store and she was buying soda for her kids and it's like okay well that's literally the only

00:04:44.200 thing that you know about that person so yes there were so many dead ends in this research

00:04:49.800 and content wise oh this i'm thinking of the biggest content note yeah imaginable right now

00:04:57.880 So we're going to be talking about calorie counts and weights today.

00:05:01.120 You kind of can't talk about fat camp without talking about those things.

00:05:04.300 So take care if those are going to be hard for you to hear.

00:05:06.720 There will also be a couple of mentions of sexual assault.

00:05:10.660 We are talking about some pretty distressing treatment of children throughout this episode.

00:05:15.820 So heads up there.

00:05:16.660 I think I'm generally pretty tough when it comes to this stuff, right?

00:05:21.700 Like I sort of live in it a lot.

00:05:23.560 And I absolutely had to take some breaks to cry.

00:05:27.300 Yes.

00:05:27.660 This one, I was like, oh, my God, everything feels horrible.

00:05:31.500 It's been a while since we got back to our roots of just straight up telling people not to listen to the rest of the show.

00:05:37.420 We're back to the classic.

00:05:39.880 Turn off your podcast now.

00:05:43.900 So where do we dive into this story?

00:05:46.700 So first things first, for folks who genuinely have not encountered fat camps as a thing, fat camps are programs.

00:05:52.900 They're often short term residential programs for adults or children.

00:05:56.640 that promise to deliver short term weight loss that usually comes from really intensive exercise

00:06:04.120 programs. Some of the places that I looked at reported six hours a day of intensive exercise

00:06:09.580 programming. Oh, my God. It often involves major calorie restrictions. So a number of these were

00:06:14.900 around eleven hundred or twelve hundred calories a day. Some were around fifteen or eighteen hundred

00:06:20.620 calories a day, but pretty significantly restricted diets. How old are these kids or like how

00:06:26.500 young do fat camps go the youngest specific age that i saw mentioned in the literature was they

00:06:33.340 talked about a seven-year-old no way kid that young yep so they're sending him to the biggest

00:06:39.060 loser basically that is one version of fat camp most of the fat camps that are open and operational

00:06:46.340 today are very very careful to go we're not a fat camp we're a weight loss and weight management 0.92

00:06:53.320 camp we're not like what you think it's the same thing as like noom being like we're not a diet

00:06:59.560 where you're like okay you are but you know that people aren't going to go for this if you call it

00:07:03.220 a diet what are the duration of these camps because you said the one that you went to was

00:07:07.220 just a day camp like your parents would drive you there in the morning and pick you up in the

00:07:10.480 evening but then there's also ones where you're in slasher movie in the woods with lifeguards and

00:07:15.340 stuff too right like residential camps so the longest one that i saw was a 12 week program so

00:07:21.800 it would be like all summer. Nine weeks is generally the longest. That 12-week one was

00:07:26.780 kind of an outlier. The shortest one on the residential end was two weeks, I think.

00:07:32.540 Currently, there are about two dozen summer fat camps in operation in the U.S. That was as of

00:07:38.860 2019, I should say, not currently. So who knows who made it through the pandemic, right? As of

00:07:44.100 2013, the quote-unquote wellness tourism industry, fat camps are a part of that,

00:07:50.280 was worth $494 billion globally. So it is worth knowing that these can be extreme cash cows for

00:07:59.100 the people who operate them. What are people paying to send their kids, like normal civilians,

00:08:05.020 what are these camps costing? The one that we're going to talk about today,

00:08:07.740 the cost is between $2,500 and $10,000, depending on which location you go to,

00:08:15.080 how long you stay. $2,500 is for two weeks in Arizona. $10,000 is for seven weeks in California.

00:08:23.380 That's a lot. So, I mean, these are rich parents and rich kids, fundamentally.

00:08:27.220 Yes. It's also worth noting, fat camps have been around in one form or another since at

00:08:30.920 least the turn of the century. Their earlier incarnations were mostly called fat farms.

00:08:36.540 Oh, I have some pictures for you of 1930s fat farm. It was one of the most famous ones called

00:08:44.700 Rose Door Farms. Okay, it was located at a dairy farm in upstate New York. I'm so excited to show

00:08:52.580 you these. Okay, so thing one, here is a motto that was posted at Rose Door Farms.

00:09:00.500 this is from rachel hollis's instagram it says exercise is necessary to meet modern standards

00:09:07.720 of grace and figure beauty inquire about our delightful gym classes so it's saying exercise

00:09:14.420 is necessary to be beautiful basically yeah and to sort of be a woman yeah i have some fun exercise 0.52

00:09:21.520 pictures as well oh it's not a great photo it's three women doing push-ups i presume but then 0.65

00:09:29.700 the photo is shot of like just their butts so like it looks like a rap video yeah oh and also 0.99

00:09:35.860 they're wearing high heels they're wearing heels in every picture of they're all wearing like 0.97

00:09:42.560 shorts and t-shirts like they're gonna work out and then fucking heels and their hair is set and 0.97

00:09:48.160 they're wearing makeup yeah they're in like a grassy field in these heels and the heels are 0.94

00:09:53.100 like kind of muddy that's the grace and beauty they're talking about but also all the heels

00:09:59.300 match oh yeah they're like here's your standard issue fat camp uniform of short shorts a cap

00:10:05.800 sleeve t-shirt and heels so the other thing to know is fat camps are most present in the u.s

00:10:13.900 but there are also fat camps in the uk there's like a burgeoning sort of movement to do nhs run

00:10:20.640 fat camps in the uk oh don't do that there are also fat camps in australia in canada in qatar

00:10:26.460 in Denmark, in Japan, kind of all over the place, right?

00:10:30.580 Yeah, I remember when I was doing research for my article that never happened somewhere,

00:10:34.180 they said that fat camps were the fastest growing segment of the summer camp market.

00:10:39.120 There's rising demand, which makes sense. And also, I think, because people are willing to

00:10:43.320 pay more for these sort of specialized camps, it makes sense that more camps would be getting

00:10:50.160 into this just because they can charge people more, essentially.

00:10:52.960 Yeah, totally. One of the pieces that I read said on average, it costs $1,500 more to send

00:10:58.460 your kid to fat camp than to other summer camps. It should cost less because they're feeding them

00:11:02.720 less. They're not doing pizza and hot dogs. Like we had a church camp. It feels important to lift

00:11:08.380 up that fat camps are not just like nefarious parents making mean decisions on their children's

00:11:14.060 behalf, right? These kinds of sort of desperate measures are born of a system that doesn't just

00:11:19.160 judge fat kids and fat parents and parents of fat kids regardless of their size in some cases it

00:11:25.840 threatens custody there have been a number of cases in the u.s where children have been removed 0.75

00:11:31.040 from their homes because of the kids weight and a belief that the kids weight is sort of

00:11:35.160 proof positive of parents neglect earlier this year there was a case in west sussex in england

00:11:42.880 where two kids were placed in foster care as a result of their weight.

