Listeners please note you’ll hear the word “fat” used a lot throughout this series.

Many of our speakers use the word as a neutral descriptor, some of them use it with pride.

In this episode, we also mention specific weight and weight loss numbers.

This language could be sensitive for some listeners, so please take care.

So am I saying right?

Reverie, Revelie?

I don't know.

We'd wake up to like patriotic music, like you're a military camp?

Is it the one that's like.

That one?

Maybe?

Yeah.

After wake up and a bit of breakfast, campers were ready to start the day, making memories that would last a lifetime and experiencing many many firsts.

First friendships, first kisses, first wins.

So I had my very first boyfriend, I had my very first kiss during a movie night, and it was just just really really good for my self esteem.

For me, it was the best summers of my life.

You will make friends at camp that you're closer with than your best friends in the outside world.

But Camp Shane isn't exactly like your average summer camp.

Here, kids don't eat s'mores at bonfires, there are no popsicles on hot July afternoons, and revel signals more than just the start of the day.

It signals the approach of a morning workout.

At Camp Shane, kids aren't just here to make memories and get outdoors.

They're here to get thin.

Mikey agreed to go to Camp Shane, which is a weight loss camp for young kids.

David Edinburgh has been on the front lines of fighting childhood obesit for more than forty years as the founder and co owner of Camp Shane.

The goal here is to lose up to thirty five pounds in just weeks.

Camp Shane operated for over fifty years and in that time was applauded by Tyra Banks, doctor Oz, doctor Phil and even Oprah Winfrey.

It was featured on MTV, ABC, the BBC, and in the New York Times.

The first time I heard about Camp Shane, I was a junior in college.

My sister had been looking for summer jobs and during a frenzied late night research session, pulled up a wild looking job post New York counselors wanted.

I didn't even know fat Camp was a real thing, but the posting promised an unforgettable summer with top of the line activities, all centered around kids who were misfits in the outside world.

Were we intrigued?

Absolutely?

Were we qualified.

We hardly knew a thing about weight loss or nutrition, and we didn't really have any experience with kids.

But four months later we were in Ferndale, New York, ready for Campshane counselor orientation.

When I first got to camp, I didn't know what to expect on the other side of the tall wooden fence that surrounded the grounds.

But pretty quickly I realized what that fence concealed.

It checks all the boxes, and it's so easy.

You send the child, you send your money, they send the child back the way it is gone.

It's that it's the most fun you'll ever hate.

That sums up camp in one sentence.

It is the most fun you'll ever hate.

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.

This is Camp Shame.

I'm Kelsey Snelling.

This is a story about fat camp, diet culture, and the heavy price of shame.

During the production of this series, I spoke to nearly one hundred people, former campers, counselors, staff and parents.

Today we'll hear stories from a handful of them.

They represent campers from the full fifty plus years that Camp Shane was an operation.

We'll get to know a lot of them throughout this season, but for this episode, we're going to get to know Camp Shane itself.

Hi, I'm David Ettenberg.

I'm the director and founder of Camp Shane.

And I'm Ziporah Janowski David's wife and a co-director.

Camp Shane was founded in 1968 and we are the original longest running weight loss camp anywhere.

For decades, Camp Shane was marketed as the premier weight loss camp for kids and teens.

It was the perfect place to meet new friends and get outside camp Shane had it all, iplines, arts and crafts, and a fan favorite go carts.

In addition to fun activities, camp provided cooking classes and nutrition education from celebrity chefs, as well as group therapy to uncover the root causes of Camper's weight gain.

Despite the camp being a huge success, it actually got its start as a humble family business.

Camp Shane, the brainchild of a woman named Selma Ettenburg, was meant to be a safe haven for kids, a place to shed extra pounds without judgment.

Selma took out ads and newspapers across the country and sent out brochures to prospective families.

She, along with her husband and children, even made house calls to interested families, armed with VHS tapes, more brochures, and a pitch for a summer of fun and fitness.

David Attenburg, whose voice was in that ad you just heard, was part of that family, and in the nineteen eighties he was the camp director.

