Obese Chinese people are flocking to ‘fat prisons’, where inmates work out nearly twelve hours a day and are forbidden to leave.
Visitors pay the equivalent of $1,000 (£740) to spend a month at the weight-loss camps in exchange for a bunk bed and three meals a day.
Chinese social media influencers are boasting about shedding up to 10kg a week at the military-style camps.
But their accounts of life at the centers — where officers that roam around confiscating fatty snacks — have divided opinion.
Meanwhile, tragic deaths inside the camps have caused a media storm, including that of a popular 21-year-old influencer who reportedly died after losing 30kg.
One Australian influencer, who goes by ‘eggeats’ on Instagram, has been documenting her stay and sharing videos from inside the camp with her 44,300 followers.
The 28-year-old says she left her ‘high-paying’ job back home to move to Asia after life down under became ‘stagnant’ and ‘repetitive’.
Fat prison inmates follow a strict regime. Alarms go off at 7.30am, followed by an 8am public weigh-in, aerobics from 9.20am to 10.30am, and a meal at 11.15am.
Then it’s back to work with a weights class from 2.50pm to 4pm, followed by another meal, then nearly two hours of high-intensity training and spin classes. The day is capped off with a final weigh-out.
The camp is surrounded by high perimeter fences, and a locked gate bars escape ‘24/7’, the influencer wrote.
People are only allowed to leave with a ‘valid reason’, and camp agents rummage through guests’ possessions to sniff out ‘anything unrelated to weight loss’.
In a screenshot of messages, a camp officer allegedly told inmates not to ask for confiscated goods back.
‘You’re an adult and capable of handling these things,’ they wrote.
But the influencer insists life inside isn’t so bad – and claims to have lost 4kg in just two weeks.
She has been gobbling up platefuls of braised chicken, mushrooms, prawns and steamed vegetables — all included in the overall fee.
The woman says she shares a bunk-bed room with other visitors, and that everyone gets a few hours of downtime a day to work, relax and do laundry.
Her followers even say the whole experience — which includes rave-themed exercise sessions with thumping music and strobe lights — looks ‘fun’.
One of eggeats’ followers wrote: ‘This looks so fun. I would escape corporate torture for fat loss prison.’
In many ways, that sentence sums up how China has changed in recent decades — and hints at the causes of its growing obesity epidemic.
According to the Global Obesity Observatory, 16.4 per cent of Chinese adults were obese and 34.3 per cent overweight in 2019.
That means the country is fast catching up with other high-income nations struggling with obesity.
In the UK, roughly 26.2% of adults are thought to be obese, compared to 40.3% in the US.
It was not always this way. For centuries, China remained a mainly rural society, where hard labour in the fields meant excess weight gain was rarely a problem.
Those who could afford to eat often would do so in great quantities, with a rotund belly seen as a sign of wealth and well-being.
These attitudes became further entrenched after Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward agricultural reforms, during which roughly 30 million people died in famines after 1958.
Meanwhile, the nation’s rapid economic development has seen the rise of more sedentary, office-based lifestyles.
Chinese fat prisons are mainly commercial, privately owned enterprises.
And while the Chinese Communist Party — which has ruled China since 1949 — has invested heavily in obesity-busting campaigns, public health officials and academics have shared warnings about the rise of fat prisons.
Pan Wang, an associate professor of Chinese and Asian studies at the University of New South Wales in Australia, told the South China Morning Post: ‘The beauty industry is booming.’
She added that ‘the concept of thinness has translated into a kind of social capital… Businesses like weight-loss camps can profit from it.’
Those concerns were renewed following the death of a 156kg influencer known as Cuihua.
The 21-year-old from Henan province in central China was found dead on May 27.
She was on her second day of a weight-loss boot camp at a fitness centre in Shanxi province in northern China.
Cuihua had been sharing her efforts to lose 100kg with her followers and said she had lost almost 30kg shortly before her death, HK01 reported.
The case prompted state media warnings over the safety risks associated with weight-loss camps and reignited concerns about the intense pressure women face to conform to mainstream beauty standards.
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