00:11:47.940 They were using Fitbits that had been given to them by

00:11:51.540 the sort of British equivalent of Child Protective Services.

00:11:55.340 They were signed up to Weight Watchers, the whole family was,

00:11:58.920 but the kids hadn't lost weight.

00:12:02.040 Yeah, that's awful. 1.00

00:12:02.760 It's fucking horrible. 0.99

00:12:03.900 I'm going to send you a quote from the judge 0.99

00:12:05.960 that feels really illustrative to me about how we think and talk about 0.78

00:12:10.040 fat kids and parenting fat kids. 0.90

00:12:12.160 Okay. Everyone agrees that this is a very sad and unusual case of a loving family where the 0.95

00:12:18.240 parents meet many of the basic needs of the children, but the local authority has been

00:12:21.860 concerned that the parents are not meeting the children's health needs. The case was such an

00:12:25.700 unusual one because the children had clearly had some very good parenting as they were polite,

00:12:31.040 bright, and engaging. Fuck this. Yep. So everything is fine except the kids wait. Yep. And we have to 1.00

00:12:37.400 take the kids away from their loving and bright and cool parents. Yep. Nice work. Who are clearly

00:12:41.660 doing a good job but they have fat kids and if they have fat kids it must be because of an 0.95

00:12:47.260 invisible deficiency in their parenting that is only evidenced through the size of their kids 1.00

00:12:52.160 bodies right it's also so fucked up because like i don't know what the fate of these children are 0.99

00:12:57.200 but the idea that taking children forcibly from their parents is like somehow better for their 0.99

00:13:02.540 health is demented two things i would say one smart money says those kids are not going to get 0.99

00:13:08.360 thinner as a result of being put in foster care exactly the thing too is what a fucking roll of 0.98

00:13:14.340 the dice you've got great parents who are nice to you and who you presumably love and who presumably 1.00

00:13:19.200 love you and now you are a fat kid who's just like a fucking walking target going into some 0.99

00:13:25.860 stranger foster parents home who might be nice like your parents and might be terrible and might 1.00

00:13:33.080 have weird shit about fat people and my you know what i mean like it's not great well yeah they now 0.98

00:13:38.960 have a mandate to force these children to lose weight so it's like okay great they're like now 0.99

00:13:43.140 in foster care with an eating disorder yeah in like the best case scenario basically so on an

00:13:49.420 aggregate level this appears to be pretty bad in the uk between 2009 and 2014 74 fat kids were

00:14:00.240 removed from their homes just a result of weight in 2016 nhs scotland officially recommended

00:14:08.640 setting up state-funded fat camps and in 2021 the nhs in england set up a pilot program of 15

00:14:17.620 fat camps around england the prospect of state-run fat camps makes me so fucking impossibly sad it's

00:14:26.300 such a mockery of this wave of quote-unquote evidence-based policy that we've been getting

00:14:31.140 the last decade, that this would work to meaningfully and reliably reduce long-term

00:14:36.420 weight loss in children is a joke. We know from The Biggest Loser that when you send people off

00:14:40.700 to a ranch, they lose weight at the ranch and they come home and they gain all the weight back.

00:14:44.680 Yes.

00:14:45.140 Even if you hate fat people, even if you are like proudly fat phobic, this is not the solution.

00:14:51.760 Totally. So on the one hand, we've got this idea that like, if a kid is in a loving home, but they're fat, then that is insufficient parenting. But if they're fat and in a strict home that punishes them for being fat, that's somehow better and more responsible of the parents, right?

00:15:10.380 i wanted to take a look at uh this is from a documentary in the uk we're going to watch a

00:15:17.340 little clip about kids getting ready to go to fat camp we are going to watch a couple of minutes of

00:15:24.420 this so apologies slash get ready we've been to the dietician we've been through the hospital

00:15:31.120 we've been to the doctors i know how to cook we fry nothing we don't use fat for cooking we eat

00:15:37.680 a reasonably healthy diet. So why does she gain the weight? And I think it comes down 0.96

00:15:43.800 to a lot of lack of exercise. If she was to do a little bit, even, you know, Stephanie 0.53

00:15:48.660 said, game of tennis, up the park, game of netball with the girls, she'd burn a bit off.

00:15:52.440 She has to be badgered, otherwise she would be lazier than what she is. So that's what 0.91

00:15:59.980 we're here for. We're here to persecute her. And sometimes, unfortunately, it goes a little

00:16:04.320 bit too far, didn't it, for you? Yeah. Because you get a bit upset. You have your moments

00:16:09.420 of hating me. You're lazy, that's what you are. My dad's just learnt to put up with him 0.99

00:16:16.940 now, but he does sometimes, he gets, I really get annoyed with him because he goes on and

00:16:22.200 on about it. What sort of things does he say? No, it's just that all I ever do is sit down

00:16:29.200 and I never go out and I haven't got any friends

00:16:32.040 and I can't do anything and stuff like that.

00:16:36.960 I'm not a horrible person.

00:16:39.360 I'm not horrible to anyone.

00:16:41.300 But people are horrible to me.

00:16:43.180 Just because I'm a bit overweight.

00:16:46.920 Like, I'll stay up for an hour and think about

00:16:49.320 what it would be brilliant if I were thin or something like that

00:16:53.120 and do everything that everyone else does

00:16:55.920 and just like be a lot it'd be probably the happiest time of life when i finally get thin

00:17:03.080 well now i have to adopt two random children from the uk i know right i was just like 0.91

00:17:09.600 what a fucking horror show i don't know it feels like they're documenting an act of abuse 0.95

00:17:15.400 yeah like for parents to be saying this about their kids it's like bad enough but for 0.99

00:17:19.880 them to be saying it on national tv yeah in that scene where that little girl is in the kitchen

00:17:26.440 and her parents are speaking so horrendously about her there's this moment where her dad is

00:17:31.140 talking about how she never moves and then she like looks at the camera yeah and like that's so

00:17:36.980 sad to me that like she's aware of the fact that this is only going to lead to more bullying for 0.99

00:17:41.900 her from her peers and from her fucking parents and from her parents in the research that i have 0.98

00:17:47.520 done i came across maybe a dozen like full-length documentaries or documentary episodes of tv series 1.00

00:17:56.620 or whatever about fat camps and they all do this shit they all film parents saying fucking horrible 0.98

00:18:05.000 things in their kids presence they all include first and last names they all include the weight 0.99

00:18:11.340 of the child like it just makes you feel really powerless when your parents are like

00:18:17.520 your body isn't right, and you need to fix it.

