
·S1 E3
The Real Heavyweights
Episode Transcript
This episode contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet behavior.
This language could be sensitive for some listeners, so please take care.
Camp Shane, like any other summer camp, had a set of traditions that kept it afloat.
Starting in the late nineties, one of those traditions was watching the movie Heavyweights, the Disney movie from nineteen ninety five about a boy's weight loss camp.
In the film, a group of campers hold an uprising against the camp's oppressive, militaristic leader played by Ben Stiller.
Heavyweights ArchivalAttention, campers.
Lunch has been canceled today due to lack of hustle.
Deal with it.
Kelsey SnellingIt's based at least partially on Camp Shane.
I actually talked to the director of the movie, Steve Brill.
SteveMy name is Steve Brill.
I think I was built as Steven Brill earlier in my career, but I dropped the "N".
I thought it was too pretentious.
Kelsey SnellingGreat!
Okay, I won't call you Steven then.
Steve told me that the idea for the movie came from an advertisement.
When he was a kid, Steve saw the notorious Camp Shane ad in the back of the New York Times magazine.
You know, the one with a skinny kid holding out his waistband inches away from his body to show off how much weight he'd lost.
SteveI would always stare at that ad, going Wow, what would it be like to go there?
Kelsey SnellingYears later, Steve was working in Hollywood brainstorming movie ideas with then rookie producer Judd Apatow,
SteveAnd I told him that about that ad.
He said, we have to make it that.
So that's how it became about a weight loss camp, and particularly about Camp Shane, because that was the only camp that we knew about.
Kelsey SnellingIf you know anything about Camp Shane, then when you watch Heavyweights you can see the parallels.
There are kids smuggling candy.
There are weigh ins, there's a bus driver pretending to pull into a fast food drive through before course correcting in the direction of camp.
There are even go karts,
Heavyweights ArchivalGo carts!
How many times can you go on the go carts?
As much as you want, Jerry.
Kelsey SnellingJerry, if you went to Camp Shane, you'd be sorely disappointed.
The go carts were always broken.
For many kids who had not yet been to Camp Shane, Heavyweights was their point of reference, and the movie made camp look crazy fun.
When I was interviewing people for this show.
It came up again and again.
StephenMovies like Heavyweights.
SethThat movie Heavyweights.
CaseyI think we all saw Heavyweights.
StephenAll I really had naturally was Heavyweights in my mind.
NelsonIt was like the movie Heavyweights.
Kelsey SnellingBut Camp Shane wasn't quite like Heavyweights, not really.
Even Steve Brill could see that.
During his research, he watched several promotional videos from fat camps all over the country.
SteveThe Camp Shane when it was always just something a little off about it.
I remember being bummed ultimately that the camp that I was hoping would be the model camp was shady.
Kelsey SnellingThis is Camp Shame.
I'm your host, Kelsey Snelling.
Today we're talking about Camp Shane's new ownership, mother son squabbles and an innocent film screening gone awry.
Like the camp in Heavyweights, Camp Shane passed hands from an older married couple to a young man with a fresh perspective.
But instead of the fitness guru Ben Stiller, Camp Shane had David Ettenberg.
By nineteen ninety, he had been camp director for eight years and business was booming.
The proof was in the sugar free pudding.
Shane's tax returns that year showed profits of two hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
Adjusted for twenty twenty five, that's upwards of six hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and that's just from the nine weeks that Camp Shane was open each year, and enrollment was rising.
By nineteen ninety five, four hundred kids had signed up to go to Camp Shane.
It had come a long way since the twenty nine campers of its opening year in nineteen sixty nine.
Looking back at the nineties, there are certain things you might remember, like Friends, Seinfeld and the Simpsons dominating television, or Sir Mix A Lot's "Baby Got Back" on the radio.
Baby Got Back ArchiveI liked big butts and I can not lie.
You otha brothas can't deny.
Kelsey SnellingMaybe you have memories of walking around your hometown mall or sitting at home in the computer room exploring the World Wide Web.
These cultural touchstones might make you sigh with happy nostalgia, But there was another cultural undercurrent roaring through the nineties, fat phobia.