David actually came to my house, gave us the whole presentation about how the camp was, and you know, all the great things, showed me the video everything like that, and my parents all.

I go, well, why not.

That’s Seth Kwitko.

A camper eighty one to eighty five, I've I remember correctly, and then I came back as a counselor twice.

He was about ten years old when he first went to the camp, and after the house call, he was pretty pumped about going.

Level playing field, so we have nothing to worry about.

Everything is going to be cool.

They're going to you know, they're going to feed us, well, we're going to lose weight, We're going to be active.

But I felt like it was easier to be active or keep up with a bunch of kids that were equally overweight.

So how bad could this be?

That level playing field that Seth talks about was so important to the campers.

They were in need of a place where they could feel at ease, a place where they weren't picked last, a place where they were able to be more than just the fat kid, because in the real world, being a fat kid is really hard.

Here's Seth again.

Once I was in skating rink with this girl that I kind of liked, and I was kind of showing off for her.

I was probably about ten.

Seth was trying to be cool and made a bit of a scene by messing with a younger kid at the rink.

This kid's mother was standing there and the first words out of her mouth was A fatso And that sort of took me by surprise, because I would never, never, in my life would I say anything to a kid like that.

I could never imagine calling someone fat as a way to hurt them, let alone a child.

Bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and there are many reasons why a person might be heavy.

There's stress, genetics, hormones, medications, trauma responses, metabolic conditions.

That's a long list.

All that aside, body diversity is natural, which makes it endlessly disappointing that we live in a world where fatness is so demonized.

When you were a bigger kid in a fat phobic society, you learn pretty quickly that the world is not built for you.

You're judged every time you eat, you can't fit into desks at school, you're denied access to rides at amusement parks, and worst of all, you never really feel free in your body.

You're always forced to cover up and lay low just to avoid harassment.

For Carl Evans, a camper from the two thousands, the judgment he felt around.

His weight soured one of his most beloved activities.

As a young kid, Carl loved swimming.

In his hometown outside of Chicago.

There was a swimming club and then there was also like a public pond.

You could get a $5 summer pass to swim in.

When I was really, really young, you know, kindergarten through like first or second grade, uh, I was like a fish I would spend all day in the summers in these places.

One summer, Carl went to a birthday pool party with his brother.

My brother, he'd make fun of my weight more than maybe anyone else in the neighborhood.

And at this party in particular, Carl remembers.

He just really like laid in and decided to do like a whole standup bit on,you know, even though I'm in third grade, he called 'em man boobs.

That was like a real tipping point to, you know, strategic swimming for like the rest of my life.

Until Camp Shane

That moment shifted how Carl viewed himself.

He started swimming with his shirt on.

As he got older, he sometimes used his size to his advantage, like playing high school football, but he still wasn't comfortable in his body and Eventually, his weight began to impact his health.

In his teen years, Carl suffered a cardiac emergency that scared him and his family.

That's when things got serious.

After doing some research on weight loss camps, his sister found Camp Shane and Carl enrolled the next summer.

The judgment kid's face, especially during early development, can stick with them for years, even a lifetime.

Where As I remember going to kindergarten orientation and they were giving up cookies and I was so excited.

My Mom's like she can't eat them, and I just remember feeling shame and embarrassment, like, uh oh, what if other people heard?

This?

This is Arielle Berger.

I went to Camp Shane in nineteen ninety three, ninety four, ninety six, ninety eight.

I was twelve, thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen.

Good memory.

I wrote it down.

I took notes.

I'm an attorney, so I take notes.

Ariel still Carrie's painful memories from her early childhood, like her first year at school.

I remember even like birthday partisan school, like I would always be like, oh, the teacher would be like, oh, you can't participate, Like that's so embarrassing.

So there's like this feeling of shame that I even associate like to young childhood.

Ariel discovered Camp Shane after seeing their advertisements.

Like many kids at Camp, Aril came from a Jewish family and she was sent to camp ahead of her About Mitzvah, the ceremony that marks the time when a Jewish girl becomes an adult, many families felt pressure to present their kids to the community in the best light, and in the case of many Shaners, this meant being slim.

