The world is changing faster than Weight Watchers can keep up

When Oprah Winfrey jerks her hands off Weight Watchers. And if at least one in eight Americans uses weight loss drugs. If free fitness apps can be found everywhere. What remains from Weight Watchers?

It was already coming, but this week the health and wellness company postponed deferment of payment. It hopes to shake off $ 1.2 billion in debts and to make a restart with new investors in a short time.

You can mention Oprah just about the embodiment of the changing weight loss industry and the decline of Weight Watchers, officially WW International. Her entire career, the American star presenter shared the struggle with her weight with her audience. In 2015 she bought ten percent of the WW shares and joined the board of directors. According to her own words, she lost more than 19 kilos with Weight Watchers. She was the ideal ambassador. And at the same time a huge business risk, but who could see that coming?

Oprah, the embodiment of Weight Watchers, left and sold its shares

Oprah was one of the first celebrities that came out that they use drugs to lose weight or stay on weight. After nine years, in 2024, Oprah announced her departure at Weight Watchers and sold a large part of her shares to be able to talk freely about her experiences with Ozempic. And to expose the national obsession with loss. After all, she had also contributed to that, for example when they in 1988 With a cart full of fat (30 kilos) came in front of the camera.

At Oprah’s farewell to WW last March, investors responded immediately by selling shares. But the decline had already been started. From June 2021, when it became clear how much subscribers WW was losing, the race already made a dive. Did customers no longer understand what Weight Watchers stood for? Were people finished with the tight eating schedules and counting? Or did they prefer to listen to fitness trackers and influencers than to a (according to WW) scientifically substantiated story?

Fitfluencers

Fewer and fewer people were willing to pay for an expensive subscription to a program that itself has as a disclaimer that it does not offer a ‘quick fix’. Why would you, if you can also follow Fitfluencers who promise washbasins for everyone, as long as you train hard enough. Another part of the potential customers felt more at home with the growing body positivity movement that propagates: stop with diets, every weight is okay. For the company that grew up with weight loss, it was almost impossible to find a way in this playing field.

All these changes came on top of the competition that Weight Watchers had to deal with before the turn of the century. Diet food producers such as SlimFast, for example, and always new diet gurus, from Michel Montignac to Kris – ‘Food Haller’ – Verburgh.

Weight Watchers saw the behavior of people with a higher weight changing, and saw attention increases with doctors and dietitians for a healthy lifestyle above a lower weight. Weight Watchers changed its name in WW, Wellbeing That Works in 2018. Away from focus on the scales. Also look at sleep, movement and stress.

But the world was changing faster than WW International was able to keep up. Investors had already focused on a new promise for a while. With Ozempic, initially developed by Novo Nordisk as a diabetes drug, users saw the kilos flying off.

Since the introduction in 2018, more and more so-called GLP drugs are being added, one even more effective than the other. Why still invest in a company that loses its customers to the makers of these ‘panacea’? The rates of pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly have been almost the mirror image of those of Weight Watchers in recent years. Last year, WW International closed with a loss of 364 million dollars (334 million euros), at a turnover of $ 786 million.

Smartpoint

Weight Watchers, founded in 1963 by Jean Nidetch, a New Yorkse who fought against the kilos, knew what women – especially women – needed. Nidetch started a company around a method with which she herself lost a lot of weight in a domestic circle: to come together with other women to stimulate each other, under supervision, when losing weight.

Weight Watchers was in a sense the tupperware of the weight loss industry. The social side was part of the success. Already in 1968 more than a million people were members of Weight Watchers worldwide. Just as tupperware trays can be found in every family, so does someone in every family joined Weight Watchers. Who doesn’t know anyone who took a cheesecake at a party instead of Tompouce, because it saves two points. Just as Tupperware fell out of time, there is also a hint of nostalgia around Weight Watchers.

The system of SmartPoints is what Weight Watchers became famous with: each type of food gets points, and Weight Watchers determines based on your gender, weight, height and goal how many points you can ‘eat’ per day. It works, like all diets work: as long as you last. Many people, saw too scientistswith Weight Watchers dropped out more than with losing weight independently.

The company not only obtained from subscriptions and coaching, but also from scales, cookbooks, magazines, snacks, chocolate bars (with only 2 points), meal replacements and whatever to think of. Weight loss was the lucrative back of the growing appetite in the US, and in the rest of the world. The industry saw that too. Already in the 1990s, half of the Americans were overweight. A problem, but also one Business Opportunity.

Not surprising that Heinz bought the company from Nidetch in 1978. And also quite logical that investment company Artal Luxembourg took over from Heinz in 1999 for $ 735 million, to bring it to the stock market in 2001.

The double revenue model of the obesityit is sometimes mentioned: first companies make people too heavy with unhealthy factory food, then they sell the means with which those same people can lose weight again. And what they prefer to be attached to their lives. It worked for Weight Watchers, until they were overtaken by the pharmaceuticals.

Old ws

In 2023, Weight Watchers Sequence bought a company that prescribes doctor’s recipes online after a video association. This after a year in which WW was more than a quarter of a billion dollar loss. With that acquisition, the company acknowledges that customers mainly come to Weight Watchers to lose weight. Medications can help to work on a healthier lifestyle. And members of Weight Watchers in the US can now also come to medicines via unemployment benefits.

WW returned publicly to the old W’s, with a new approach. « We embrace Weight Watchers again, » said director Sima Sistani, who left in 2024 after two years. « It is important not to avoid the conversation about the importance of weight loss for health. »

Weight Watchers lies with the announced reorganization in intensive care, but the patient has not died yet. The company is now trying to get the finances in order within 45 days. The company wanted to implement the company accelerated: expanding the telephospheric activities – read medicine provision – yielded a revenue growth of 57 percent in the first quarter of 2025, in the first quarter of 2025, according to the company.

The ‘holistic care model’, as Weight Watchers calls it, stays up as long as the company is not definitively bankrupt. A special website has been opened for members: Weight Watchers is here to stay. And with the most frequently asked questions there is an answer to an apparently pressing question: the reorganization has no consequences for the availability of the prescribed medicines.

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