00:18:20.320 Like to blame a child, like her parents are blaming her.

00:18:24.380 It's truly awful, and it is worth noting, she is built like her parents.

00:18:29.720 Yeah. 0.98

00:18:30.140 And I say that not to be like, what, a couple of hypocrites, which is usually sort of the line.

00:18:34.780 I don't think that's helpful because I don't think that most people can control their body

00:18:39.800 size in the way that we like to believe that they can, right?

00:18:42.540 Right. But it does feel instructive that this kid looks like her parents. And it might not be that

00:18:50.100 she's doing something wrong. Yeah. As their mom noted, she's like cooking in a particular way.

00:18:56.720 She's like not using fat. She's not frying anything. She's doing all this stuff. She's 0.99

00:19:00.540 sort of exasperated and is like, we're doing everything right, but she's still gaining weight.

00:19:05.180 Like, what do we do? And I'm like, so that might be a sign that it's not actually about

00:19:09.240 individual behaviors, my guy. Yeah, exactly. But there's not really an alternative being

00:19:12.980 offered at this point. And it sounds like the alternative is sending her to some short-term

00:19:18.280 bullying cabins out in the woods where they're going to be shitty to her. She's probably going 1.00

00:19:23.200 to lose 15 pounds and then she's going to gain back 25 because that's what always fucking happens. 0.94

00:19:27.880 So that actually gets us into the next sort of thing that I wanted to talk about in context 0.95

00:19:32.200 world. And then we get to dive into this particular fat camp. I wanted to take a look at the research

00:19:37.240 around fat camps, and there's been quite a bit. Overwhelmingly, these studies that have been done 0.80

00:19:43.020 into fat camps trumpet the success of weight loss camps for kids as an effective intervention

00:19:50.380 in the war on childhood obesity, right? The overwhelming majority of these studies

00:19:56.680 measure success based on two measures. One, what was their weight on day one,

00:20:02.480 and what was their weight on the last day of camp? And two, what was their BMI on day one?

00:20:08.160 And what was their BMI on the last day of camp? Great. I found two studies that did any kind of

00:20:14.080 follow-up after camp was over. Oh, wow. One of those followed up 10 months later,

00:20:19.560 and it showed that 90% of campers had regained significant amounts of weight in the following

00:20:24.940 10 months. But the way that they framed it up in that study was their BMI stayed at or below what

00:20:31.840 it was on day one of camp, even just by like 0.5 of a BMI point, right? So they were like,

00:20:38.700 success. Look at all these people who weighed less than when they started fat camp. And I'm like,

00:20:43.400 okay, right. But we're talking about like one pound a year later.

00:20:47.460 And also their parents spent like $15,000.

00:20:50.760 That is such an expensive pound. And anecdotally, a number of camp owners have said that about

00:20:56.660 half of their campers each year are return campers well there you go right right um which they're

00:21:04.220 like it's great they keep coming back because it's great and i'm like so what i don't even know

00:21:09.220 what the paradigm is supposed to be where this would induce long-term success because the whole

00:21:14.520 thing is that you're sending them away to camp to sort of kickstart their weight loss and learn

00:21:19.740 skills that they can then take back with them but the thing is the camps themselves are totally

00:21:26.080 unsustainable lifestyles yes these kids are not going to go home and exercise for six hours a day

00:21:30.460 and eat 1100 calories for a long period of time and then the idea of skills that you're teaching

00:21:37.400 them information you're imparting education at these camps that they can then apply when they 0.74

00:21:42.000 go home it's also bullshit because everyone knows most of the things about quote-unquote healthy 0.97

00:21:48.180 eating right people know fruits and vegetables don't eat fried foods the desserts like everyone 0.99

00:21:52.780 knows the basic architecture of this yeah and also a lot of these kids when you send them back home

00:21:58.160 they're not preparing their own food yes i don't know how old these kids are but they looked about

00:22:02.340 like i don't know 13 14 they're probably their mom is still going to be cooking meals and a lot

00:22:07.340 of these kids are not necessarily in control of their own finances so they're not buying their

00:22:11.220 own snacks this doesn't make any sense that this would actually work yeah so this is also one of

00:22:16.880 the tropes that comes up when they talk to owners of fat camps and directors of fat camps when they

00:22:22.520 go oh hey it looks like some of the kids regained the weight the response from people who run fat

00:22:27.820 camps is well that's because their parents didn't follow up okay and their parents didn't change and 0.97

00:22:31.920 the family system needs to change and i'm like well if the family system needs to fucking change 0.97

00:22:36.120 first of all it fucking doesn't and even if that premise were true then fucking make an intervention 0.98

00:22:42.500 about the family system changing and not shipping your kid off to fucking fat camp this is the thing 0.99

00:22:47.800 is like you're saying the thing you're suggesting as an intervention doesn't work and then the 0.95

00:22:53.200 person in charge of that intervention is like no no no we need a different intervention yeah it's

00:22:57.300 like great bye what do i need a fat camp for if it's all about the parents yeah there's also like

00:23:03.480 presumably psychological damage and other negative outcomes that come from losing weight and gaining

00:23:09.400 it back oh michael oh michael you're like a human segue it's so perfect i'm like mid-rank and you're

00:23:15.620 sending me skype notifications i just sent you a quote to read so so this is from uh physician

00:23:25.440 caroline welbury in american family physician in 2006 this was a quote that underscores exactly 0.59

00:23:33.260 what the fuck you were just talking about she says even though weight loss camps are a popular 0.87

00:23:38.720 intervention few studies have evaluated their effectiveness the results of two studies showed 0.99

00:23:43.760 some weight loss in campers and another showed no weight change yep so basically this is another 0.92

00:23:48.700 fucking thing with this field is there's all these interventions that are being touted like 0.95

00:23:53.060 the nhs is thinking of setting up state-run fat camps on the basis of what evidence yeah oftentimes 0.99

00:24:00.420 when you actually look there's like a study or two or something and it's really low quality

00:24:05.540 and there's all these awoga noises from the methodologies of these extremely trash studies 0.56

00:24:11.160 oftentimes that are funded, I don't know, in this case, but oftentimes they're funded

00:24:14.940 from whatever industry is trying to sell the intervention. And then you always find this

00:24:21.160 thing of like, oh, obesity is such an important issue. We need to move fast on this, even though

00:24:25.760 the data isn't there. It's like, well, then what are we moving fast on the basis of?

