You Don’t Have to Diet Until You Die (or, Some Thoughts on Weight Watchers)
Weight Watchers recently acquired the telehealth company Sequence, allowing them effectively to prescribe weight-loss drugs like Ozempic to their members. Talk about being on the wrong side of history — body liberation is the future.
I suppose there’s something refreshing about the acquisition, though it will cause incalculable harm. It means they’ve given up the charade, or are at least allowing us to see the stage makeup and costuming. In 2018, Weight Watchers rebranded as “WW,” declaring themselves a “lifestyle” instead of a diet. They crowed about their “new purpose.” The emphasis was off weight, they said, and it was all about “wellness” instead. Every dieter I know (most of whom are former chronic dieters) saw right through that cynical, corporate switcheroo; it was as transparent as Kentucky Fried Chicken becoming KFC. It’s still fried chicken. It’s still a diet. A rose by any other name, you know?
Weight Watchers is a business, and the business is repeat customers engaged in the endless, and typically hopeless, project of reshaping and controlling their bodies in service of our culture’s distinctive, unnatural, and highly-political fixation on (mostly female) thinness. I’ve said a lot about why I describe dieting and diet culture in such convicting terms and don’t need to rehash it…
