Sixty years ago, a Queens housewife turned a humiliating fat-shaming encounter into a weight-loss empire. Jean Nidetch was a former IRS clerk and mother of two who had struggled with disordered eating her entire life, and who weighed 214 pounds when she ran into a neighbor at the grocery store. The neighbor assumed Nidetch was pregnant—she wasn’t—and asked about her due date. Nidetch fled the scene, embarrassed but also galvanized: She would go on to lose 72 pounds, and to start WeightWatchers, a business that would sell her advice for doing so to millions of U.S. women.
Over the next six decades, the company would thrive by preaching Nidetch’s basic gospel: Watch what you eat (by counting calories or, in WeightWatchers' variation, points) and find community support (by paying a monthly membership fee to attend regular meetings with other WeightWatchers customers). That “behavioral” approach to weight loss would go on to power Nidetch’s company through a 1978 sale to Heinz, a 2001 IPO, and a 2015 investment of $43.2 million from Oprah Winfrey (who remains on the board). Even as its profits and stock price yo-yoed over its lifetime, WeightWatchers continued shaping the core of the $80 billion weight-loss industry—outlasting countless dieting fads, a larger cultural shift towards body positivity, some ill-fated internal pivots, and the rise of younger, techier competitors.
