As pupils at Woodhouse Grove school in Apperley Bridge packed up and went home at start of the summer holidays, 90 other youngsters from countries around the world were just arriving united on a mission to shed body fat and make a new healthy start.

It is the third year that Leeds University's Carnegie International Weight-loss camp has taken over the school and its grounds for the entire six weeks holidays to run a get fit not fat regime.

The new recruits aged from 11 to 18 have travelled from as far away as Saudi Arabia, the Lebanon, Spain and Scandinavia - but not from Bradford.

The lack of local interest is not a complete mystery to the camp's technical director and sports psychologist Dr Paul Gately, who lectures at Leeds Metropolitan University - but it's a frustration.

For the first time, this year Dr Gately opened up the camp to day campers hoping to make it more accessible and affordable to families in the area.

He admitted that at £760, a day camper's fee for the whole six weeks isn't cheap and for many families across the district that hefty sum could buy a sunshine holiday - but, he said, you can't put a price on a child's health.

If he had his way, there would be plenty of free support for obese children and their families - but the reality is, that there's nothing.

Even the National Health Service that has been nursing the nation's health for more than half-a-century has nothing much "if anything at all" to offer, he said, and in his eyes that's wrong.

Dr Gately made no bones about his weight-loss camp being as exclusive as any of the other small-scale projects working around the country that only manage to help a tiny minority of obese people living in the UK but he said there's more to Carnegie International Camp than meets the eye.

"Our work doesn't end when camp finishes. The camp is like a little laboratory," he said.

"It teaches us what we can do in a wider community setting. We learn from our experiences here and we publish our research in journals so other experts can take it away and apply it to their own work and projects wherever they are.

"We're already running our own community based weight-loss programmes in Leeds, London and Newark - we'd love to do one in Bradford.

"There are already some great people doing great things trying to prevent obesity in Bradford but they are all doing their own thing.

"The problem is that you have sport, leisure, education and health all battling it out for funding for their own projects and when we ask to join them they say "No, the funding's mine" and won't share it. That's where we're going wrong. We all need to work together and pool our resources and knowledge to deliver an effective programme if we're truly going to reduce obesity cases. We'd like to get everyone working together. Bradford could do it easily."

He said crude, diluted weight-loss treatments don't work and are completely against the ethics of the camp.

"We're not about taking people's kids away for six weeks, getting them to shift a shed load of weight and then dump them back home. It's crazy to expect losing a lot of weight like that will solve the whole problem because it won't. The six weeks at a camp is just the start of the solution. We give campers the skills and strategies to take away with them so they can turn their lives around."

There are follow-ups once camp's ended but there needs to be much more, said Dr Gately who reels off other ideas such as all-year-round camps, day camps and after-school clubs.

Five per cent of the children at camp are overweight, the rest are classed as obese yet to the untrained eye there are youngsters there who look "perfectly normal".

According to Dr Gately that's because our perception of what's normal, overweight and obese has been confused by what's become accepted as the "norm" when it comes to body-size. As a nation we are getting bigger and we aren't doing anything about it.

"There are lots of misconceptions about that obesity is caused by psychological problems but it's the other way round. Anxiety and depression are brought on by obesity.

"Of course there are things that can trigger off obesity but there's lot of kids here on camp who are perfectly happy - except that they are overweight. Another myth and worry for parents is that putting children on weight-management programmes can lead to eating disorders, there's no research to support that at all."

Sixty per cent of the campers will maintain or lose more weight, said Dr Gately who organised the university's first weight-loss camp in 1989.

More than 2,000 obese children have passed through his camps in that time, but one of his most successful stories so far is 17-year-old Colin Ord.

When Colin, of Durham, came to his first camp three years ago, he weighed in as a 33-stone loner - now he's back for a thirdcamp, but this time as a role model for other campers, working on the staff and eight stone lighter.

His weight battle is still far from over - he has still got another eight stone to lose - but he's getting there. Colin had managed to get NHS funding for the first two camps but they pulled funding for the third - because he'd already done so well. He hasn't let it put him off, though, and he was thrilled when Dr Gately asked him to come back as a member of staff.

"I'm helping out with the lifestyle sessions telling my story and experience to the other campers," he said.

Colin's experience just about sums up the camp ethos, it's not a quick fix and it doesn't pretend to be one either. It's a starting point, offering young people an opportunity to break habits before those habits break them.