A company dedicated to loss suffered a big one of its own last week: WW International Inc., better known as WeightWatchers, announced that, in an effort to shed $1.15 billion of unsightly debt, it was filing for bankruptcy. The company says it’s restructuring and intends to rebound, as it has from previous struggles over the years, but it’s hard not to notice that to some degree the world has moved on from the company’s model. As happy as people are with their new pharmaceutical alternatives, though, the company’s in-person, community-based, mutual-support model of (mostly) female dieters supporting one another on their journeys offered something that no shot or pill ever could.
The company, founded in 1963 by a Queens housewife, Jean Nidetch, has been a cultural touchstone for generations. Oprah Winfrey was for years a board member and part owner. There was a WeightWatchers magazine. There were WeightWatchers cookbooks, frozen dinners, desserts, bars, shakes and high-profile celebrity spokespeople. While it never felt like the hippest, trendiest, sexiest way to lose weight, it found ways to stay front and center. In 2002, there was even a “Sex and the City” story line in which Miranda signed up and started counting points.
In better times, WeightWatchers had five million members worldwide. In the pre-pandemic era, the company hosted 3,300 in-person workshops throughout the United States.
Those days are gone. WeightWatchers and its commercial diet program peers have struggled to maintain market share in the era of GLP-1s, the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, which give users a much higher chance of success. WeightWatchers couldn’t beat them, so it tried to join them, by acquiring a telehealth subscription service that connects people to doctors who can prescribe weight-loss medications. Even so, the once-iconic program feels like an artifact of an era where obesity was seen as a moral matter, not a medical one; a problem of willpower, not biology.
The culture WeightWatchers promoted did a lot of harm to a lot of girls and women. Social media is full of tales of women taken to meetings as young girls by their well-meaning mothers or of girls restricting their calories while they were still growing. In 2022, the company settled with the Federal Trade Commission after it was revealed that its Kurbo app, designed to teach children as young as 8 about nutrition and how to avoid so-called “red light” foods, was illegally collecting children’s data.
Then there were the adults who went through the program five, 10, 15 times, stuck in a cycle of loss, regain and shame that didn’t ultimately leave them any thinner, even as it fattened WeightWatchers’s coffers. Studies show that for the vast majority of people, diets don’t work in the long term. This did not stop WeightWatchers from re-enrolling those customers, again and again, with the implicit promise that this time would be different.