Fat Phobia wasn't new, but as pop culture shifted and advertising became all the more pervasive, it was taking on fresh tactics to convince Americans that being fat was something to fear, something to be mocked, and if you were fat you'd better spend serious chunks of your hard earned money trying to slim down,
Special K ArchivalAnd.
Protein can help you keep missiles while you lose fat.
So make the special k breakfast part of your daily diet and exercise plan.
Slim Fast ArchivalThat's why I chose the Ultra Slim Fast Plan and I lost fifty pounds in six months.
Workout ArchivalYour body can be trim toned, firm, slim, fit, and in shape in just eight weeks.
Now there's the Sports Illustrated Super Shape Up program fully sponsored by Diet PEPSI.
Kelsey SnellingTrim toned, firm, slim, fit and in shape.
I think we get the point.
When you weren't explicitly being sold thinness like in those ads, it was still implicitly being marketed towards you.
Fashion magazines were filled with images of emaciated models with pale skin and dark circles under their eyes, a look dubbed heroin chic without an ounce of irony.
These models weren't selling diet pills or exercise plans, but they were communicating the idea that thinness equals beauty, even if it's a thinness that can only be obtained through objectively unhealthy means like drug addiction or disordered eating, and in TV and movies, fat people were constantly the butt of the jokes, once again sending the message that being fat is abnormal and shameful.
Take the show Friends, for instance, it was filled with jokes about Monica's weight.
Friends ArchivalOh oh, and I'm sorry that I said you were a cow in high school.
That's okay, I was a cow.
I know, I'm just sorry I said it.
Kelsey SnellingAll of these signals were affecting people's psyches.
For example, in nineteen ninety four, Esquire magazine printed an article revealing that fifty four percent of women surveyed would rather be hit by a truck than be fat.
Think about that, women would rather be seriously injured or die than be fat.
This fear of fatness could have stemmed from the fact that between nineteen eighty and the late nineties, childhood obesity rates in America nearly tripled, hovering around fifteen percent.
In nineteen ninety seven, the World Health Organization declared obesity as a major public health problem and a global epidemic.
Around the same time, the American Heart Association added obesity to its list of major risk factors for heart disease and heart attacks.
Then, in nineteen ninety eight, the National Institutes of Health changed body mass index or BMI categories.
For those who don't know, BMI is a medical screening tool that measures the ratio of your height to your weight.
The resulting number supposedly indicates how much body fat you have.
Your number places you into four categories underweight, healthy weight, overweight, or obese.
Under the new guidelines, a BMI of twenty six or higher was considered overweight.
With this change, millions of Americans went to bed normal sized and then woke up overweight without gaining a single pound.
The National Institutes of Health told reporters at the time that the changes were necessary because of studies linking extra weight to health problems.
Parents and physicians alike now had a medical cause to prescribe fat camp to even more children.
But here's the thing.
BMI actually does a crap job of assessing how healthy someone is, and it was never meant to assess the health of an individual in the first place.
Dr. ErlangerIt was developed by a Belgian mathematician in the eighteen hundreds.
Kelsey SnellingThat's doctor Lisa Erlanger.
She's a family physician, educator, activist, and speaker who focuses on anti bias weight inclusive trauma informed care for patients of all sizes and backgrounds.
This mathematician, named Adolphe Quetelet, was simply collecting data on averages.
He never intended for this to be used as a medical prescription.
Plus, he conducted his measurements only on men, and this was nearly two hundred years ago.
Clearly, his findings are far from applicable in most modern societies.
Dr. ErlangerThose ideas were adopted by eugenicists people trying to create the ideal human.
And also later this BMI, which was never intended to measure the health of an individual, particularly not in our modern community, started to be used as a way to assess the health of an individual.
Kelsey SnellingAnd here's another thing.
BMI does not take into account muscle mass, body composition, or really anything other than height versus weight.
Dr. ErlangerBMS is also just an incredibly poor predictor of how much body fat a person has.
And we know this intuitively, right.
We know two hundred and fifty pound people who are all muscle, and we know one hundred and fifty pound people who are all fat.
And so the idea that just taking these two measurements would tell us how fat a person is is intuitively ridiculous.
Kelsey SnellingResearchers have found that BMI alone is not a good indicator of mortality risk.
In some studies, people in the overweight category actually had the lowest mortality rate of anyone.