To achieve this, Ariel's mother took drastic steps.

This is even before discovering Camp Shane.

She put a lock on our pantry at one point, and so it's like, what does that say to someone?

Right?

Like, what do you lock up?

I lock up jewelry or money?

Why would you lock up food?

Like?

That made it even more powerful.

I think when.

Locking food away didn't help Aril lose weight, her mother introduced her to some of the late eighties and early nineties most popular diets and diet.

Foods, snack wells, chocolate sandwich cookies so good can we ever make enough?

The snackwell cookies that claimed to be low fat, accomplished this by adding additional sugar, which is true of almost all low fat diet foods.

Introducing new lays Wow Potato chips.

They taste just as good as regular Lays, and because they're made with a lane, they're half the calories and one hundred percent fat free.

In the late nineties, Freedom Lay introduced Wow Chips, fat free versions of some of their best known chips like Lays, Pringles and Doritos.

Something in it was essentially a laxative.

You would eat it and you would instantly get a stomach ache and go to the bathroom.

So it's like, hey, it's a win win.

I just ate a whole bag of Doletos and I went to the bathroom.

Five days were the bathroom for one day.

It was like the crazy thing.

Those Wow chips were required to carry a warning and were eventually taken off the market altogether.

And then there was weight Watchers, which got it started in the early nineteen sixties as a weekly support group.

Weight Watchers new nineteen eighty eight Quick Success program is helping people lighten up.

In fact, I started at weight Watchers at seven, so I knew at seven years old, which is insane.

At seven, I knew how many you know?

Calories?

Ornogram of protein, fat carbohydrate.

It was like this.

Obsession the fat diets didn't help Ril or anyone really get thinner.

In fact, the focus on weight only made her feel worse.

All this pressure to be thin puts kids at a high risk for depression, anxiety, and unhealthy relationships with food and their bodies.

Here's Seth again.

No one really thought about the long term effects.

And rather than positive reinforcement fostering that you know, eat well and you'll live a long time, it's don't eat you know.

It is the negative reinforcement rather than the positive reinforcement.

I can't blame my parents for that.

So when all of those attempts failed, Camp Shane felt like a miracle solution.

Located in the heart of the beautiful Catskills Mountain's, Camp Shane is the oldest weight loss camp in the country.

Come spend some time with us, make new friends, get into shape, and experience a summer that will change your life.

But first you had to get to Shane.

To get to Camp Shane, campers had to first traverse the roads of upstate New York.

Some kids, like Seth, had their parents drop them off, but many who flew into New York city from around the country had to take a cramped and crowded bus.

After two hours of state roads and thousands of trees, a glimmer of civilization would appear through the foliage, a strip of fast food restaurants.

Here's Nelson Jancaterino, a former camper and counselor from Alabama.

And I remember pulling off on that exit and seeing like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and Taco Bell, I think, and all the kids were like, oh, oh my god, I want Taco Bell, I want Burger King, I want blah blah blah, like screaming, and like, I think the bus driver would like kind of like pretended like he was going to turn left.

And that was the last time most kids saw McDonald's, but not the last time they thought about it, because just beyond this oasis of tasty, high calorie goodness was Camp Shane.

Two worn totem poles welcomed to rivals to the property.

On the inside, forty two acres of lush, green forest and hilly terrain were freckled by cabins, sports fields, and a few large buildings for gatherings.

At the base of a notoriously steep hill sat the cafeteria.

The whole design was a bit of evil genius.

Walking around campus was a cardio session itself, but struggling up and down the hill was an added workout.

Kids tested various strategies like igzagging, walking backward, and even rolling down just to get to breakfast.

Ask any Shaner and they'll tell you right away.

The hill was absolutely iconic in its heyday.

The camp's reputation was so respected and well known that a few celebrities even sent their kids to camp.

Tommy Mottola, Stephen Tyler, and Michael Bolton were just some of the famous parents who trusted Shane with their children.

Here's Nelson again.