00:24:30.220 And also, it doesn't even seem like there's very much interest in finding out whether something

00:24:34.640 actually works or not. Yeah, works in the long term, right? It's enough that something is able

00:24:40.040 to like take some number of pounds off of a small number of kids in the short term people are like

00:24:45.940 great it works let's run with it and there's no consideration of you know of all the studies that

00:24:51.580 i read i'm gonna say two dozen studies maybe on this one mentioned eating disorders and weight

00:24:58.540 stigma no way one yeah everything else was just like how much did they weigh on day one how much

00:25:03.580 did they weigh on the last day it works let's run with it dude me and you have read so many diet

00:25:08.880 studies for this show and one thing i can say with rock solid certainty is that short-term 0.52

00:25:15.800 weight loss is the easiest fucking thing in the world yeah every diet gives short-term weight

00:25:23.180 loss so it's weird for these studies that this discourse even still exists that it's like oh it 0.98

00:25:28.940 worked after six weeks but we don't know in the follow-up it's like everything works at six weeks 0.96

00:25:33.540 Well, and we haven't even fucking figured out why people are fat. 0.98

00:25:38.840 Right. 0.99

00:25:39.160 Right.

00:25:39.400 We have a bunch of theories.

00:25:41.420 There are something like 60 different types of obesity that researchers have sort of pinpointed

00:25:46.380 that all have different causes and different effects, right?

00:25:49.940 Like it is bananas to be like, okay, we don't totally know what the origin of the problem

00:25:55.200 is.

00:25:55.460 We don't know where it's located.

00:25:57.840 We don't know whatever, but we definitely know how to fix it.

00:26:00.600 Go to a fat camp.

00:26:01.460 That's also, I mean, that's such an interesting point, too, because you could imagine, I mean, for fuck's sake, never a fat camp, but you could imagine some sort of intervention being effective at improving health habits if you did some sort of diagnosis beforehand. 0.97

00:26:17.500 Yeah.

00:26:17.740 There's no other screening going on, it seems like, of whether this sort of thing is actually what the kids need.

00:26:23.620 Yeah.

00:26:23.880 It also seems like they're just funneling in all of the kids that can pay.

00:26:27.600 Yeah, I mean, there are a number of stories in these fat camps. 0.99

00:26:31.140 I watched the fucking, Michael, this is 90 minutes of my life that I will never get back. 0.99

00:26:37.740 I watched the fucking MTV Fat Camps documentary from like 2006. 1.00

00:26:42.540 Dude, I've seen that. 0.99

00:26:43.660 I've also seen that. 0.99

00:26:44.600 It's so fucking horrible. 1.00

00:26:46.640 You just watch all of the kids that are less fat fucking bully all the kids who are more fat. 1.00

00:26:52.560 I know. 0.99

00:26:52.820 One of those kids is type 1 diabetic and she's being homeschooled because the side effects of her medication are so intense.

00:27:01.140 which means she hasn't been around other kids and she's sort of like a little bit mystified

00:27:05.460 by the social dynamics because she hasn't been in them in a couple of years. 0.99

00:27:09.220 Everyone is fucking horrible to her. 0.95

00:27:12.160 And I'm going to this was not going to be part of the episode, but now it is because 0.99

00:27:15.320 now I'm talking about it and I'm so fucking mad.

00:27:18.380 There are also two people who date and they dated last year at fat camp and then they 0.98

00:27:22.820 both come back and the dude in the couple keeps being like, oh, look at how fucking 0.88

00:27:28.180 fat Marissa got like, oh, I can't even look at her anymore.

00:27:31.140 But then we'll also give her letters that are like, I'm still in love with you and I still have feelings for you.

00:27:35.860 And any mean things that I say are just because I'm sad that I'm not with you anymore. 0.98

00:27:39.760 And then she takes those fucking notes and reads them aloud to her friends and they make fun of them. 0.99

00:27:46.200 And she outs him as being bipolar. 1.00

00:27:48.640 Like these documentarians, no fucking joke. 0.99

00:27:51.740 We're like, how can I show these teenagers at their worst? 0.98

00:27:54.620 But in particular, so one of the fattest campers at Fat Camp in this documentary is this girl named Diane. There was a review in the Washington Post of this documentary, and they were basically like, it's great, you should watch it.

00:28:10.700 The way that the reviewer describes the fattest camper is, quote, there's also Diane, whose mother works at the camp, who tends to deal with most problems by weeping profusely and who bears an unfortunate resemblance to serial killer John Wayne Gacy. 0.99

00:28:29.160 What the fuck is that? 0.99

00:28:30.320 What is that sick burn of a child? 1.00

00:28:32.380 What should I do with this platform? 1.00

00:28:34.020 I should dunk on a fat, disabled eighth grader. 1.00

00:28:37.160 Yeah, what? 1.00

00:28:37.920 Cool, dude. 1.00

00:28:38.780 what a great fucking idea you dick i'm just imagining you throwing your tv into the dumpster 1.00

00:28:45.460 and setting it on fire i mean i absolutely looked at like heavy bags on amazon like i was like i 1.00

00:28:53.580 feel like i need to do like a bunch of fucking punching have you ever been so mad at a website 0.99

00:28:58.760 that you throw your phone across the room absolutely fuck this website as if like that's 0.99

00:29:04.080 where it lives by have you ever had this experience do you mean do i have this experience every time 0.99

00:29:10.000 i'm researching an episode of this show yes i do fuck this column from 21 years ago mike i'm on my

00:29:16.240 eighth iphone this year so i was gonna say more about the research i mean i think the main thing

00:29:24.600 to know is like it's all short term it's not particularly illustrative of the sort of long

00:29:30.360 term effects almost none of the media that i found there's one book that i found that was

00:29:36.280 focused on the actual camper's experience everything else was just did they lose weight

00:29:40.800 or did they not lose weight if they did it's good again where is the interest in this yeah 0.78

00:29:46.540 but so many studies it's like they gather the fucking quantitative data and they do their like 0.60

00:29:50.820 statistical things but there's no actual endeavor to understand the phenomenon yeah it's like we 0.97

00:29:57.640 found this thing we got a graph we got enough to publish but it's like well did we fucking learn

00:30:01.700 anything i mean i will say there were like a couple of studies that used some like existing 0.52

00:30:07.720 tools to measure overall self-esteem okay and said that average self-esteem increased for campers

00:30:14.760 over the course of camp but they don't ask why yeah like it could be that they are feeling better

00:30:21.280 about themselves because they're actually able to be around just other fat kids for the first time

00:30:26.100 it could be that they were in an environment that was entirely focused on weight loss and then did

00:30:31.840 the one thing right like temporarily lost weight yeah there's this idea that's like fat camp is 0.91

00:30:37.700 good it makes you have higher self-esteem and it's like well fucking hang on how long does that part

00:30:42.360 last too and under what conditions what it says to me is that they're they're creating an even

00:30:47.300 stronger link between the kids self-esteem and their weight yes this is the cycle that everybody

00:30:52.720 goes through. You're envisioning this new life for yourself. And then inevitably, when you start

