Fat camp for kids is a horrible thing to be teased about if you spent your summer at a weight loss camp, and a horrible thing to be threatened with if your parents were trying to get you to lose weight.

Fat camp, for kids, has always seemed like a place your parents shipped you off to you when they wanted you to lose a lot of weight fast.  It’s a place that would starve you, make you work out all hours of the day and night, and then when you started school you’d be magically transformed into a reed-thin figure.

The reality is quite different.  There are weight loss camps that are designed for children, but they’re not the places of nightmares that used to be true.  Nowadays, they’re designed to help educate kids in a fun, supportive environment.

The reality is that it’s not safe to lose a lot of weight quickly, and it also isn’t effective.  People who lose weight quickly have a tendency to gain it back.  So a weight loss camp isn’t going to make a magical transformation for a child; they’ll get him jump started, but it’s a long process and really is about changing his lifestyle, not just working him to death for a month.

Weight loss camps for kids are set up so that children can have fun; after all, no kid is going to stick with something he hates if no one is holding him to it.  So they show kids that there are lots of fun and creative ways to exercise and to eat healthy, and the child will take that knowledge home with him and apply it to his life there.