The really rich parents that would come in like limousines, and you had like a I think one summer Mike Tyson's daughter was there and he showed up in a helicopter and like landed on the field.

A helicopter landing is pretty cool, but so was having a child star as a neighbor.

Shaun Weiss was there and this Shaun Weiss from Mighty Ducks.

He was a legend at camp, like the coolest kid at camp.

You wanted to know him, talk to him.

He walked around like he owned the camp.

And then one year they even played Mighty Ducks that movie night.

It was like having Bradley Cooper walk around.

It was crazy.

Despite celab popularity, Camp Shane was actually quite rustic.

The buildings were humble and bare bone, and the grass was often unmowed.

Kids were out in the woods in cabins with no air conditioning or TV, and it didn't matter.

Camp was the perfect bubble, a community of chubby children who were finally free to be themselves.

Remember Carl, the boy who was bullied by his brother at a pool party.

Years later, he was still uncomfortable swimming around others, but at Camp Shane he had a revelation.

After spending time in the hot sun, many Shaners looked forward to a dip in the cool water.

Carl was worried about swimming, but this wasn't the outside world.

Here's how Carl remembers that moment.

We had pool on schedule and I come down there and some of the guys are walking down to the pool without shirts on.

They just got their trunks and towel.

That was pretty radical in and of itself, But when I got to the pool, it was another one of the veteran guys.

He totally saw it.

He's like, take your shirt off, and I was like, I will, and he's like, we're all here for the same reason, baby, and he and I took my shirt off, and the sense of liberation of like I mean, I really mean it, like it was like lightning and thunder crackling.

Because I didn't jump in the pool took it off.

I just stood there and looked around and like you could feel the breeze.

It was a sunny day, and minus will have been like a Christening emancipation, you know, doves flying off kind of a thing, because that was the first like gigantic boulder.

I took that shirt off and didn't jump in the pool and just sat there in myself.

That feeling is why Carl eventually became a counselor.

Kids at Camp Shane could find a sense of security and even pride in themselves.

I would be walking on the campgrounds and the girls it was like G nine through twelve that I'd be walking by and all of a sudden I'd hear Hi Seth from thirty Girls, And of course that made me feel good, but it was certainly an ego booze.

Part of it was like really good for your self esteem.

Like for me, like I said, everyone's like, oh, she has such a pretty face, but now I was just oh, she's just pretty.

There were so many people there who accepted and encouraged campers.

Here's Nelson again.

I was good at soccer, it was really good.

But I would get picked last because I was heavy.

But then at camp, like, I'm the Pele, I'm like the star soccer player.

Mm-Hmm.

.

Um, so much so that like, and when I was older, like the counselors wanted me to play on, like, I played on their counselor team.

Despite wanting to lose their “fat”, the F word (f-a-t) was used with pride at Camp Shane.

the way trainer counselor.

And he's one counselor who will always stand out to me because for one of the talent shows, he actually had a bunch of We had all the campers from our cabin.

You know, regardless of size, shape, whatever, big, small, you know, fat, skinny, whatever the case may be.

And we went up there and we did, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, mister Olympia posing.

We actually oiled up with baby oil.

We went up there, chunky, skinny, whatever the case may be, and we were posing, and the camp went absolutely insane.

And he was one of these guys that again just just saw us as kids and wanted us to have a good time and feel good about ourselves.

Camp was a respite kids gained confidence in their new home, but it wasn't all friendship, bracelets and koumba.

Don't forget the camp's main goal was weight loss.

Despite being free from the school bullies, homework, and social hierarchies, the one thing that carried over from the outside world at camp was dieting.

According to newspaper articles and former campers, Camp Shane served a strict diet that ranged anywhere between twelve and fifteen hundred calories.

Meals could include a breakfast of two French toasticks or cereal, maybe a sloppy Joe lunch, perhaps a small chicken dinner.

Kids were also given two snacks a day, a piece of usually bruised fruit, a cup of cottage cheese or a small bag of chips.

Campers were also kept busy, with six to seven activity periods daily, each lasting about an hour.