00:30:57.020 gaining the weight back because you're a human being and this is what human beings do, because

00:31:01.260 your self-esteem is now even more closely coupled to your weight, it's even more devastating to go

00:31:06.400 back to the previous weight that you were at. So it's like, what is the point of doing this

00:31:10.680 to fucking children when maybe just leaving them at the same weight would actually be better than 0.99

00:31:17.080 losing 25 pounds and then gaining 25 pounds? That's right. So what we have in terms of looks 1.00

00:31:22.700 said sort of the long-term impacts are accounts from adults who went to fat camp as kids there

00:31:28.080 are some adults i read i don't know a dozen personal accounts of adults who went to fat camp

00:31:33.940 some folks did speak highly of their time at fat camp they talked about things like being seen as

00:31:39.280 romantically desirable for the first time in their lives they liked being around other fat people and

00:31:44.680 not feeling sort of excluded and different in that way although the fattest campers at fat camp

00:31:50.180 report and having those same feelings right right that only worked for people who were not the

00:31:54.360 fattest people in the room they talk about sort of breaking the isolation and realizing they

00:31:58.480 weren't alone in how they were feeling about being a fat kid or their experiences of being a fat kid

00:32:03.300 but again all of this is happening in a setting that is explicitly entirely focused on sort of

00:32:09.380 producing thinness right right like i'm very glad that there are people who have had good experiences

00:32:14.620 I will say the folks who spoke most highly of their experiences were entirely people who present

00:32:22.240 to me as thin adults. Oh, interesting. It's a very small sample size. It's not scientific in

00:32:27.220 any way. But I was just like, oh, notable. Yeah, notable. The people who feel good about it are

00:32:33.180 the people who did what it wanted them to do, which is become thin adults, right? Right.

00:32:37.940 The flip side of that is a number of people talked about fat camp as their gateway to a

00:32:42.920 restrictive eating disorder. Campers and counselors both talked about developing binge

00:32:48.700 purge behaviors when they were at camp and hiding food and falling into a bunch of disordered eating

00:32:55.140 patterns. Well, what I would love to hear from the owner of a fat camp, what the distinction is

00:33:02.900 between exercising six hours a day and eating 1100 calories at a fat camp and doing that not

00:33:08.360 at a fat camp. Because if you're not at a fat camp, that's a fucking eating disorder. 1.00

00:33:11.480 Well, if you're not a fat person, that's an eating disorder. 1.00

00:33:14.000 Yeah, exactly. It's disordered eating. Of course, they have disordered eating after

00:33:17.900 they go to the disordered eating farm.

00:33:20.560 Jesus Christ. 0.81

00:33:21.320 I'm going to send you one more quote. So many of the adults and kids who talked about going

00:33:26.920 to fat camp talked about how most of the kids there had really, really rough home lives that

00:33:33.860 were often made worse by deeply judgmental parents. So some kids asked to go to fat camp,

00:33:40.480 the majority majority majority were sent by their parents so this is a quote from a former fat

00:33:46.460 camper it says most of the kids were sent there against their will by ashamed very wealthy parents

00:33:52.000 almost every girl in my cabin had a story about something wretched that a family member had said

00:33:56.340 to her about how her size was reflecting poorly on the family the overwhelming sentiment was that

00:34:01.700 kids at the camp need to be fixed rather than helped or supported yep shocking twist everyone

00:34:07.480 is here because their mom is the mom from titanic tightening the corset so before we got on mike

00:34:14.060 michael made another titanic reference which makes me just think did you watch titanic last

00:34:18.160 night there's only one movie in my life and it's titanic at all times i watched it last night

00:34:23.640 every night i love that movie that's me but with like uh muppets most wanted like ty burrell is a

00:34:32.600 french interpol guy it's great okay that is the the very generally dark context that we're walking

00:34:40.840 into now i'm all worked up i know dude all of the emotions that you went through in the last like 0.64

00:34:46.440 three weeks i'm now experiencing in like an hour and a half i fucking know i feel like i've been 0.96

00:34:51.760 on a roller coaster this is why i was like we can only do one clip because every fucking clip 0.96

00:34:57.000 is this level of like just naked bias. Yeah. Okay. So today, Michael Hobbs, we are going to 0.98

00:35:05.700 talk about one fat camp in particular. Have you heard of Camp Shane? No. It's named Camp Shane

00:35:12.040 because it's named for the word Shane, S-H-E-Y-N, which is the Yiddish word for beautiful. Oh, okay.

00:35:20.900 So Camp Shane is one of the most famous fat camps in the country. It is the first co-ed 1.00

00:35:26.360 fat camp oh camp shane is credited by the screenwriters as having inspired heavyweights 0.53

00:35:31.680 the slogan for camp shane i'm not fucking kidding is learn laugh lose oh 0.80

00:35:39.160 that's actually pretty good their secondary slogan is way better than a fat camp where way 0.96

00:35:47.500 is spelled w e i g h of course it's like eat pray just kidding don't eat

00:35:55.380 i'm just gonna be workshopping slogans for the rest of the episode i'm done listening i like it

00:36:01.700 i like it so as i'm talking about this i'm using the past tense because earlier this year after

00:36:08.080 53 years in business the most famous fat camp in the country i would argue abruptly closed

00:36:16.340 the owner told parents and media that they were closing because they were short-staffed and

00:36:21.600 didn't have enough staff who were willing to work under COVID protocols. In the months since then,

00:36:26.640 a very different, very complex and very dark story has unfolded about like, hey, it might

00:36:33.680 not have just been about staffing. Yeah, it's never whenever management blames workers for

00:36:37.880 the company failing, it's never the workers. That's right. So the biggest story, the sort

00:36:44.360 of story that really blew this open was a long read in Bloomberg written by someone named David

00:36:51.340 Govey Herbert, who spoke to over 60 former campers and counselors and staffers. So the story here

00:37:00.060 starts with a family. The two people that we're going to spend the most time with are Selma

00:37:05.940 Ettenberg, who is the mom in this family and the founder of Camp Shane. And the other person we're

00:37:11.660 going to spend the most time with is her oldest son, David Ettenberg. She started Camp Shane in

00:37:18.580 1968. She did a bunch of media around the opening of Camp Shane and got a ton of coverage in its

00:37:25.720 early years. And I am going to send you a quote about that coverage from this Bloomberg piece.

00:37:34.980 It says,

00:37:35.200 The resulting coverage could be casually vicious. Nobody loves a fat kid an ex-fatty finds read

00:37:41.440 a New York Daily News headline from 1972. Her objective is to make a human being of a child 1.00

00:37:46.720 who enters camp looking like a glob, a Detroit Free Press reporter wrote two years later.