Obese people fare better than any other group when faced with congestive heart failure, certain bypass surgeries, and hypertensive heart disease.
Ironic because doctors often use BMI to determine the types of treatment a patient will receive, and a patient's BMI can even affect their insurance premiums.
Dr. ErlangerAnd so not only was this never intended to be a measure of health, the way we use it is clearly not a reflection of health.
Kelsey SnellingContrary to popular belief, it's extremely possible to be healthy and fat at the same time.
Yet in nineties America and at Camp Shane, that possibility was completely unrecognized.
In fact, obesity was starting to be viewed as a disease.
To weight inclusive health experts like doctor Rachel Milner.
These attempts to turn body size into a disease not only to humanize people and put blame where it doesn't belong, it also sets people up for ineffective treatment.
It's why she actually avoids using the words obese or overweight.
Dr. MillnerThis language and this attempt to identify body size as a disease is really a way for the pharmaceutical companies and for the diet industry to make money.
If we say bodies are a disease and then they come up with these so called interventions.
This is a multi multi billion dollar industry.
Kelsey SnellingA condition can be classified as a disease if it impairs the normal functioning of the body, but millions of fat people have no negative symptoms at all.
In fact, fat storage is actually the human body working properly.
It's a key component of our species survival.
With this in mind, Doctor Millner doesn't think weight should factor into medical treatment.
Dr. MillnerThe only role that body size should play in medical treatment is if the dosage of a medication or anesthesia or a blood pressure cuff needs to be adjusted to make sure that it's safe and effective for the size of the person's body.
Outside of that, it is unethical to make body size a part of treatment.
Kelsey SnellingSo yes, Americans were getting fatter throughout the nineties.
I mean, how could we not when eleven servings of grain were at the base of the food pyramid.
But BMI was also screwing with obesity data, we can now look back and realize it wasn't really the health catastrophe the National Institutes of Health or the World Health Organization would have us believe.
But at the time, rising childhood obesity rates and rampant fat phobia and popular culture meant more parents were concerned about their children's weight and more people were interested in Camp Shane than ever.
Behind the scenes, Camp Shane was going through some major strife.
Selma and her son David were caught up in a battle for ownership and things were about to get nasty.
Not yet ready to pass the reins to her son, Selma still owned the camp, but David was camp director and partial owner.
He and his wife, Ziporah moved into the house in the center of camp and lived there.
During the summer season, Salma moved into a house across the street from camp.
That meant David had more power and presence than ever before.
Under David's reign things were different because his motivation wasn't necessarily to help kids lose weight like it was for Selma.
SueThe biggest change between Selma and David's era is that you could tell by lots of little things that it had become a business, a for profit business.
Kelsey SnellingThat's Sue Steinberg, who you heard from last episode.
By the nineties, she was working at Camp Shane as a lifeguard, swim instructor, and later on head of the pool.
She witnessed what she saw as a rocky transition from Selma to David.
SueI did recognize the signs of the lack of love for this community and with that said,um, giving David Ettenberg the benefit of the doubt.
To him, it was a business, you know.
Like he never purported to have started a camp for fat people to create a bubble of societal you know, marginalized people who could explore their identities.
You know, like, he never would have said that Camp Shane was supposed to be that to him, he would.
Have said, you know, I am running a business, and he ran it as such for sure.
Kelsey SnellingAnother person who noticed this was Jenna Hopkins.
Jenna was a group leader throughout the nineties.
She saw David's leadership style grow increasingly lax over time.
JennaIt seemed to be better managed by the owners and staff in the beginning.
It just seemed like maybe it was too big for them to properly manage, and maybe weren't even really, we're just taking the money and running, you know.
Just it's all right, Well that happens who cares, you know.
That was sort of the mentality that it seemed to be as the years went on.
Kelsey SnellingWhat happened next was an avalanche.
According to reporting from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Selma insisted that David and his wife Ziporah live in their house on camp all year long, even outside of the summer season.
David and Ziporah said no.
According to David, Selma then sent the sheriff to evict them from their on campus house.
Selma later claimed that David abruptly announced he was quitting during the crucial hiring period in April before camp began.
We're sure whether or not he actually did.
