As a 13-year-old in the early 1970s, Canadian writer Moira Dann was sent by her parents to Camp Stanley, a “fat camp” in the Catskills where strict diet and exercise regimens were inflicted on children. Her book, ”Fat Camp Summer: Advice I Would Have Given My Parents,” describes her experiences there —weekly weigh-ins, exhausting workouts and directives to wear a brassiere to bed— and reflects on the enduring impact of diet culture.
I never thought my entire life could be stuffed in a duffel bag. But when you’re shipped off—or rather taken there in an early-seventies model Oldsmobile—to a camp in the Catskills, that’s a given.
At Camp Stanley, I was in Division Four, Bunk “L.” We got to pick a name for the bunk: we chose “Light ‘n’ Lively,” which was also the name of a line of low-fat dairy products back then. I didn’t vote for that name. I thought we should have something more witty or clever, although I didn’t offer anything zingy. Other names noted in the Camp Stanley brochure include Incredible Inches and Gourmets Gallery (sans possessive apostrophe).
The Division Four bunk was a long, barracks-like building, with beds on either side of a hallway that went to the back, arriving at the shared bathroom. There were about thirty girls in each bunk. Every two beds there was a plywood half-wall to provide a scintilla of faux privacy. It gave the impression there were two beds to a “room” and the occupants shared a sink with the two occupants of the next “room.”
There was a window over each set of two beds. A two-shelf night table between the beds allowed each girl a cubby hole for storage.
Each girl had a Camp Stanley calendar available to mark weight-loss milestones and scratch off days endured, like a “prisoner pent” in Shakespeare’s sonnet.
Hungry pubescent girls in a group are dangerous.
For instance, my birthday that summer didn’t offer a cake to celebrate. No, the Camp Stanley version was a red cabbage with a tealight candle on top. And yet you would have thought the raw, purple-y brassica vegetable I’d been given was a Lady Baltimore cake with fluffy buttercream icing, because everyone in my bunk wanted a cabbage leaf! I was mobbed, and within minutes, I was left with nothing but the central stalk and a bunch of bunkmates talking cake fantasies long after lights out. I stood in my pajamas, holding the denuded cabbage stalk, while a bunkmate took a picture. It was funny—except it wasn’t.
Moira Dann’s name tag from Camp Stanley.
Another food ritual was the weekly “canteen” day, where we got to spend the wee bit of the money parents had left for us to get stamps, stationery, film, toothpaste, tampons and—sugar-free candy. Food!
Some girls were candy bingers. The price you pay for candies sweetened by fake sugars such as sorbitol and saccharin can often be flatulence and loose bowels. Canteen day was often quite aromatic.
I’ve never been a big candy craver, so my MO to make the treats last was to spend my canteen money on sugar-free gum. Chewing a half-stick of gum helped suppress my appetite. I could also keep my mouth moist while exercising by thinking about biting into a lemon and chewing gum.
I realize now the sensation I often thought of as hunger was, in fact, thirst from dehydration. Ditto fatigue. I often couldn’t discern the difference between hungry and tired: at home, when I should have gone to bed, I made and ate a sandwich instead. Or cinnamon toast à la Dad: softened butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar spread on brown toast.
Other things we could buy on canteen days were tampons, sanitary napkins, and cocoa butter. The latter—delivered in small, yellow, metal tubes—was recommended by Gussie Mason [Camp Stanley’s owner and the author of Help Your Child Lose Weight and Keep it Off] and others as a treatment for stretch marks.
I still use cocoa butter as a moisturizer sometimes; just one whiff of that rich smell as I twist off the cap transports me back to Bunk L, Division Four, in Hurleyville, New York, falling asleep surrounded by other thirteen-year-old fat girls tormented by stretch marks.
Kids who grow up and fill out quickly during puberty can develop stretch marks. So do other adults who gain weight quickly: mothers, athletes, weightlifters. For young girls, it’s usually on the abdomen, the hips, and the breasts. I had a few silvery marks on my hips but nothing that concerned me. I bought the cocoa butter and massaged it in, but even seeing little change to a non-problem, I kept at it, mostly because of the fragrance. It’s a wonderfully rich, creamy, chocolatey scent. And it’s a great moisturizer.
Some of my fellow campers were quite alarmed by stretch marks. I saw a few girls in my bunk whose expansion had been so rapid that their stretch marks resembled angry, red lightning bolts on their hips and burgeoning young breasts. Applying cocoa butter was widely adopted as part of girls’ bedtime ablutions. The bunk was usually redolent with the buttery fragrance after lights-out.
The scent was so evocative of times when girls could eat what and whenever they wanted, that I would often see bunkmates just sitting with their open tube of cocoa butter, inhaling the aroma as though it were a perfume tester. It was rumored some girls went further than sniffing and took an actual bite. Apparently, you could tell who did this by noting how many tubes of cocoa butter a person bought on canteen day.
One tube of cocoa butter lasted me all summer. After becoming familiar with the texture on my fingertips, I was never tempted to try a taste. I still use cocoa butter as a moisturizer sometimes; just one whiff of that rich smell as I twist off the cap transports me back to Bunk L, Division Four, in Hurleyville, New York, falling asleep surrounded by other thirteen-year-old fat girls tormented by stretch marks.
Hating diet soft drinks and low-fat treats probably saved me, in one way. I didn’t become attached to any of it. I tried baking with sucralose (yuck) and reverted to just using less sugar. More fruit. I do like V8 juice and plain soda water, so I’m lucky.
Our regular drink at the long dining tables were jugs of what we called “bug juice.” It must have been a low-cal, sweetened concoction made into a drink by adding water to powder.
Even though we got skim-milk cocoa for breakfast, I missed my tea. Skim milk was an option at most meals, and Mason made the case for it in her book: “One of the welcome side-effects of serving milk may be a more emotionally stable teenager. A lack of calcium in the diet often causes many teenagers to become irritable and restless.”
Contraband was rumoured, although I never witnessed anything beyond a slice of angel-food cake wrapped in a napkin, dessert saved from a Sunday supper.
There was a tale of one camper whose brother had managed to smuggle her some real chocolate bars and a box of Life Savers on visitors’ day. This was probably an apocryphal tale, but it did lead to the discussion among my bunkmates of an existential question: how many calories in a Wint-o-Green Life Saver? FYI: fifteen calories. And they’re sweetened with sugar and corn syrup, the original sinners.
The calorie count of a small treat and its sweetening agent was the kind of existential question that pubescent girls in Camp Stanley’s Bunk L, Division Four whispered about after lights-out, on those rare days when all the exercise they’d done hadn’t left them so tired they blacked out before their heads hit the pillow.
Adapted from Fat Camp Summer: Advice I Would Have Given My Parents Copyright © 2025 Moira Dann. Reprinted by permission of Sutherland House Books.
