Weighty Problems

Embodied Inequality at a Children's Weight Loss Camp

Laura Backstrom

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813599137
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Many parents, teachers, and doctors believe that childhood obesity is a social problem that needs to be solved. Yet, missing from debates over what caused the rise in childhood obesity and how to fix it are the children themselves. By investigating how contemporary cultural discourses of childhood obesity are experienced by children, Laura Backstrom illustrates how deeply fat stigma is internalized during the early socialization experiences of children. Weighty Problems details processes of embodied inequality: how the children came to recognize inequalities related to their body size, how they explained the causes of those differences, how they responded to micro-level injustices in their lives, and how their participation in a weight loss program impacted their developing self-image. The book finds that embodied inequality is constructed and negotiated through a number of interactional processes including resocialization, stigma management, social comparisons, and attribution.

1

Embodied Inequality, Childhood Obesity, and the “Problem Child”

The children awake in their bunk beds to the squeals of campers chasing each other to communal bathrooms. Near their cabin is a fire pit with the charred remains of last night’s campfire where they had spent the evening hours singing songs and impersonating the counselors. Down the dirt path about a half mile is a lake with a dock and large inflatables where the children will splash around in the still chilly water later that day. Spread across the 600 wooded acres of the campground, there are arts and crafts buildings, a ropes course, a dining hall, open fields, basketball and tennis courts, and two pools. It is the quintessential summer camp, a rite of passage for thousands of American children.

Yet these campers differ in one key way: they came to Camp Odyssey to lose weight. Unlike other summer camps, Odyssey campers are given a pretest that includes measures of their height, weight, body mass index (BMI), body fat percentage, blood pressure, and the circumference of five parts of their body as well as fitness tests. Camp Odyssey is a weight loss camp located in a midwestern town that draws thousands of visitors to its waterparks and tourist attractions during the summer. A few miles from the souvenir shops and restaurants of downtown is Camp Jay, a large campground that is operated by the Jewish Community Center (JCC) of a nearby city. Camp Odyssey is embedded in this larger camp, but it is not affiliated with the JCC. For the past decade, Fay and Steve, the married camp directors of Odyssey, have rented a small number of cabins for their twenty to forty participants and paid for the use of Camp Jay’s facilities and dining services. Odyssey campers follow a separate program of activities and have little interaction with Jay campers.

On this June morning during the first week of camp, the campers change into T-shirts and athletic shorts, fill their water bottles, and head to the dining hall for breakfast. Hundreds of Camp Jay campers are already there. There are long tables at the front of the room filled with a buffet of breakfast items, including pastries, sugary cereals, tubs of peanut butter and jelly, and fresh fruit. The Odyssey campers sit at the four tables designated for them. A counselor brings over a sample plate to show the campers which foods they can eat from the buffet and the portion sizes they should take. The campers eat carefully portioned meals totaling about 1,800 calories per day.

Following breakfast, the campers go to Odyssey Time, which consists of three forty-five-minute rotations. One rotation, a weight loss information session, is called Education and is nearly always led by Fay, the camp codirector. The second rotation is Movement, a structured exercise class such as kickboxing, yoga, or dance. The third rotation can consist of a guest speaker on nutrition, a body image workshop, a self-defense class, or fitness tests. Campers stay at camp for two weeks or a month. For the first two weeks, campers are divided into three groups: older girls, younger girls, and boys. During the second two weeks, the number of campers is small enough that they are simply divided into two groups based on gender.

After Odyssey Time, the campers walk to the gym where they play dodgeball before going to lunch at the dining hall. After lunch, they change into their swimsuits and head to the pool, where the boys play an aggressive game of basketball in the shallow end while the girls play Marco Polo in the deep end. Still in their swimsuits, the campers walk to the lake where they have a snack of pita chips, vegetables, and hummus. At 5 P.M., they go back to their cabins to change for a cookout at the picnic grove. After they eat grilled chicken and vegetables, the counselors go around with face paint. In the evening, they have a social activity, such as karaoke, movie night, or a camp dance. On this particular night, they paint murals to decorate their cabin doors and invent cabin nicknames like “The Extreme Eight.” By 8:30 P.M., the counselors usher them back to the cabins for showers and quiet time before lights out at 10 P.M.

In many ways, this June day was a typical day at a typical summer camp. In other ways, the campers were engaged in a program of bodily and self-change that was anything but ordinary. Although several weight loss camps have operated for decades, the growing acceptance of intensive weight management programs for children is directly linked to more recent concerns—even panic—about childhood obesity. As children are exposed to messages about weight control at earlier ages, antiobesity programs have become important sites of cultural meaning about body size. Thousands of children have attended one of the approximately two dozen summer weight loss camps in the United States.1

Many parents, teachers, and doctors believe that childhood obesity is a social problem that needs to be solved. Yet missing from debates over what caused the rise in childhood obesity and how to fix it are the children themselves. What is it like to grow up worried about your weight? How does weight affect children’s relationships with their peers and families? How do children learn that their bodies are problems and that they should try to change the way they look? How does participating in a weight loss program affect a child’s developing self-image? This book turns the spotlight on children’s firsthand experiences and understandings of the cultural meanings surrounding body size and how they learn about embodied inequality.

