fat camp
When I was nine, I was hugely obese. My parents took the opportunity to send me to one of those fat camps in America where rotund pre-teens can burn off their kilos of tub with healthy outdoor pursuits and vegetables.

I thought I was fat, but when I met my room-mates, I became the Nicole Ritchie of the camp. Jed was so fat that you couldn't see his eyes and, from a distance, he looked like an out-building. If he laughed, his body continued to ripple for some minutes afterwards. I believed he affected the tides. Chip was fatter still. His ankles spilled from his shoes like a haemorrhage of pliant lard and his face was little more than a stub of nose emerging from waves of jiggling flab. If you put your hands near his mouth when he was eating, you might lose one. His parents dropped him off from a flat-bed truck

Day one: assualt course. A former marine screamed himself purple at us as we tried to negotiate the course. Jed rolled for much of the distance, picking up twice his body wieght in sludge, while Chip had to be winched from a concrete tube after a fire team had rubbed his flanks with butter. I fell from the three-metre wall and landed on a ginger-haired girl from Minnesota. She seemed to have no skeleton and I was unharmed. At lunchtime, Chip went into a faked anaphylactic shock when he was allowed only one cookie. A hit team with rubber truncheons had to placate him.

Day two: Psycological counselling. We had a group focus session in which we were required to bare our feelings about being fat. Jed told a story about sitting on a succession of family pets and squashing them dead. He had once eaten an entire "All-You-Can-Eat" buffet at Hungry Hippos and been banned from the restaurant for life. Chip admitted that he had eaten so many pizzas on one occasion that share prices for tomato puree had risen five percent. His parents had rigged up a feeder for him from parts of an industrial grain silo. My tales of eating one too many Hobnobs paled in comparison.

Day three: confidence dance. A ball was held for the male and female fat-campers to increase confidence and repair years of damage to self-esteem. Jed smuggled in a hipflask of brandy and ended up making out with a girl from Alabama - only on closer inspection it turned out to be a storage tank containing 1000 litres of fresh water. He left shortly after that (his parents collected him with a trailer). Chip turned out to be a hell of a dancer. He jumped around the floor like a rotund Micheal Jackson on speed - until someone realized he was having a fit and sedated him.

Day four: It was lonely without Jed. Only, we saw him on the news that very evening. His parents had stopped at a diner on the way home, where Jed had eaten too many nacho chips and gone batshit on additives. He had to be shot with a tranquiliser gun. Me and Chip laughed so hard that Chip fell off the bed and went partially through the floorboards ino the room below. In panic, he soiled himself and introduced a timid boy in a bunk below to the experience of scat. This made me laugh even harder - so hard that my appendix ruptured and I had to be taken to hospital.

I came home after that. Eventually, I lost all my weight after seeing a poster of Peter Andre and vomiting non-stop for a week. Happy days.
(frankspencer, Mon 6 Aug 2007, 12:14, Reply)