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After more than half a century and countless obsessive calculations about the number of points you must spend on your diet, Weight Watchers has officially ceased to exist. Monday, WW is born.
With a catchy slogan, "Wellness that Works," the company's major rebranding not only eliminates its old name, but also marks a strategic move to align with a modern society in terms such as "self-care" and "self-care". positivity ". "Are celebrated, and the slightest mention of dieting is met with severe criticism.
Mindy Grossman, President and CEO of WW, presented the company's new approach as a "360-degree approach to health," no matter what definition you make of it, "said Rachel Siegel of the Washington Post.
"Everyone is talking about well-being and, to a certain extent, people do not want to use the word" diet "because they think it's a short-term punitive problem, and it's not not what we are, "Grossman said.
As part of the company's current vision statement, WW aims to "create a world where well-being is accessible to all, not just a few." Well-being or "state of well-being" physical, mental and social "of the word" health "appear several times in this statement. "Diet" and "weight" were not found.
But the news that the company, which has spent decades building a reputation as "the world's leading provider of weight management services," is moving away from diets to focus on wellness. skepticism.
Founded in the early 1960s by a Queens homemaker named Jean Nidetch, the company has historically been touted as a sound and scientific method to help people lose weight. – group meetings of people, with weighing, led by a person who has successfully completed the program.
Under his new brand, WW will still offer his point-based weight loss program, Grossman said on NBC's Today Today, but said the company wanted to do more than offer a "solution to short term".
She said the company was "evolving" to integrate health and wellness practices and attributed the company's financial success to its adaptation. Indeed, the new brand follows the announcement by the company last August of 4.5 million subscribers, an increase of 1 million over last year. According to Market Watch, its total revenue exceeds $ 1.3 billion.
"We will never abdicate our leadership in the best healthy diet program for weight loss in the world, but we can be a lot more today," Grossman said. "What we want is to be a sustainable partner in health. Most people need a partner to help them be healthy and we are that partner.
It is not surprising that diet brands, like WW, are inclined to promote holistic and perhaps vague wellness approaches in a climate where diets do not favor the masses.
"Diets are not a buzzword these days," Susan Roberts, professor of nutrition and psychiatry at Tufts University told NPR.
Christy Harrison, a Registered Dietitian in New York, defines her in a blog article as a "belief system" that "loves thinness and equates it with health and moral virtue." "" Promotes weight loss as a means of achieving higher status, "" demonizes some ways of eating while elevating others "and" oppresses people who do not fit their supposed image of "health" " .
The reaction is supported by scientific research and anecdotal evidence that suggests that diets not only work, but can also have negative health effects, including the development of eating disorders.
In 2007, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles released an analysis of more than 30 long-term diet studies entitled "Medicare research for effective treatments for obesity: diets are not the answer" . Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, said in a press release at the time, "Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people. "
"We concluded that most of them would have been better off not following the diet at all," Mann said. "Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their body would not suffer from wear due to weight loss and total weight recovery."
Several first-person trials also claimed that their diet, particularly their participation in the Weight Watchers program, had led them to develop eating disorders.
In a 2016 piece published on the Medium page of Refinery29, the author described the consequences of his Weight Watchers experience. The author, who started the program at age 14, wrote that everything was fine at first, until she stopped losing weight:
I felt like rubbish; I felt like a failure and there were times when I felt like I did not deserve to live. Now that I had managed to achieve my meager success, my eating habits ranged from Perfect Weight Watchers Angel to everything I could see in the throat, according to the time.
Similar accounts have arisen over the years.
"Weight Watchers nurtured my perfectionist tendencies," wrote a woman in 2017. "I started a cycle of counting and tracking points, frenzy, dietary restriction, compulsive exercise," Hope, then spiral again.
When the company announced at the beginning of the year its intention to give teenagers as young as 13 free subscriptions of six weeks, the outcry was immediate. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, "in the United States, up to 10 out of 100 young women suffer from an eating disorder".
Through the remnants of Lean Kitchens and SlimFast, there are well-being practices – an attractive approach to overall health, including weight loss, that focuses on elements beyond digits of a scale. In 2015, the global wellness sector, which encompasses everything from beauty to real estate, represented a $ 3.7 trillion market, according to the Global Wellness Institute.
On social media, many pointed out that well-being is often useddisguise"Diet culture, slamming WW as another example.
In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Harrison, the dietitian, said WW may have changed its name and added to its offerings, but at the base, the company is still a weight loss service.
"It's not like it's gone, it's just gone underground," she said.
Grossman, CEO of WW, told BuzzFeed News that the company "will always be the best in the science of food as healthy as possible," but added that WW is "the biggest promoter of body positivity."
"We believe that well-being is not just about something," she said. "Ultimately, we are looking for sustainable options for people to live the healthiest life they want to live."
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