In the suburbs of the Chinese city of Guangzhou, $600 can buy you a month-long stay at a facility providing meals, accommodation and daily exercise classes.
But this all-inclusive offer is no spa retreat. It's a military-style weight loss camp designed to make participants shed kilos through rigorous exercise, strictly administered meals and daily weigh-ins.
Content creator TL Huang believes she is the first Australian to attend the camp, which she labelled a "prison".
She recently went viral on social media after documenting her experience there.
Ms Huang, who has been travelling around Asia after quitting her job in Australia, said her mother told her about the weight loss camps in China.
"I thought, why not try it out and also lose some weight?" she said.
After joining a WeChat group run by the camp and answering some questions about her weight loss goals, a car was sent to take her to the facility.
There she signed a contract agreeing to the rules: no outside food, attend all workout classes and no leaving without permission.
She said the regime included 19 workouts a week and twice-daily weigh-ins.
"For me as a foreigner, it was quite daunting. It was a bit of a scary experience because I wasn't sure if I was going to a real camp," she said.
"The trainers would be very, very strict if you gained weight. They'd kind of question you, asking, 'What did you eat? Did you snack?'
"There was a girl in my team, she had lost 30 kilos. I think she was in there for about four months.
"It was very crazy."
Health professionals advise to lose weight at a rate of 500 grams to a 1 kilogram a week.
More than that can cause significant health risks.
Weight loss craze
Private camps dedicated to weight loss have exploded in popularity across China, with more than 2,000 estimated to be in operation.
Health officials have warned that 65 per cent of adults in China — once plagued by famines — could be overweight or obese by 2030.
"The 1980s was the beginning of this fast-food culture that was influencing China," said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"Diseases that are common today were relatively rare at that time — we talk about cardiovascular diseases, cancers, they were relatively rare.
"You have this lifestyle change — people have more access to proteins and were influenced by the foreign lifestyle and fast food."
China's modernising economy has seen a rapid transition to sedentary, less physically demanding jobs while a slowdown in growth has pushed people to embrace cheap and unhealthy diets.
Those twin challenges have created an appetite for extreme weight loss measures.
Obesity in young people
Ms Huang said many of her peers at the weight loss camp were younger Chinese people.
"A lot of these attendants were younger than I am, but they're quite overweight and obese," she said.
"I heard from a lot of them that their parents send them to these camps to lose weight."
According to UNICEF and Peking University, China's rate of overweight and obese children has quadrupled since 2000.
"Young people in China, they are so obsessed with weight loss," Mr Huang said.
Netizens on China's version of TikTok, Douyin, have chronicled Gen Z weight loss trends including working as a food delivery driver on the weekend or spending hours singing karaoke to burn calories.
Health-conscious young consumers have even adopted the non-medical use of continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), a tool diabetics use to monitor their blood sugar, as a weight loss incentive.
Some believe they can use them to work out what foods are causing their blood pressure to spike.
"There's a huge demand for these devices, especially among young people in China these days," Mr Huang said.
"Weight management in their eyes is more like image management. You need to keep a good image to make you more marketable when you are looking for jobs and spouses.
"There is an economic rationale there, especially if we consider the youth unemployed rate, which is very high in China."
The youth unemployment rate has hovered around 16-17 per cent in China in recent years. In Australia, that number stands closer to 10 per cent.
Economic incentive
That economic incentive may be underpinning the Chinese government's push to address obesity.
China has made tackling obesity part of its broader Healthy China strategy, stepping up nationwide weight-management campaigns, school and community prevention programs, and clinical guidelines to promote healthy lifestyles and slow rising overweight and obesity rates.
Last year Beijing announced plans to establish weight management clinics country-wide, signalling a shift towards national interventions in the obesity epidemic.
It came as research suggested that by 2030 health expenditures related to obesity will comprise roughly 22 per cent of China's total health spending.
Mr Huang believes that economic reality is driving new policies targeting weight loss in China amid slumping economic growth.
He said the state's policies were attempts to internalise norms that being overweight was "not good", he said.
"Increasingly this has become a criteria, controlling your body weight, in recruiting," Mr Huang said.
Weight loss 'prisons'
But extreme weight loss measures are not without controversy.
In 2023, an influencer died while attending a facility in northern China as part of efforts to shed more than 100 kilograms, local media reported.
Ms Huang said the intense conditions in the "prison" were physically and mentally taxing.
"For one of my roommates, I guess she just wasn't losing weight, and for her it was a mental challenge because she was getting really stressed about it," she said.
"A lot of these people do two to three months and their weight loss is extreme, really dramatic. So they usually lose around 20 to 25 to 30 kilos in three months."
Ms Huang lost about 6 kilograms over 28 days at the camp and believes her experience has resonated with people online because it is a solution to a problem facing many cultures.
She said obesity was an issue internationally and a lot of people saw the camps as something that could help.
"I actually didn't feel self-conscious or demoralised at all, because I guess everyone is also trying to lose weight, so it's kind of like a team or community," she said.