The small portions, paired with excessive exercise naturally resulted and kids losing weight like a lot of weight, and really really fast.

A kid who weighs one hundred eighty pounds should not be down to one hundred and fifty in eight weeks.

It's not healthy.

The Camp Shane diet was not only minimal, but it was pretty much the same for everyone.

Seven year old girls were fed the same as sixteen year old athletic boys, and that low end of twelve hundred calories, while not suitable for even the youngest kids, was definitely below the recommended caloric intake for teens.

Teen girls should consume at least twenty two hundred calories a day, for teen boys twenty five hundred calories.

Because it was like a one size fits all, I mean, someone who was like me, who was maybe thirty pounds overweight but was active, was eating the same amount as someone who was one hundred pounds and inactive.

That was a problem.

It doesn't lead to sustaining this weight loss.

However, there were some exceptions in the early years, when a camper dropped enough weight, they were allowed back in the chow line for second helpings as a way of maintaining their new body.

That is, if the kitchen happened to have leftovers from that meal.

So you could be on like single bubble triples, so you'd be like they put you on breakfast, whether they put you on lunch, maintenance or dinner, or they put you on all three, depending on how much weight you lost.

When they figured that you hit some certain level, they would not want you to lose more weight.

Eventually, those small portions and hours long workouts got to campers.

They were hungry, tired, and at times a little unruly.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and campers got creative.

Here's Aril.

But when we had skim milk, kids were like guzzling it, so they had to stop.

I think we had a salad bar one year without the dressing.

The dressing like was very small or it was like a fat free dressing.

And then they used to have ketchup and mustard on the tables for like hot dog Day or Hamburger Day, and kids were like drinking in the ketchup.

There were crab apple trees, and every year and crab apples are like poison.

Every year, inevitably a kid would eat a crab apple and go to the nurse and get sick.

But it was like sort of like this like horrible joke.

There's apples all around and you can't eat it.

It was like very uh Bible esque.

And the more campers were restricted, the more powerful food became.

Remember those fast food restaurants the kids passed on the way to Shane.

Yeah, the kids remembered too, and created a system to get food into camp.

So there was like one hole the fence by like where the go karts are.

They're like, if you deliver to this hole in the fence, and they give them like exact directions of where to pull up what they would see across.

They're like, if you delivered to this hole, we're going to give you a two hundred dollars cash tip, but only if you delivered to this hole in the fence.

And they did, and the entire cabin smell like Chinese food.

There was like low main everywhere.

They ordered like like five hundred dollars worth of Chinese and the entire cabin ate it.

The fence trick was so successful, campers continued the tradition for years, and sneaking around at night became so common counselors had to patrol the grounds around the clock.

When that became too much for staff, the camp brought in reinforcements.

Here's Nelson again.

We had Matoush, the notorious Polish Night Watchman He scared the outta everybody.

'cause he was, we thought he was a vampire.

Like, he just was like, like kind of wandering around.

And he was there at night and he was like, fast.

He was so fast.

He looked like Drago from Rocky IV or whatever.

Just massive.Just like, you're out.

Like, and at night we're not supposed to.

And you see like a, you see a quick flash of light and next thing you know, you turn around and he is like, get back to your bunk what are you doing out?

But a giant Polish vampire wasn't enough to curb a Shaner or appetite, and the camper has found other ways to get food.

Ariel remembers the year the more entrepreneurial kids set up a black market.

So the boys in B12 they got a foreign counselor to somehow get almost like, like a Sam's or Costco size thing of M&Ms.

And I remember there were $5 in the black market and this was like in the early nineties, $5 a pack for one like 50 cent package.

It used to be back then.

So the M&M cartel of B12 was like this huge thing and you could tell who's the boss and who's the muscle.

I'm telling you this is like Rico, this is like the sopranos of Camp Shane.

Campers obviously couldn't eat their contraband goodies out in the open.

They had to find more unique places to snack.

And I got back to my cabin that night and I went into the bathroom and I was eating M&Ms in the toilet.

So yes.

Is it disordered eating?

Yes.

So I'm eating M&Ms in the toilet.