00:37:51.860 My parents love me now, one boy told a reporter, they don't pick on me anymore. 0.98

00:37:56.120 So again, parental bullying is the theme of this fucking episode in this entire sector. 0.98

00:38:01.780 Yep. So Camp Chain started out as one camp in Ferndale, New York that served 20 campers its 0.98

00:38:09.640 first year over the years it grew to many states and it served over 600 campers at its height

00:38:18.360 each of them are paying about 1500 so adjusted for inflation the camp is raking in about a million

00:38:26.800 dollars a year so selma is getting rich off of this camp right right in terms of the actual

00:38:33.740 program at Camp Shane. What folks were put on was a 1,500 calorie a day diet. Food did not have 1.00

00:38:41.260 salt because of water retention issues. There were no snacks. There were no sweets. If there

00:38:47.580 was a field trip to a nearby town, when the campers returned, their bags were searched to

00:38:53.220 make sure kids weren't sneaking in foods. Nice. Packages sent to the camp were also searched.

00:39:00.080 there was one story of someone who was like my mom sent me maxi pads because i was on my period

00:39:05.540 and a counselor made me open them in front of her to prove that they weren't candy oh wow good god

00:39:11.040 just like i don't know man as a teenager who's having a period like and especially if you're on 0.99

00:39:15.880 your fucking period are you kidding me no thank you so they're sort of like doing all this shit 0.97

00:39:22.420 to limit the amount of foods and the kinds of foods that kids have access to but at the same 1.00

00:39:26.660 time the owner was recruiting thin counselors overwhelmingly and she decided the owner at the

00:39:35.400 time decided that they didn't actually need to be on the restricted diet that the campers were on 0.98

00:39:39.260 so she had a separate pig out room is what it was called right next to the main dining hall that 1.00

00:39:46.420 campers could see oh and it was just full of whatever fucking kind of food thin counselors 1.00

00:39:52.300 wanted to eat and if campers hit their goal weight they were sometimes allowed to go into 0.93

00:39:59.140 the pig out room as like a reward this this makes no sense first of all yeah it's an acknowledgement

00:40:06.080 that people can't live like this on any kind of long-term basis because if they could then the

00:40:10.980 counselors would live like this too and secondly your reward for restrictive eating is you get to

00:40:17.700 eat as much as you want that's like a really bad paradigm to teach the kids it also seems like 0.98

00:40:22.860 weirdly counterproductive to whatever the fuck you're doing there it just seems like it's gonna 0.94

00:40:26.700 teach these kids to like eat nothing and then binge that's exactly right it's like food is a 0.99

00:40:31.820 reward that you get from being thin which you get from not eating yeah so you get to eat after you

00:40:37.700 not eat enough yeah it doesn't it doesn't make any sense so in addition to all of that campers

00:40:43.660 are regularly weighed measured and photographed they're usually photographed shirtless or in a

00:40:50.720 swimsuit or in underwear we're talking about folks that we saw in the clip that we watched

00:40:55.580 were like one was 11 and the other one i think was 13 this is not a time when you want to be 0.99

00:41:02.540 mostly disrobed in front of your peers especially if you're a fucking fat kid right like it's just 0.97

00:41:07.360 like no no no no selma was widely understood by pretty much everybody who came in contact with 0.99

00:41:14.240 her to be a very intense and very polarizing figure there was a song at the camp to the tune 1.00

00:41:21.080 of bingo that went there was a bitch who ran this camp and selma was her namo yeah 1.00

00:41:29.000 yep wow foul-mouthed kids in the 70s seriously god she was super fucking intense in her 1.00

00:41:39.700 management decisions she had three children who in their adulthood she would talk to them about 1.00

00:41:48.400 sort of taking over the camp when her daughter diana gave birth to her first child selma got 1.00

00:41:56.880 extremely angry oh because she was like you were supposed to work at this camp and now your 1.00

00:42:02.980 attention is divided so she fired her daughter and cut off her health insurance she's cutting 1.00

00:42:09.020 toxic people out of her life 2020 selma girl boss selma she made that resolution and she stuck with

00:42:15.980 it so david the eldest stays on at the fat camp and his sister takes that really hard and there's

00:42:23.120 a long-standing rift between the two of them as a result of it, where she's like, you just 0.97

00:42:27.060 watched our mom fucking fire me and got off my health insurance? 0.98

00:42:30.140 Abusive parents are very good at pitting kids against each other. 1.00

00:42:34.340 Selma sounds like a masterclass in that to me.

00:42:36.880 Yeah.

00:42:37.340 So by the late 1980s, so Camp Shane has now been around for 20 years, David confronts

00:42:43.740 his parents and says, essentially, they have got to hand over ownership if they want him

00:42:49.900 to stay on.

00:42:50.600 He's passed up other job offers.

00:42:52.060 he's not doing other things they agree but in pretty short order selma seems to get cold feet

00:42:59.640 or have second thoughts or whatever and she files a lawsuit to invalidate the earlier agreement so

00:43:06.560 she is suing her son that's like a good first date weed him out question like how many legal

00:43:11.740 actions are you in the middle of against your children sue your kids two okay so david ended

00:43:19.360 up buying the camp from his parents for 1.2 million dollars in 1991 so this whole court

00:43:26.060 battle drags out over several years in the end the courts upheld the sale and david became the 0.98

00:43:32.500 owner outright of camp shane but that did not stop selma from having huge fucking feelings

00:43:39.620 and resentment about that in 2000 the irs started investigating camp shane's financials and david's 0.75

00:43:48.540 financials in particular oh my god both of the kids both of selma's kids david and leslie the

00:43:54.900 other daughter believe that their mother reported them to the irs dude it's weird to start a

00:44:00.800 business and then sell it to your son and then try to ruin it yeah it's like a foundational

00:44:06.520 principle it's a little weird so as all of this is happening camp shane just keeps growing wow

00:44:16.140 In 2002, the camp was featured on that MTV show, True Life. The year after that airs, the summer after that airs, there are 500 campers at Camp Shane. It's their highest number of enrollees yet. As all of this is happening, as the camp is growing, in 2006, David decides to go national, and that's when he opens up these campuses in all of these other states.

00:44:38.040 Ah, okay.

00:44:38.680 This is also like the height of childhood obesity panic. 0.99

00:44:42.580 oh yeah dr phil probably send him some kids one of those boot camp episodes fuck man there is also 0.96

00:44:48.580 i will say i am a dedicated top chef viewer and there is an episode from one of the early seasons 0.71

00:44:55.380 where the chefs are like challenged to like make foods that fit within restricted calories for kids

00:45:01.540 at a fat camp that's dark it's so dark so the camp is growing and growing and growing

00:45:10.000 Selma's sort of like physically out of the picture. But inside the camp, things were really fucking rough. So in 2011, a camp counselor talks about what her job was. And here's what Bloomberg has to say about it. 0.98

00:45:29.380 Quote, her job was to run arts and crafts, but she spent much of her time comforting kids.

