Weight Training

Here is a comprehensive article which examines child obesity.


Rates of childhood obesity have soared in the past 30 years. In North America, they have tripled. One in four Canadian children is now estimated to be overweight and 1 in 10 is clinically obese.

For adults, a multibillion-dollar industry offers endless, if dubious, options for weight loss. But services to help children are so scarce that parents are taking out loans and raiding retirement savings to send their sons and daughters thousands of kilometres away to this $6,300-a-month (U.S.) institution.

“We had to take a home-equity line of credit to pay for it … but it's an investment in a human being,” says Nancy Stolk, the Edmonton-area mother of 17-year-old, 5-foot-10 Carmen Nanninga, who weighed 275 pounds when she entered Wellspring in January.

Weight-loss camps for kids have surged in popularity around the world. But officials at Wellspring insist that their year-round school is no typical “fat camp,” where kids tend to drop pounds each summer but return every year to lose the same weight again.

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