Because of this debacle, which may or may not have even happened, Selma and her husband, Irving, furiously filed a lawsuit to invalidate their previous agreement, the one that said David would one day own the Camp.
David then used his minority shareholder status to dissolve the company.
An ugly legal battle ensued.
In the end, both parties agreed that David would.
Purchase the Camp for one point two million dollars.
By nineteen ninety three, David was the sole owner of Camp Shane.
Though David and his mother were often at odds, he did continue a few of her business practices, like hiring counselors through exchange programs like Camp America, an organization that sends camp counselors from other countries across the globe to America for summer jobs.
This saved David money because Camp America counselors generally worked for lower wages than state side counselors would, and David loved saving money.
Camp America counselors are some of the central characters behind the grandest of Camp Shane lore, like the supplier of the M and M cartel in episode one, Remember Heavyweights.
Each year, a counselor would drive to the Blockbuster in town to rent the VHS tape and host a screening in the gymnasium.
And yes, I know some of you listening are probably googling Blockbuster and VHS tape right about now.
But one year the screening didn't white go according to plan.
NelsonThere was the operations manager then was from Eastern Europe and he had a heavy accent, and he was told to go to Blockbuster and rent Heavyweights.
Well, I don't know why we didn't have it at the camp.
We watch it every year.
God bless him.
He goes to the video store and he asks for Heevy weights.
He's like, I want the Heevy weights, the Heevy weights.
And they're like, what?
Heevy weights?
He is like, yeah, Heevy, Heevy weights.
And he is like, all right.
So he gets what he thinks is Heavyweights the, you know, funny, Ben Stiller comedy Heavyweights.
Kelsey SnellingThat’s Nelson Jancaterino.
You heard from him in episode 1.
He was a camper at Camp Shane for several years before working as a counselor for several more summers.
But back to the story: the counselor rented the tape and brought it back to camp
NelsonAnd they put in what they think is Heavyweights, and they turn it off when it wasn't Heavyweights.
It was Heevyweights, which was this graphic porno.
It only lasted for like a few seconds to like Big Dog, who was like a notorious counselor, jumped in front of the projector.
But all the kids whore like five seconds saw this like graphic sex act.
Kelsey SnellingWe're talking around one hundred kids, some as young as eight years old being exposed to graphic pornography.
Somehow, despite this mishap, the Heavyweight screenings continued with the actual movie.
Of course.
Another Camp America counselor was a British former race car driver named Simon Greenwood.
Merryl Winter, a camper and then counselor throughout the eighties, nineties, and two thousands, worked closely with Simon.
MerrylAll the girls fell in love with Simon.
He had an English accent, he was adorable, and he's meticulous, so he was always good at what he did.
Kelsey SnellingIf this were really like the movie Heavyweights, then Simon would be Pat the encouraging counselor that all the kids and fellow staffers love, only like the Lady Magnet version.
David loved Simon too, and soon David made him his right hand man, and they were quite the character foils to one another.
Where David was distant,
MerrylHe never took the time to get to know the kids, he didn't know any of them.
Kelsey SnellingSimon was invested.
MerrylHe was a hard worker, he loved the kids, he loved the concept of camp, and he was really the backbone of that camp.
It wouldn't have survived without him.
Kelsey SnellingBut Selma was still living across the street from camp, and she didn't care how many passionate, hard working sidekicks David had by his side.
She challenged David at every turn.
She may have no longer been the camp's owner, but she was still around, helping out in the office and riding her golf cart on the campgrounds to yell at kids for chewing gum.
Even when she was off campus, she never really left.
She was known to watch whatever she could from her house.
If that sounds like I'm exaggerating, I'm not.
She sometimes sat on her porch with a pair of binoculars to peer inside the camp.
She even contested the sale of the camp, claiming she felt pressure to sell at a low price.
Everyone could see the continuing tension between Selma and David, including Merryl.
MerrylI saw they were feuding.
You couldn't not see they were feuding when they weren't talking.
Yet they were sharing an office together, and they were mother and son, so it's really hard to fathom.
But she installed a lock on the door so if David walked out of the office, she would just lock it from her seat, which was kind of funny.
Kelsey SnellingAnd these were the adults in charge of hundreds of children.
Janna Hopkins, the group leader you heard from earlier, noticed the rivalry between Selma and David as soon as she stepped on camp for her first day of work.