00:45:35.740 Within the span of a few hours one day, she had a crying girl admit that she'd been cutting herself, found another purging in the bathroom, and consoled a sobbing camper who'd lost, quote, only 10 pounds that week.

00:45:48.800 Ooh.

00:45:49.920 Right. 1.00

00:45:50.480 Yeah, because they're fucking game show contestants and they don't know it. 1.00

00:45:53.640 It's not good for children. 0.99

00:45:54.620 So this counselor's pay was $550 plus room and board for 11 weeks of work.

00:46:02.140 She says that while she was at the camp, she developed a real practice of binging.

00:46:08.040 So she spent her entire salary on food.

00:46:11.880 Oh, wow.

00:46:12.140 And when she was asked about the campers, she said, quote,

00:46:14.680 if they didn't come in with eating disorders, they left with them.

00:46:17.680 Yeah, I mean, we were teaching them to have eating disorders.

00:46:20.840 And they succeeded in having eating disorders.

00:46:23.440 Yeah.

00:46:23.640 There were also reports from other former employees that say that David, the owner, instructed them to write positive Yelp reviews of Camp Shane under pseudonyms.

00:46:34.920 According to these former employees, if they didn't, he said he would dock their pay. 0.96

00:46:39.360 I can't believe that the person who's shitty to children is also shitty in every other aspect. 0.93

00:46:44.260 It doesn't stop when they become teenagers. 0.99

00:46:46.600 Neat.

00:46:47.660 I should say it goes without saying David denies all of this and is like, I would never do this.

00:46:51.420 I mean, of course.

00:46:51.840 Staff issues are like a real theme here. So I genuinely looked up on like Indeed and Glassdoor.

00:46:58.280 Oh, yeah.

00:46:58.840 I looked up employee reviews of working at Camp Jane. Out of five stars, it gets 1.8 stars for

00:47:05.540 pay and benefits.

00:47:07.080 Nice.

00:47:07.580 Nearly every written review mentioned straight up not getting paid.

00:47:11.880 But at least a lot of kids didn't lose any weight and got psychologically traumatized.

00:47:17.080 Oh, silver lining, fat kids feel worse than ever.

00:47:20.680 zooming out it also harmed many children so one of the reviews says quote i signed up hoping to

00:47:29.560 gain experience in nutrition and helping the children to lose weight the food sucked i became

00:47:34.400 the lunch lady for every meal the meal plans were put together without much thought the sports

00:47:39.060 activities were the same every day no psychologist was provided or a nurse like the parents were

00:47:45.120 promised the company promises more than they give you and the pay sucks especially since you are on

00:47:50.600 your feet from 6 30 a.m to 10 30 p.m it was basically a dollar an hour i mean that's pointing

00:47:56.640 at something else too with this the rise of fat camps as a quote-unquote health intervention

00:48:02.620 that there doesn't seem to be a lot of quality control or differentiation between the fat camps

00:48:07.940 i mean the whole concept of a fat camp is built on the idea that it is children's responsibility

00:48:13.920 to be thin right and that any cost ten thousand dollars is worth it if your kid is a couple

00:48:22.120 pounds lighter a year later right there's no accountability yeah underfeeding children is

00:48:27.520 quite easy you just don't give them enough food and make them exercise correct i mean this is the

00:48:33.240 thing is like if all the kids are gaining the weight back and no one seems to care because

00:48:36.660 they're all blaming the kids are blaming the parents then why would a fat camp ever improve

00:48:40.840 what it's doing like there's no actual feedback loop so things back at the camp continued to

00:48:45.820 worsen in 2015 the director of the ferndale campus the original campus he'd been the director for 20

00:48:53.280 years and he left reportedly because there were some tensions with david as the owner like things

00:48:58.940 were getting worse and worse there so for the first time since the early 90s david is in charge 0.99

00:49:04.880 of the day-to-day operations again, and everything goes to shit. Enrollment is down. Two-thirds of 0.98

00:49:11.860 the cabins are reportedly empty. More and more campers seem to have mental and behavioral health

00:49:17.620 issues. One kid smuggled in knives to cut themselves at night. When I say everything 0.92

00:49:24.760 went to shit, that is also literal. The camp had two septic pumps, and both of them blew out one 0.99

00:49:30.020 day so the camp was flooded with sewage oh my god things went off the rails in the georgia campus 0.95

00:49:36.900 too they enrolled an autistic camper who was promised that staff would stay with him in his

00:49:43.820 cabin each night he was anxious they did not stay with him in his cabin any night not even on the

00:49:49.980 first night and on that first night in the absence of staff presence the autistic camper was 0.62

00:49:55.320 repeatedly raped by one of his bunkmates oh my god that bunkmate pleaded guilty to a felony charge

00:50:03.920 as a result and the autistic camper's parents uh filed a civil suit against camp shane and won

00:50:11.320 oh wow in 2019 david sells the property that camp shane was on his mother had bought it in 1968 for

00:50:19.340 fifty thousand dollars he was now selling it for six point three million dollars so he's getting

00:50:25.440 out he's not getting out he just moves the camp to connecticut he moves it to a private school

00:50:30.580 campus where they rent property there right because it's a school and that same year in

00:50:36.140 2019 a new civil suit was filed against the camp alleging that a former camper was sexually abused

00:50:43.020 repeatedly by an adult staff member. Oh, wow. In 2021, Hearst Connecticut Media Group

00:50:50.500 submits a FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act request from the Connecticut Office of Early

00:50:57.280 Childhood, which licenses summer camps around the state. There were so many complaints about Camp

00:51:03.600 Shane that the camp voluntarily surrendered its license. Oh, wow. So all of this horrible shit

00:51:11.200 is happening all of these complaints are being filed all of these violations are being found by 0.99

00:51:17.080 this state investigation and in july in the middle of camp parents across the country got 48 hours

00:51:25.600 notice that they would need to pick their kids up and that the camp was closing for the season

00:51:31.140 so they had two days if you're in michigan and your kids in new york figure it out these are

00:51:35.960 rich parents they had their like butlers do it but still they have like helicopters just

00:51:40.860 hovering over the camp at all times, I assume.

00:51:43.080 The investigation found that they had 62 violations.

00:51:47.680 Among other things, they found that the camp had issues with missing campers.

00:51:52.920 Those kids were out looking for food.

00:51:54.480 Those kids are hungry.

00:51:55.660 They had failed to train staff on administering medication.

00:51:59.120 And again, a number of these kids have mental health issues.

00:52:03.320 None of those kids should be at a fat camp. 0.96

00:52:05.380 Yep.