And I remember someone in my cabin's, like, I smell chocolate.

And I was like, uh, how is this?

Is this like a bloodhound?

What the hell's going on?

The bathroom also became Ril's go to spot for hiding Campshane's most coveted contraband item, gum.

So you couldn't have your stash in one spot and there was one year.

I was so smart.

I thought I had a bunch of gum and I put it in like four iploc bags so it was completely air tight.

I opened up the top of the back of the toy toilet and that gum went in the top of the toilet and it lasted the whole summer.

That was my best stash, absolute best dash.

Sneaking food, black market candy, and generally finding creative ways to break the rules are time honored traditions at camp.

And these stories take on mythical proportions summer after summer.

It's almost like when inmates use cigarettes to, to gamble.

It was like we were using the hottest commodity in camp, and that was food.

It was became institutionalized.

It just boggles my mind.

That became a, a currency, food should not be a currency.

And speaking of prison, whenever Shaners were off campus, they were forced to wear bright orange t shirts.

Camp Shane would sometimes offer field trips for campers, like a day in New York City or an afternoon at the water park.

The bright colors made kids easier to spot in a crowd, and more importantly, it helped Shaners stick to their diet.

Local vendors were told explicitly not to sell food to anyone in an orange shirt.

It was extreme, but there were no days off from the Shane diet.

This included visits to nearby camps for inner mural tournaments.

To prevent kids from cheating on their diets, the counselors packed Shane specific lunches that they ate in Shane designated areas Camp Shane.

Camp Shane, we had to travel with our own food.

We couldn't even get Gatorade, we had to have water.

Um, and they would give us these sandwiches.

They packed these sandwiches.

So it would literally be this soggy sandwich with a slice of cheese and a slice of tomato and maybe a slice of lettuce and that is what you would eat.

We'd be outside with our pathetic sandwiches.

Yep, the Shaners had to sit on the ground outside of the cafeteria.

It didn't matter how well the kids played that day or how confident they felt the night before.

In an instant, they were back to being the fat kids, very hungry fat kids, and when an opportunity arose for food, you better believe they pounced.

So like a little boy in Camp Echo, I guess was like playing outside.

And he had a magnifier and he was apping ants.

It was really hot out, the sun was really bright.

So he ended up setting some leaves on fire.

It wasn't a big fire, but still it was enough to make the fire alarm go off.

So the fire alarm went off.

Everyone's running out.

Well, the camp Shame boys were outside and literally when everyone started running out and it was chaos, they ran into the cafeteria.

Camp Shane was a dysfunctional sanctuary, a place that preached confidence, get celebrated campers for changing their bodies home away from home, that worked kids to the bone.

As one former camper described it to me.

The camp works.

The kids lose weight.

So I think that Oprah, Tyra, whomever, when they look at this camp, they see a bunch of kids that go in heavy and they come out thin and they're not asking any other questions.

But someone should have asked questions.

In twenty twenty one, a few weeks into the summer season, Camp Shane suddenly closed.

Camp closed, parents left scrambling.

The state is now investigating the sudden closure.

Newspapers, TV stations, and even Bloomberg Businessweek rushed to cover what turned out to be a shocking twist of events.

There was no guidance.

It was more or less throw a bunch of kids at a place, call it a fitness camp by starving 'em.

It was something.

It was something out of a horror movie.

Nothing about that camp was right.

What I didn't know at the time, though, was that he was grooming me.

this experience.

It still haunts me.

Yet none of those things would be the end of camp.

Until

there were campers leaving or counselors were leaving.

Kids were getting sick, kids were getting hurt.

They shut the camp down, and I figured if they were shutting it down that summer, they probably weren't going to come back.

And what were you feeling when you saw this or heard about this.

This can't be used against me in a court of law.

Okay.

No.a little schadenfreude, you know?

Good.

Right.

I'm glad.

But at the same time, I was, I, I, I said to myself, man, I wish that was me.

I mean, yes, they got their comeuppance and they got their punishment.

I would've felt good if, if I was the one who caused that to happen.

This is Camp Shame.