JannaEverybody knew that there was a battle going on.
It was just it was, you know, it permeated everything.
Kelsey SnellingJanna was a single mom in Texas when she came across an ad for Camp Shane in the back of a teacher's magazine.
She decided to apply and got a job as a group leader.
JennaKind of thought, well, I'm going to make money.
I got an opportunity to be in the outdoors and maybe lose some weight.
Plus my kid camps for free.
This is pretty cool, and you escape the you know, one thousand degree summers in Dallas.
Kelsey SnellingJana drove herself and her seven year old all the way from Dallas to the Catskills.
That's a crazy journey for a single mom to make, but she did it.
After days on the road, Janna arrived in Ferndale and drove into the center of Camp Shane.
JannaSo I drive in and I park, and we get out, and I walk up to the you know, the window of the office and this woman slams the window open and she looks at me and she says, what do you want?
So I'm immediately thinking, oh, no.
You know, maybe I'm in the wrong place.
Kelsey SnellingI don't know.
JannaAnd I said hi, I said, my name is Janna, and I said I'm supposed to be a group leader this summer.
And she looks at me and she says, I didn't hire you.
Go home, And I'm just standing there with my kid going uh oh, I have to say, I mean, so many things are running through my head.
I'm literally still standing there.
And then David Ettenberg comes out of the office and he says, Janna, Janna, Janna its David.
Don't worry about that.
Just ignore her.
That's my mother.
And that was how I met Selma.
Kelsey SnellingBut Janna couldn't really ignore Selma.
She kept making herself known and flexing power that she didn't really have anymore.
One day, Janna took a group of her campers for a walk into town.
One of the girls fell and hurt her leg.
It hurt so much she couldn't walk back to camp.
So Janna ran back to camp to get her car and drove the girl to the infirmary on campus.
JannaYou know, no cell phones, I couldn't stop and whip my phone out and say, “Hey, I need somebody to come help me”.
So I made the choice to go ahead and I ran, well, I didn't really run, but I went back to camp.
So I got my keys, I got my car, and I came back and I picked her up - just her!
And I took her back, and I took her to the infirmary, and I left my co-counselor with the other girls and said, you know, y'all going back.
And the next morning I woke up where, in my cabin thing where I slept, and I heard something, and I opened my eyes and Selma was sitting right next to my bed in a chair.
Kelsey SnellingTruly horrifying.
Remember, at this point, Selma was no longer in charge, but that didn't stop her from trying to discipline staffers as if she were.
Her presence still loomed large.
JannaAnd I honestly I was afraid of her.
There are a lot of people who love her and have a lot of respect for her, But I didn't see or know that Selma.
I just saw the one who was overwrought with the desire to get her camp back and would do anything she could to do that.
Kelsey SnellingJana didn't know just how far Selma was willing to go.
In nineteen ninety five, a smoke alarm went off in Selma's house across the street from Camp, prompting a visit from the fire department.
The police investigated.
Leslie, Selma's daughter and David's sister believed Selma started the fire herself, using old newspapers and film negatives to frame David.
Selma claimed she wasn't home that evening.
Later that summer, a quote "concerned parent" sent an anonymous letter to the New York State Department of Health calling attention to overcrowding and poor food quality at Shane.
The thing is the letter included lots of insider details like enrollment figures, bunk square footage, and health inspection dates.
To David, the letter wasn't anonymous at all.
With all of this drama and chaos going on, no one seemed to be prioritizing the kids.
Sometime that August, a fourteen year old broke his collarbone while allegedly playing unsupervised at the off campus Lake.
Nineteen ninety five was Janna's last summer.
At this point, she'd been at Camp Shane for years.
She had the sense that something bad was going to happen, and she didn't want to be there when it did.
JennaThe biggest problem I had with David, I think was later, as things were getting crazy.
And I just kept saying, I said,I don't want this to happen.
And he would say, I know, I know, don't worry.
I'm handling it, I'm handling it.
But clearly he wasn't handling.
Kelsey SnellingAnother thing David wasn't handling well, the food.
David didn't prioritize nutrition so much as he prioritized cutting calories, so kids were served the same junk food they were likely eating at home, just much smaller portions, say two French toasticks for breakfast instead of four, and then for dinner one slice of pizza instead of two or three, served with a glass of milk.