00:52:05.980 So those are sort of like the, you know, categories of violations.

00:52:09.760 here are some of the actual stories on the last weekend of its operation a goal post fell on a

00:52:16.380 camper that eight-year-old girl who was the camper fractured her skull campers quote were encouraged

00:52:24.480 to work out until they vomited this is where we get into baby biggest loser parents would call

00:52:29.960 or email the camp to share sort of concerns about their kids experiences and they didn't get any

00:52:34.480 responses from the camp for days camp counselors were responsible for administering cognitive

00:52:40.740 behavioral therapy so it's like a bunch of teenagers doing like psychology yep and they

00:52:47.680 have no training in cbt wikipedia youtube tutorials this is how i learned to iron shirts

00:52:53.400 yeah that's how you learn to be a therapist right yeah all of this is happening with as we mentioned

00:52:59.020 like frequent bullying amongst campers and sometimes between counselors and campers right 0.83

00:53:05.820 oh man it's so fucking rough well it's actually an interesting question what's the difference 0.77

00:53:12.420 between someone encouraging your kid to lose weight and bullying them like some of the stuff 0.97

00:53:18.580 it's sort of encouraged for people to be mean to kids because quote-unquote health is at the end

00:53:23.260 of it yeah i mean this is a thing that we've talked about a little bit and that i've written

00:53:26.860 about which is that the logic of quote-unquote tough love weight loss is just the same as the

00:53:35.280 logic of abuse yes i wouldn't be doing this if you didn't make me i'm doing it for your own good

00:53:40.580 as soon as you shape up i can stop yeah you're in control here you're making me do this and i don't

00:53:46.460 like it right it really does sort of operate from pretty similar playbooks yeah that's thrown into

00:53:54.260 even sharper relief when you take into account that we don't know how to produce weight loss 0.93

00:53:59.540 for a majority of people in the long term and we certainly don't fucking know how to do that 0.55

00:54:04.640 in an empirical way with kids yeah we we can't even get teenagers to stop playing pokemon go 0.85

00:54:11.120 i don't know how to do anything with teenagers timely reference that was my only that was all

00:54:15.880 i got my interact the level of my interaction with teens we're now just like the human equivalence

00:54:24.000 of that Steve Buscemi. How are you doing, fellow kids? I have that skateboard over my shoulder

00:54:28.920 right now. Yes, that is accurate. I will say like, this is all the story of one fat camp.

00:54:36.580 It was a very prominent one. It was a very well known one. But it is one fat camp. So by no means

00:54:43.120 is this like this. Exactly. This is happening at every fat camp ever. Yeah. But I do think it's

00:54:48.540 worth lifting up that when you focus an environment exclusively on getting children to change their

00:54:55.940 bodies at almost any cost and you deprioritize the lived experience of those kids it can attract

00:55:04.620 a kind of person who just doesn't care much about the people that they're working with 0.98

00:55:09.640 and in some cases may have really profound biases or grudges or weird shit about fat people 0.99

00:55:16.900 overwhelmingly there may be folks who haven't really unpacked their own body shit and end up 0.98

00:55:21.880 externalizing that onto the people around them who in this case are children i think there's 0.97

00:55:26.820 this sense amongst the thin people that i talked to about fat camps it's like well you know if it

00:55:31.960 helps well it also doesn't help in that way i mean it's such a narrow way to measure health 0.98

00:55:37.080 and such a stupid way to measure the well-being of children but even on that one stupid measure 0.95

00:55:41.120 doesn't fucking help yeah totally we've focused everything on weight loss okay great well are the 1.00

00:55:45.280 camp's helping them lose weight no okay yeah so at the core of fat camp is this idea that this 0.98

00:55:52.540 temporary intervention where adults kind of whip kids into shape is going to fix whatever led them

00:56:01.140 to whatever point they are at in their lives right and whatever weight gain or body size or any of

00:56:07.220 that stuff right that's like hey man if you have abusive parents and they ship you off to fat camp 0.99

00:56:14.240 and you lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks, and then you come home, your parents are still fucking 1.00

00:56:20.600 abusive. 0.98

00:56:21.440 There's also, it's not clear to me that this scared straight approach works for anything.

00:56:27.100 Yeah.

00:56:27.380 The idea that you can take somebody out of their home environment, submit them to some

00:56:32.400 extreme regimen, and then put them back into their home life, just as a model of behavior

00:56:38.840 change, it doesn't make any sense.

00:56:40.980 It's not plausible because people respond to things based on the forces in their own

00:56:46.700 context.

00:56:47.160 Like we do things because of what is around us on a daily basis, not what was around us

00:56:52.680 five weeks ago when some random guy I've never met before yelled at me.

00:56:56.760 That's not going to have a lasting effect on behavior.

00:56:59.240 Yeah, I mean, there are some fat camps now that have been operating more recently that

00:57:03.800 incorporate more sort of accept and celebrate your body kind of stuff, but also are still

00:57:10.160 focused on weight loss right i actually read a great book about more recent fat camps written

00:57:16.480 by a sociology professor named laura backstrom it's called weighty problems a number of the

00:57:21.900 campers that she talked to this book came out in 2019 so presumably this was like pretty recent

00:57:26.140 spoke really highly of their time at fat camp and she also was like but also they are sort of being

00:57:32.780 taught these deeply conflicting messages about like appreciate your body and embrace it as it is

00:57:37.820 but also change it as much as possible right now yeah it's a little bit of like an adapt to keep

00:57:42.360 with the times kind of thing but without really reckoning with the like inherent deep contradictions

00:57:48.360 in those messages that's a lot of cognitive dissonance to have between kayaking and archery

00:57:53.620 totally essentially her sort of primary critique she was like so now they're just getting conflicting

00:58:00.320 messages before the instruction was clear it was impossible but it was clear and her argument was

00:58:06.980 She was like, I actually think these conflicting messages can be as damaging or more so because you're supposed to both love your body and change it and hate it and reject it.

00:58:17.520 But also act like you love it, because if you don't, then there's going to be weird social consequences for that.

00:58:23.120 Right. Like, yeah, it feels like the bottom line of all of this is just like adults have anxieties about kids' bodies.

00:58:29.520 They project them onto kids and then they make kids solve their own fucking anxiety. 0.93

00:58:34.720 save that cognitive dissonance for goop.com don't bring it to children leave it on the 0.99

00:58:39.640 internet for adults yeah lose weight with your whatever vaginal eggs yeah exactly use vaginal 0.52

00:58:46.100 eggs mom you're a consenting adult on some level to that stuff maintenance phase do's and don'ts

00:58:52.120 don't go to fat camp do use jade eggs up your business

00:58:56.460 I'll see you next time

00:59:26.460 You

Maintenance Phase - January 04, 2022

Fat Camps

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