This week, news broke that WeightWatchers has filed for bankruptcy in the US. In 1968, five years after its launch, the group boasted more than 1 million members around the world. A decade later, the business would sell for more than $71m. Then it peaked at 5 million subscribers in 2020, but has struggled since the pandemic which coincided with the rise of drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro. The legal process will see roughly £860m of the 60-year-old diet brand's debt written off while it agrees new terms for paying back its lenders, and the company will be acquired by a group of investors.
The ‘weight loss programme’ has said it will remain “fully operational” during the process with “no impact to members”. So, it’s not clear yet whether the doors of this weight-loss giant will shut for good, but many of us are celebrating this news anyway. Why? Because WeightWatchers feels like the Moby Dick of diet culture.
Any young woman growing up in the UK will have a similar memory of the brand as I do – it lorded over us in public consciousness as a place fat women should go. It was pervasive and insidious. I knew about WeightWatchers ‘smart points’ despite never joining the programme, I knew that they called some foods ‘syns’, promoting to millions the unhelpful and untrue idea that food can be attached to morality.
Every plus-sized woman I knew as a teenager would attend WeightWatchers in phases - they’d go, lose weight, leave, put the weight back on, and eventually join again. The brand may not attach itself to yo-yo dieting or see itself as a toxic overlord of dieting, but that was its material impact for many.
WeightWatchers has always been heavily skewed and marketed towards women, with us making up 90% of its membership. This fact in itself is evidence of how patriarchal beauty standards are – weight loss is always targeting women, and fatphobia disproportionately affects women irregardless of our weight. The 2022 Health Survey for England estimated that men were more likely than women to be overweight or obese (67% of men compared with 61% of women).
Despite, in recent years, the brand trying to shift its approach to a more ‘holistic’ focus on wellness versus just weight loss, the damage is too little too late and much of its historic characteristics are still present, just now with some snazzy new marketing.
I take umbrage with almost every element of WeightWatchers. I hate the name; the idea it instils that our weight is something that needs to be ‘watched’. I hate that it has helped to instil the idea that weight loss is synonymous with health; that a woman’s life should revolve around restriction and monitoring. I hate calling food a ‘syn’ – replacing a ‘i’ with a ‘y’ does not remove the meaning. I hate that it mothered a culture of calorie-counting.
So it’s fair to say that I am happy to see the fall of WeightWatchers. Right? Well, yes and no. Sadly, it’s a lot more nuanced than that. This is not the win for diet culture it may seem, and it definitely doesn’t signal a shift in society towards body acceptance and healthier approaches to eating and health.
Instead, it marks the dominance of a new wave of diet culture. One that exists online more than it does in WeightWatchers meetings, that lives on SkinnyTok and MyFitnessPal. One that focuses on macros, calorie deficits and high-protein diets instead of ‘syns’. A new era where skinniness is more glorified than ever, and the ways of achieving it feel more in reach for the masses, with the prominence of ‘weight-loss drugs’ like Ozempic. There is a new culture where being plus size will be seen as avoidable, where people ask ‘why don’t they just take Ozempic?’, where fat is more of a synonym for ‘wrong’ than ever. Diet culture has sharpened its teeth, and armed itself with a syringe; it no longer needs the henchmen of WeightWatchers.
A culture obsessed with appearances monopolises our time and energy – but it's not that simple.
Whilst we can all find a bit of joy in the collapse of WeightWatchers, I know I had a big laugh yesterday about it, we must not get complacent. Instead, we must turn our attention to those who can do more to combat this new era.
The pressures of diet culture are relentless, and the blame does not live with individuals who succumb to it – God knows I have, over and over. It lives with capitalist corporations that profit off instilling bad body image and then pretending to offer the solutions. It lives with Big Pharma for promoting a weight-loss injection as a ‘miracle’, not a drug serious commitment with side effects (some of which we know little about yet). It lives with the governments who do not provide enough education and funding for healthier alternatives – who could invest in free, public gyms, who could combat high food prices and a rise in UPF. It lives with those who reinforce fatphobic rhetoric, over and over.
