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.
I was one of those rinse-repeat clients. When I heard the bankruptcy news, my first impulse was to perform a vigorous, calorie-burning dance to celebrate the cosmic justice of it all.
But, today, I come not to bury WeightWatchers, but to praise it. Or, at least, to note a defining part of the WeightWatchers model that we might not want to toss out so quickly, lest the end of the so-called obesity epidemic winds up fueling our current epidemic of loneliness.
When Mrs. Nidetch invented Weight Watchers, back in the 1960s, she didn’t just pass along the diet on which she had already succeeded in losing weight. She invited six friends over to play mahjong and talk. She believed that “finding companionship and camaraderie was maybe even more important than the diet or even weight loss,” as Marisa Meltzer wrote in “This is Big,” her biography of Ms. Nidetch.
As WeightWatchers scaled up, that model stuck. Back in the 1990s, the last time I tried the program, it was still defined by the element of community. You’d get to your meeting. You’d weigh in at reception. Depending on what the scale said, you’d either celebrate or sulk. And then you’d sit on a folding chair, in a church basement or a bare-bones conference room where your leader (later called your coach) would take you through that week’s lesson, which could be about anything from exercise to nutrition to “finding your why.”
Members could talk about their victories or their challenges, sharing tips and tricks and encouragement. Business trip looming? Birthday party or anniversary dinner ahead? Help was available, from the leader and the rest of the staff members, from the lessons of the program’s success stories and from the fellow members who were still in the trenches, struggling with the temptation to polish off a second slice of sheet cake or to give in to the siren song of the airport Cinnabon.
WeightWatchers meetings were a third space, those increasingly rare places that are not work and are not home. In 1990s Philadelphia, as in the rest of the world, WeightWatchers groups were almost entirely made up of women. But they were otherwise diverse, bound not by race or religion, politics or class, but by a common goal. In recent years, WeightWatchers meetings became one of the all-too-rare places in America where conservatives and progressives found themselves sitting side by side, commiserating about the same plateaus or the same frustrations or the same annoyance that the powers that be had changed the point value of avocados, again.
It wasn’t the diet but the connection — “the gathering, the community” — that was Weight Watcher’s secret sauce, said Zibby Owens, the author, publisher and book influencer who spent some time working as a Weight Watchers leader. “When you lost five pounds you would announce it and get a special bookmark, and everyone would cheer,” she told me this week. “There are so few opportunities to have a room full of people cheer you on for doing anything.”
Recently, Mrs. Owens has been open about her significant GLP-1-fueled weight loss, but she still sees the value of the connection and support that the old-school WeightWatchers meetings provided: “The loss of those meeting rooms is another way that our world today is becoming more disaggregated, more separated.”
There are, of course, other ways to find community. We can still join a synagogue or mosque, a weekend running club or a local volunteer effort. Mrs. Owens thinks book clubs are one of the more resilient structures — “Count pages, not points,” she says. The problem is that studies have shown that once we lose community and connection — when it becomes easier to play indoors on our phones than outside with our neighbors, to stream a sermon than to go to church, or to do our shopping online instead of going to a store and interacting with other human beings — we are unlikely to rediscover it.
For everything that was wrong about WeightWatchers, once upon a time it did something right. It tapped into the power of women supporting one another. It gave them connection and attention and, in some cases, status and jobs. It gave Jean Nidetch wealth and power in an era where banks didn’t even want to give unmarried women credit cards.
Now that the new medications are remaking weight loss — now that we can take our focus off managing our appetites, measuring half-cups of pasta and weighing ounces of chicken breast — there’s a chance we could lose all of that power and intention. Or we could redirect it; to remaking the world, not just reducing our bodies.
Jennifer Weiner, a novelist, writes frequently about gender and culture.
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