I Just Want to Fit Into My Jeans
Project Director:Megan Q. Daniels, with Christine Van Dusen
Photo: Megan Q. Daniels
Every time Sara Gault brought a forkful of spaghetti to her lips, she felt like people were staring, judging, disgusted that the fat girl wouldn't stop eating. At night, alone in her room, the 15-year-old felt similarly sickened when the mirror caught her reflection. To relieve her angst, she pressed thumbtacks into her forearms.
"We'll never get past that elephant," kids would sneer while trailing Sara in the junior high halls. She kept quiet, wishing to disappear.
That was ninth grade. Now, in 10th grade, Sara says she is different. She wears skirts. She wants to try out for the hip-hop dance team. She promises to go all tae kwan do on anybody who teases her.
All because of Fat Camp.
The month she spent at Camp Timber Creek — a co-ed, sleepover wellness camp located on an old boarding school campus bordered by farmland in North Carolina — didn't entirely reshape her body. But for Sara, and for other campers who go there every summer, camp is no less a transformative experience.
They wear bikinis to the pool, they have boyfriends, they run laps, they perform in talent shows — all things that seem inconceivable before camp.
When they go back to the real world, and are surrounded by pinky-thin friends and bombarded with images of skinny starlets, can they stay healthy, in mind and body? Or is that only possible at the place they affectionately call Fat Camp?
The stakes are high. The percentage of American children and teens who are overweight has more than doubled in the past 30 years, according to the National Institutes of Health. And obesity-related diseases that were once considered adult conditions — such as type 2 diabetes, asthma and hypertension — are now on the rise among obese children and adolescents.
This project, with photographs by Megan Q. Daniels and written narrative by Christine Van Dusen, will endeavor to put a human face on the national epidemic that is childhood obesity by giving voice to kids like Sara and sharing their intimate stories — about what happens not just at camp but the struggles, successes, temptations and failures they encounter upon returning to the real world.