Twins go on £3,500 "fat camp" after Facebook taunts (From Bucks Free Press)

Twins go on £3,500 "fat camp" after Facebook taunts

7:30am Monday 12th October 2009

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TWINS from Gerrards Cross went on a £3,500 “fat camp” after boys taunted them on social networking website Facebook.

16-year-olds Kate and Grace Jarman had wanted to lose weight before, but the final straw came when comments on Facebook labelled them “miserable, lazy and fat”.

The pair, who go to Chalfonts Community College, had struggled to diet on their own but decided to join a weight loss camp after seeing the cruel taunts.

They both weighed around 12 stone but after a four-week programme they have lost a stone-and-a-half between them. They now say they can shrug off the comments.

Grace said: “People were saying not to care about what other people think - but I do care.

“Coming back from the fat camp we felt a lot better and could just shrug the comments off.”

The twins spent four weeks at a weight-loss camp called Wellspring in Somerset.

Kate said: “It was really intense – we had to get up at 6am every morning and it was straight into exercise.

“In many ways I hated it but that's because it was so hard - lots of people were homesick. We had each other which made it easier because our main part of home with us.

“It was very expensive but I think it was worth it.

“We've tried to build exercise into our daily routines and have kept it going since the camp.”

She said they never ate lots of chocolate or sweets, but they loved bread and other carbohydrate-rich foods which caused them to pile on the pounds.

The girls have now started to walk the three miles to school and back each day as well as having regular gym workouts and a country walk with the family every Sunday.

The British Heart Foundation recently published a survey saying that nearly one-in-three children did under an hour of exercise a week with 30 per cent admitting they “can’t be bothered” to exercise on a daily basis.

The girls are helping launch the charity's Food4Thought campaign, aimed at getting children to be more active as part of the battle against childhood obesity.

They will be taking part in an Ultimate Dodgeball event in London in an attempt to fire up children’s interest in physical activity.

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