Not enough food to sustain kids doing eight hours of exercise a day.
Now, there was one workaround, at least for the skinny campers at Shane.
If kids were deemed an acceptable level of thin, they were sometimes awarded a visit to...
The Pig Out Room, a supply closet off the dining hall filled with all the contraband snacks that Shaners weren't allowed to eat, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, candy chips, cakes baked by the camp chefs.
SueAnd then of the people that were like normal weighted people, they had the pig out where.
You know, I never got there, so I'm not really sure, but I think there was peanut butter there.
You know.
Kelsey SnellingThe Pig Out Room disappeared in the late nineties, but while it existed, it was protected like a national treasure.
Sometimes staff would check bags and backpacks to make sure no one was hiding any contraband food that they might have smuggled from the room.
Campers were almost never allowed in there, try as they might, and most counselors weren't either.
Only the fittest were permitted, those who had reached Camp Shane's definition of a goal weight.
Usually that meant the Camp America counselors who were already thin and weren't at Camp Shane to lose anything.
So camper's food intake was heavily restricted, and then their reward for restriction was to eat a bunch of cake and cookies in The Pig Out room.
It's a confusing message that further fetishized quote "bad foods" and not one that in stilled healthy habits.
Sue remembers a Camp America counselor who was a semi professional soccer player.
He was one of those straight sized counselors who would have been allowed to go to The Pig Out Room.
He didn't understand this relationship that camp was establishing between campers and food.
SueFor him, food was fuel.
He never could compute.
And I just remember the whole summer of him being like, I do not get it.
These kids are out there running all day and we are feeding them, you know, a teaspoon of apple butter and some dried toast and some cottage cheese.
Kelsey SnellingLike her fellow counselors, Sue also had questions about the camp's approach to food and how it was all adding up.
One day, she got a glimpse of the numbers and learned just how little these kids were surviving off of
SueI was working there with the nutritionist and she was concerned, you know, rightfully so.
And she was, somewhat distraught.
She was just like, the numbers aren't computing, I remember specifically she was like, oh, on Thursday we got 1400 calories.
And that was sort of in the range that we were supposed to be getting per day.
And she sort of, you know, showed me the numbers of like four straight days of like 900 or a thousand calories a day.
Kelsey SnellingSue’s right.
It doesn’t work that way.
And since David had been in this space for over 20 years, the fact that he didn’t understand how calories work isn’t just shocking.
It’s irresponsible.
Plus, these days we know calorie restriction simply doesn’t work.
Researchers have found that more than 95% of all diets fail long term, most within a couple of years.
And often, the weight regained puts people at a higher weight than where they started in the first place.
And still, year after year, the message campers got was to restrict their food intake.
StacyThe understanding was very much… you need to lose weight and by all means necessary while you're at camp.
Both the camp is gonna help you and we're gonna turn a blind eye to behaviors that we know are aiding people in weight loss that are actually not healthy and good for them.
Kelsey SnellingStacy told me about the shame and embarrassment she felt growing up in a bigger body.
She hated walking to the plus size section to pick out her new swimsuit, and she was always comparing herself to her stepsisters, who were just naturally smaller than her, while she listened to her grandma brag about only drinking water and eating Ritz Crackers all day.
Stacy used food as a coping mechanism after a traumatic experience in her childhood.
She felt like a black sheep in her family.
StacyBut looking back at photos, I looked like an Olympic swimmer, Like I looked like a healthy person with a lot of muscle mass.
And it wasn't until I was at Camp Shane that I learned how to purge, you know, to binge and purge, how to avoid food right like if we were going to be weighed in the next day, everybody would just not eat.
Kelsey SnellingThis mentality to lose weight by all means necessary was dangerous.
At Camp Shane, Stacy experienced disordered eating, long hours exercising.
And little food.
After a few weeks of this, she got sick and because she was at fat camp.
The counselors didn't believe her.
They thought she was just making excuses to get out of exercising.
StacyYou had multiple activities that you were doing physically all day long.
And particularly when I would go to things that were high intensity cardio, like aerobics and circuit training, I basically couldn't breathe.