Childhood Obesity as a Social Problem

In February 2010, Michelle Obama launched her national antiobesity campaign called Let’s Move! The following May, the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity released a 120-page report that provided the guiding standards for the Let’s Move! program. In this report, the goal of the campaign was stated as long term: to lower the childhood obesity rate from 17 percent to 5 percent by 2030. While many initiatives arose over the past decade to address childhood obesity, Let’s Move! garnered a great deal of media attention and became the most recognizable antiobesity campaign. In Fall 2011, a few months after the camp session ended, Michelle Obama gave a speech at the Partnership for Healthier America in which she said, “So when we’re talking about getting kids running around and playing again, it is important to understand that this isn’t just about fun and games. This isn’t a joke. It’s about their health. It’s about their success in school. It’s about our economy. It’s about our national security.”

For Mrs. Obama, childhood obesity signified cultural and institutional problems within society that threatened the nation’s future. For the young people who attended Camp Odyssey, childhood obesity was more personal. They saw their weight as an added burden to the problems of growing up, and one that required enormous effort to resolve. The success of Let’s Move! and the growing popularity of weight loss programs for children raise an important question about contemporary American culture: Why has children’s body size become a central issue to so many people?

One answer to this question is based on observed changes in the population’s body size. In the 1990s, health officials noted that BMI had risen among the American population since the 1970s.2 The percentage of children aged 2 to 19 who are considered to be obese has more than tripled in the past thirty years to 17 percent.3 Many government and medical studies viewed the increasing obesity rate as a public health crisis.4 While childhood obesity trends reflect broader patterns of increasing obesity rates among adults, the rhetoric is amplified because children are involved. Many in the medical community, media, and government warn of health risks associated with excess body weight, especially the risk of obese children growing up to become obese adults with health complications such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes.5 The vast majority of obese adolescents remain obese into their late 20s and early 30s. In fact, one study found that only about 10 percent of obese adolescents were not obese twelve years later.6

Warnings about childhood obesity emphasize the potential negative consequences for both the individual and society. In 2005, the National Institute on Aging predicted that the current generation of children may be the first who will not live longer than their parents’ generation due to health complications related to obesity. In 2010, a group of retired military generals and admirals issued a report entitled “Too Fat to Fight,” which claimed that about 25 percent of people between the ages of 17 and 24 are too overweight to join the armed forces.7 Viewing this as a threat to national security, the former surgeon general Richard Carmona said, “obesity is a terror within. It is destroying our society from within and unless we do something about it, the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9/11 or any other terrorist event.”8

In response, a small group of scholars and activists contend that obesity is a moral panic that may be rooted in but extends beyond medical concerns. While acknowledging that the number of overweight people has increased over time, these critics argue that BMI is a flawed measure, and they contest the categories of normal, overweight, and obese.9 The most notable example of the social construction of these categories occurred in June 1998 when the National Institutes of Health lowered the BMI cutoff point from 27 to 25, which caused millions of Americans to become classified as overweight overnight.10 Additionally, they point out that the science behind the association between obesity and poor health is either inconclusive or incorrect.11 Many question whether BMI categories accurately measure health risk, and there is some evidence that dieting can be more harmful to health than being overweight.12 Whereas public health researchers argue that the solution lies in reducing BMI, fat acceptance scholars and activists warn that attempts to eliminate obesity may increase stigmatization of those with BMIs falling outside the “normal” range, and the solution instead lies in encouraging body acceptance.

In addition to calling into question the validity of the “obesity epidemic,” recent scholarship illustrates how antifat ideology denies rights and perpetuates inequality.13 The failure to control weight is linked to a host of negative consequences, such as poor economic outcomes, lower worker productivity, rising health care costs, threatened national security, decreased longevity, personal unhappiness, and passing on obesity to future generations.14 This is the type of rhetoric invoked by Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign. By contrast, bodily practices that represent self-control are associated with personal qualities that lead to success, both individually and collectively. At the societal level, if children ultimately fail to contribute to society due to excess body weight, they are deemed bad future citizens who imperil the nation. The ideals and anxieties associated with children are often tied to concerns about the future. The obsession with children’s bodies, particularly their weight, is not merely an aesthetic preference or a means of ensuring health. Instead, children’s bodies are symbolic sites of meaning construction and contestation related to political and moral issues.

While children are sometimes targeted for education about obesity in an attempt to instill a rational, responsible autonomy that allows them to make “good” choices, children are more often the targets of public policy that frames them as vulnerable and in need of protection for their own benefit and for the good of the broader community.15 Thus childhood obesity is often blamed on parents, school, and society.16 The central tension in attempting to solve the issue of childhood obesity is between the agency of children to make their own decisions regard...