Health and Fitness Camp

Welcome to Camp Pocono Trails, the leading health and fitness camp anywhere. Health and fitness are more important than ever for adolescents, teens, and young adults. As recently as even 30 years ago, health and fitness wasn’t a major concern for most young people. If you look at photos and movies from the ’70s and earlier, most people were reasonably fit.

Why We Need a Health and Fitness Camp

Today, unhealthy food choices are everywhere and serving sizes have expanded greater than ever before. Take Coca-Cola for example, where the only serving size used to be a meager 6 oz.

Today, we can go to a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant and order a small Coke which is 12 oz, double the size of the largest and only size of Coke back in the 50s. It is easy to see that the food industry has tapped into the fact that we are naturally attracted to salt, fat, and sweets. Because the cost of a large order of fries over a small order of fries is mere pennies for the manufacturer, they are incentivized to give us more unhealthy food to create profits.  It may seem like a good deal to “super-size” your fast food order for mere pocket change, but how good of deal are you really getting when that high-caloric density food causes health problems?

Screen Time Adds to Need for Increased Health and Fitness

Our society is now faced with the notion of unlimited screen time. Even as recently as in the 1980s, most TV stations shut off at night. Now, adolescents and teens get unlimited TV around the clock, not to mention internet access which never goes dark.

When you combine an abundance of unhealthy foods available, larger than life portion sizes, along with limitless screen time- it’s a recipe for disaster.

Health and Fitness for Teens: Now is the Time for Action

We need quality health and fitness camps now more than ever. At Camp Pocono Trails, we offer health and fitness education that is second-to-none. Unfortunately, health and fitness education is not taught or often poorly taught in schools.

Just teaching young people about mindfulness of eating can produce significant long-term positive health consequences. For example, in a 2016 study that was published in health psychology, the Official Journal of the division of Health Psychology of the American Psychological Association, found that individuals with high percentage body fat make more impulsive food choices than those with low percentage of body fat.

Obviously, high percentage of body fat increases the risk of obesity over time. This study demonstrates shifts in choice patterns of food using a brief mindful eating training with adolescents. Mindful eating is a beneficial strategy to reduce impulsive food choices that impede weight gain.

Health and Fitness Camp: Next Steps

When adolescents and teens make impulsive food choices and do not plan their day, health consequences often arise. At our health and fitness camp, we also teach young people how to plan their time to not let the day just get away from them. We teach campers how to think about food so that mindless eating does not occur.

If you are interested in a health and fitness camp for your child, please give us a call today at 1-800-365-0556.