It began as a support group for overweight New Yorkers in 1963 and ballooned into a multimillion pound global enterprise that has spent decades selling people the dream of long-term weight loss.
The trademark WeightWatchers’ points-based programme has been followed by millions, with accompanying cookbooks, groceries, weekly weigh-ins and “judgment-free” meetings, and a food-tracking app.
But soon members of WeightWatchers – which rebranded as WW in 2018 – may be putting away their scales for the last time. WW International is preparing to file for bankruptcy and hand control to its creditors in the coming months, if its negotiations with lenders and bondholders fail, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The financial troubles of the company, which is reportedly struggling with more than $1.4bn (£1bn) debt, has not come as a surprise to scientists and those who work in the diet industry, who have seen transformative change to businesses since the introduction of Ozempic and other weight loss injections. These developments may have a knock on effect on the UK operation.
“I think it’s had its day,” says Tim Spector, professor of genetics at King’s College London and co-founder of Zoe, the science and nutrition company. He thinks that meetings run by WeightWatchers, which peaked at five million subscribers worldwide in 2020, have in the past been “a little place of refuge” for overweight and obese people who felt stigmatised elsewhere. They were once a mainstay of church and village halls across the UK, and hundreds of groups still offer meetings across the country.
But Spector said: “I think it’s a good thing. Most calorie counting is largely snake oil … it doesn’t work on the vast majority of people, because if you restrict calories, you increase appetite – and if you don’t focus on the quality of the food, you’re still eating foods that make you overeat.”
WW rewards dieters for eating low-calorie but, it says, nutrient-dense foods. Spector’s advice to people who want to lose weight is to eat “foods that fill you up because of their quality and fibre: going back to better quality and less highly processed foods, rather than cheap food that says it is ‘low calorie’, ‘low fat’ or ‘low sugar’ ”.
Spector believes advising people to “eat less and exercise more” is “flawed”, because the effectiveness of GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro has demonstrated how important appetite is, compared with metabolism.
Last week the US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which makes Mounjaro, announced it could be bringing the first daily weight-loss pill – which uses the same GLP-1 technology – to the UK next year after trial results found it controls type 2 diabetes and helps people lose weight.
“Until you’ve dealt with the problem, which is the appetite signal … that ‘eat less, exercise more’ approach was just doomed to fail. It’s just a reality that GLP-1 drugs are so much better for people who have been suffering for a long time.”
Spector says some people have been paying WeightWatchers for too long to help them restrict their diets, while failing to achieve long-term weight loss. “Now, they’re realising that they don’t have to keep failing. They can take a drug that works.”
After the explosion of weight loss drugs, Oprah Winfrey, WW’s most famous ambassador, revealed she had been using the medication. She announced in February last year that she would step down from the company’s board, causing its shares to drop by almost 20%, to their lowest since 2001.
The company did not respond to a request for comment last week on the reported bankruptcy, but its former chief executive Sima Sistani told the Financial Times last year that adapting for the new Ozempic era was like Netflix shifting from DVDs to streaming.
As well as GLP-1 drugs, WW also has to compete with advances in scientific research. Prof Roy Taylor of Newcastle University pioneered a groundbreaking diet programme 14 years ago which showed, for the first time, that type 2 diabetes could be reversed through rapid weight loss. Now, NHS England offers the Path to Remission programme based on his research. Using slimming shakes, it limits calorie intake to 800 calories a day for three months for recently diagnosed overweight adults with type 2 diabetes. A year into the programme, participants lost just over 10kg on average and in a long-term study, remained more than 6kg lighter after five years.
Taylor thinks WW, which advocates gradual weight loss, was not as an effective an option for many dieters. “I’ve been listening to my patients over four decades explain to me the very real difficulties of losing weight. One of these was the nagging matter of hunger, because if you cut back what you eat a little every day, you’ll feel hungry. But once a person is established on a diet of less than 1,000 calories a day – which takes about a day and a half – the hunger becomes really quiteminimal.”
For this reason, Taylor argues it’s much easier for dieters to aim to lose weight rapidly. “It’s nonsense to say if you lose weight rapidly, you put it on rapidly,” he says. “Provided the return to eating is done in a carefully guided fashion, people tend to keep the weight off.”
He fears people who go to WW have “an unrealistic view” of just how much weight they may need to lose to avoid being at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. “People talk enthusiastically about losing a few pounds, but that’s a drop in the ocean compared with the excess weight that’s causing mischief in the body,” he says. “We need to compare ourselves with our own weight at the age of 21, because unless you become a bodybuilder, any weight gain in adult life is adipose tissue – in other words, fat,” adds Roy.
Weight loss club Slimming World, which is the largest of its kind in the UK and runs thousands of local groups, described the decline of its biggest rival as “extremely sad” last week and reassured its members: “We’re not going anywhere.”
“Weight loss drugs are not the magic bullet for obesity,” the managing director of the club, Lisa Salmon, said in a statement. “Healthcare professionals need a full range of treatment choices for people without medicalising obesity as the first and only option.
“Everyone losing weight – with or without weight loss drugs – needs support to make changes to their diet, activity and mindset. And despite living in an increasingly digital age, people enjoy and benefit from the sense of community that comes with being part of an in-person group to receive that support.”
In-person local meetings are indeed the “lifeblood” of WeightWatchers, agreed former WW coach Ruth, who asked not to be identified. “There are a million diets and healthy eating plans you can do digitally – the difference with WeightWatchers is getting together with people who ‘get it’ – who understand what you’re going through,” she says.
But during the pandemic, WW International attempted to save $100m and laid off an undisclosed number of the coaches who ran these local meetings. “There was this confusing mass redundancy, and nobody knew what was happening,” Ruth says. After lockdown was lifted, WW was “left with too few coaches, and not enough meetings”, she adds. In her opinion, “they didn’t handle the pandemic well”.
Similarly, the recent introduction of a new points programme for people taking GLP-1 drugs did not go down well with the WW group she coached. “Members said to me: ‘Oh, it’s cheating. That’s not fair,’ ” says Ruth. “They felt like they’d learned new ways of thinking and eating, for example about snacks, and any members that were on weight loss drugs weren’t doing that.”
Taylor argues the programme is dated. “WeightWatchers was started when there was really little contact between people who wanted to lose weight and little discussion of the issue. Having a forum to do that was enormously helpful for people. Now, life has moved on. Society has changed with social media and digital apps.” Ruth recently resigned as a WW coach and had mixed feelings when she heard the business may go bust. “It’s hugely sad, because WeightWatchers is a lifeline for so many people, but it’s no surprise to me.”
