The end of WeightWatchers?

"It's a scene played out in community centres up and down the country," said The Independent. "A cluster of people, most of them women, inevitably, are nervously waiting to stand on the scales in front of their peers. Will they have lost or gained a few pounds since their last communal weigh-in?"

Set-ups like this were once a "defining part of diet culture", although they may soon seem like an "archaic throwback to another era". That's because WeightWatchers, the US company that has dominated the diet industry for more than six decades, has filed for bankruptcy, "reportedly in an attempt to eliminate $1.15 billion (£863 million) worth of debt".

WeightWatchers has said that there will be "no impact to members" and that it is not closing its doors. Its services will remain "fully operational" during the filing process, the company said.

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'Comically old-fashioned'

The "most obvious culprit" behind the company's "dramatic change in fortunes" is the rise of Ozempic and similar drugs, which have "transformed" the way we approach weight loss. Ozempic has "turned the diet industry upside down, and left more traditional brands struggling to keep up".

Some of the advice dished out by the WeightWatchers diet plan now seems "comically old-fashioned", said Zing Tsjeng in The i Paper. Members agreed to adhere to a points-based system, where each food is assigned a score based on its nutritional value. Bananas, for example, "were believed to be too carb-heavy and high-calorie", according to a 1980s diet plan.

Admittedly, this numbers-based approach "did work for some people". A 2017 study published in The Lancet found that 57% of participants lost weight after a 52-week trial of the WeightWatchers programme. But for millions of others, it introduced the idea of food as something to be handled "like a radioactive substance".

A 'new wave' of diet culture

The decline of WeightWatchers is "more than just a business story", said Eva Wiseman in The Observer. It's a story about "what happens when dieting goes out of fashion, but being thin remains more important than ever".

Of course, today "we no longer say the word 'thin'". And "we don't say we're trying to lose weight, we say we want to 'get strong', or sometimes get 'lean'". The weight-loss methods and choices may change over time, "but it's the judgment attached to these choices that keeps diet culture comfortably ticking, and profitable, and dangerous". WeightWatchers may be falling out of fashion, "but that doesn’t mean the diet industry is on its knees".

Indeed, the decline of WeightWatchers isn't a "win" for those who rail against diet culture, said Glamour. It "marks the dominance of a new wave of diet culture", where "skinniness is more glorified than ever, and the ways of achieving it feel more in reach for the masses". "Diet culture has sharpened its teeth, and armed itself with a syringe; it no longer needs the henchmen of WeightWatchers".