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Kids Keeping The Weight Off

Baraboo News Republic :: News ::

Friday, June 2, 2006

Sixteen-year-old Alecia struggled with weight for almost as long as she could remember.

The Onalaska teen said the extra pounds started to creep on when she was 9 years old. "I just wasn't getting a lot of activity," she said. "In the beginning it was like, 'It's not that much, it'll go away.'" But the habits she developed — namely, "being lazy and loving soda" — made it harder and harder to take the weight off as the years went by, Alecia said. Then last year, as she topped the scales 70 pounds over her ideal weight, she decided she had had enough.

Camp is one of the most ideal ways for kids to come and kind of get a grip on this issue of weight in their life. Camp Endeavor is a far cry from the punitive "fat camps" of years gone by.

Alecia and her parents searched the Internet for a weight-loss camp and found Camp Endeavor in Lake Delton. In four weeks of portioned eating, daily physical activity and learning how to break old habits at camp last June, Alecia lost 30 pounds. She's maintained that and lost six more pounds over the school year, and hopes to whittle herself down further when she goes back to camp in a few weeks.

One in five children in Wisconsin is overweight, according to population health researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, putting them at risk for type-2 diabetes, high cholesterol and heart disease at a very young age. Nationally, the number of overweight children age 6 to 11 more than doubled from 7 percent in 1980 to 15 percent in 2000.

"Most of our kids are Midwestern kids and they tend to be youth who have been overweight for many years," said Tut Gramling of Baraboo, who with her husband Dan Dingmann started Camp Endeavor two years ago. "Camp is one of the most ideal ways for kids to come and kind of get a grip on this issue of weight in their life." Camp Endeavor is a far cry from the punitive "fat camps" of years gone by. "Our approach is very much holistic," said Gramling, an occupational therapist who guides campers through physical exercises to change their fitness level and mental exercises to alter the way they think about food and weight. "We find that kids that carry weight tend to feel a lot of chronic stress," Gramling said. "We work on everything from how to protect yourself from hurtful language to nutrition and exercise."

Campers consume between 1,700 and 1,800 calories a day, enough to sustain healthy growth in the 10- to 18-year-olds, and they learn that no food is off-limits — in moderation. "We have birthday cakes when we celebrate birthdays and we have s'mores at our campfires," Gramling said. "It's not unusual that someone will say, 'Hey, I'm not eating that — I came here to lose weight.'" Most of the Camp Endeavor kids are medically obese when they arrive at camp, some weighing more than 300 pounds, and that all-or-nothing attitude toward food hasn't served them well in the past, Gramling said.

"I expected it to be a lot worse than it actually is," Alecia said. "We had pizza there, we had cheeseburgers, every Friday night we have a barbeque… It's not like one slice of bread and a pea." Learning portion control, more than anything else, is what helped her lose and maintain the weight, Alecia said. Joyce Smidl, director of Sauk County's Women, Infants and Children program, said she sees a high incidence of kids in the pre-school crowd who are overfed, underexercised and overweight. In that case it's the parents who need to demonstrate portion control, she said. "Kids do not get enough fruits and vegetables and consume way too much dairy," she said. "They've got these no-spill cups, they're wandering throughout the house. I see kids who get 16 servings of dairy." Even in the last five years, Smidl said, she's noticed an increase in the size of the infant to 5-year-olds who come to her office. "I don't know if I'm seeing more kids but the fatness of them — I'm seeing that as much more," she said. "They're over the 100th percentile of (body mass index)."

Smidl blames overindulgence in processed snacks and sedentary family lifestyles on the growth in kids' girth. "Parents are in charge of what, when and where they give their kids," she said. "If you're concerned that your kid's eating too much of those things, they shouldn't be in the house." Parents should never put kids on a diet but allow them to grow into their weight, Smidl said. Offering new foods multiple times — and modeling a healthy lifestyle themselves — are the best way to go, she said.

Many of the Camp Endeavor kids are struggling to break unhealthy habits dating back to their preschool years, Gramling said. "They come with the thought that it is going to be difficult," she said. "We really impress upon them that change, for all of us, is possible."

Alecia said she has undergone a transformation. Once a self-conscious teenager who had trouble making friends, she's now a confident, social girl who brings a wary eye to the high school cafeteria line. She also has a boyfriend, and went to prom this spring in a black sequined number with a slit down up the middle. "People were like, 'You look amazing,'" she said. "It was a big change.