And it wasn't because I was out of shape, it was because I had bronchitis and I probably had just caught a cold or something and then gotten sick.
But I remember coming back up from the hill from, the dining hall and feeling like I couldn't make it up the hillI remember asking multiple times like, I, I don't think I can do this.
Can I sit this out?
And being told no, being very much given the impression that I was lazy
Kelsey SnellingStacy had bronchitis, which turned into walking pneumonia.
She was given broth and tea, but that was it.
She kept coughing and soon cracked a rib.
StacyMy body was overwhelmed with the amount of exercise and extreme pressure that it was being put under physically and not supported with nutrition, and that led to my body literally crashing, crumpling to beg for help.
I mean, that's what sickness is, right is our body physically telling us to slow down, to rest, to recover.
Kelsey SnellingStacy went home early that summer feeling like a failure.
She didn't accomplish what she went to Camp Shane to do to lose weight to become skinny.
She tried to replicate the weight loss tactics she learned from camp at home.
StacyI would starve myself.
I would try to restrict my calories the way that had been restricted at camp, and then I would starve.
I was just so hungry that then I would binge, and then I would feel badly about having binged, and then I would purge, and that cycle would go over and over and over again.
I don't know that I fully understood body shame until I went to a fat camp, and it's why it was called Camp Shame.
We didn't call it "Camp Shane".
We called it Camp Shame.
And the messaging was very much especially for children who had been going for years.
It was a focus on you get love, you get attention, you get these sort of things when you perform at camp, and performance in that instance was losing weight.
Kelsey SnellingStacy's experience of starting with calorie restriction and developing disordered eating from there is a pretty common long term effect according to psychologists and certified eating disorder specialist doctor Rachel Millner.
Dr. MillnerSo anything that is an attempt to either lose weight or prevent weight gain for kids and adolescents who need to be growing and developing, is going to increase their risk of eating disorders.
And if they're not somebody that developed an eating disorder, it's still going to put them in a place where they're constantly weight cycling, so they're trying to lose weight and then regain weight, which we know as a negative impact on health, and where they don't get to feel fully embodied, that they feel like their body is constantly betraying them.
Kelsey SnellingOf course, this mindset and messaging wasn't only playing out at Camp Shane.
It was happening at home, at school and in the TV and movies kids watched, which brings us back to Heavyweights.
One interesting thing about the movie is, even though it was released in nineteen ninety five, it's somehow not filled with outdated fat phobic jokes like you might expect.
The movie is a comedy, but the jokes are rarely at the expense of the fat characters.
Director Steve Brill said that was intentional.
SteveI certainly wanted to ennoble and make these characters fun and people you could look up to and not make fun of, which is obviously what the fat guy or the fat kid has always been in movies.
By being overweight, you know, the shame and self criticism and the doubt that it brings into you is is really harmful.
And that's something that you know, we wanted to address as a problem, and that's something that you know, hopefully the kids when they watch the movie, they go, oh, it's all right, it's all right to be overweight.
Kelsey SnellingIf you've never seen the movie, then spoiler alert, I'm about to talk about the ending.
The campers have successfully ousted their militaristic camp director and they've just won the annual competition against their rival.
Camp Music swells as the campers all cheer and hug each other.
The main character Jerry turns to Pat the camp counselor, and says.
Heavyweights ArchivalThanks for the best damn summer of my life.
Kelsey SnellingUnfortunately that's just a movie.
At the end of a Camp Shane summer, there's no trophy, no music that swells as the credits start to roll.
No hearts filled with new lessons about loving yourself in spite of the bullies and naysayers.
It is all right to be fat, like Steve said, but our culture is often telling us otherwise.
So even though almost all Shaners had fun at one point or another, I don't think any of them walked away from camp thinking it's all right to be heavy.
Another difference between Camp Shane and the fictional Camp Hope.
The camp owner at Shane hadn't been ousted.
In fact, in spite of his mother's sabotage, David was about to lead Camp Shane into its biggest decade yet.
Next week.
On Camp Shane.
MerrylHe was happy with bodies in camp, whether they be, um, kids or counselors...Didn't matter if they were doing things that were unethical or, or, um, dangerous
Kelsey SnellingWe reached out to David Ettenberg and Ziporah Janowski for comment; at the time of this recording we have not received a reply