So long, WeightWatchers – it’s time to step on the scale for the last time. The much-maligned weight loss company is getting ready to file for bankruptcy, according to reports. Insiders have cited the twin pressures of long-running financial woes and the rise of weight loss drugs as the reasons for its looming demise.
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.
When a customer signs up for the WeightWatchers diet plan, they agree to adhere to a points-based system, where food is assigned a different number based on its nutritional value. They are assigned a weekly budget of points to use up; salmon has a lower score than, say, fish fingers. But some of its advice now appears comically old-fashioned: bananas, for instance, were believed to be too carb-heavy and high-calorie in the 80s.
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.
I first heard the phrase “WeightWatchers” on the school playground as an overweight child. The insult was tossed at anybody who seemed larger than average. The first time a bully told me to go to WeightWatchers came as a total surprise – as a child, you don’t really think of your body as something in need of fixing.
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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Yet I still harbour food guilt, even as an adult. I can summon up a list of “bad foods” from memory and I’ll feel a twinge of discomfort if I have more than just a scraping of butter on bread at a restaurant. Sometimes, I wonder what I could have filled my brain with if I hadn’t stuffed it full of calorie counts, though I consider myself lucky: I know too many women who still torture themselves over food, convinced they’re full after eating a portion that would only satisfy a child.
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.
I see it in the breathless coverage of Ozempic, which has been positioned as a miracle drug for those who want to lose weight despite it only being licensed for the treatment of diabetes. According to the Financial Times‘s How To Spend It magazine editor Jo Ellison, almost everyone in fashion is on the skinny jab, whether they admit to it or not – and on and off the runway, ultra thin is back in, protruding hip bones included. One of the main effects of these GLP-1 drugs is that patients simply lose their appetite, and users have marvelled over its ability to rob them of the desire to enjoy or even eat food. If Weight Watchers had invented weight-loss drugs, they’d probably be handing them out alongside their diet plans.
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.
WeightWatchers was a global phenomenon that told people – mostly women and girls – that the simple act of eating could be freighted with guilt and shame, one that could be exorcised by strict adherence to a nonsensical code.
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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