I won’t miss it. Those of us who grew up in the “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” noughties grew up in the long shadow of WeightWatchers, which was launched in 1963 and profoundly altered how generations of girls and women felt about food – not as a pleasurable source of nourishment but something to be controlled and limited.
Admittedly, this numbers-based approach did work for some people – one Lancet study in 2017 found that 57 per cent of participants lost weight after a 52-week trial of the programme. But for millions of others, it introduced the idea of food as something to be portioned out carefully, handled like a radioactive substance – or at least ruin your week if you weren’t careful.
But some of it clearly stuck. At secondary school, I started avoiding lunch and subsisted off cereal bars. I was fortunate – it never escalated into anything more serious. I thought that I was perfectly normal: restrictive eating being something that most teenage girls did, like starting your period or getting a training bra. My fatal flaw, however, was that I simply liked food too much, so my “diet” didn’t last long. Cereal bars were fine; laksa for lunch and my mum’s spaghetti bolognese for dinner, on the other hand? Much better, thanks.
square FOOD & DRINK I’ve been dieting most of my life — Weight Watchers gave us a world that’s worse for its manipulations
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WeightWatchers may be facing its last supper, but the restrictive attitude it pioneered is alive and well. I see it everywhere on TikTok, where wellness content creators plug weight loss supplements or describe chia seed water as an “internal shower” that makes you feel fuller for longer.
In 2019, WeightWatchers was already struggling to hold onto customers. It rebranded as an overall wellness company and changed its name to WW International to “reflect the broadened role it plays in helping people lead healthier lives”, the company said at the time. It was arguably a victim of its own success – its punitive, fat-shaming rhetoric had become so widespread that it was no longer seen as a cutting-edge solution to weight gain. Despite what anybody shilling get-thin-fast schemes will tell you, most health advice has remained remarkably and banally consistent: you need to combine a balanced diet with regular exercise.
The company may have almost counted its last calorie, but it lives on in our miserly approach to food, where we optimise for weight loss, health or physical appearance, but never for joy or tastiness. In the post-WW world, the pursuit of sustenance has been completely divorced from pleasure – no second helping is needed.
Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author, and podcaster
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