Weight Watchers Past & Present

 

Weight Watchers was founded in 1963 by Jean Nidetch, in her home in Brooklyn, New York. Desperate to lose weight, she managed to lose 20 pounds, but then found her motivation failing. As the story goes, she picked up the phone one day and called her overweight friends and made a "cookie confession." Eventually, her friends came to Jean's house each week for mutual support and sharing. They all lost weight and the word spread.

Upon her friend's advice, she started Weight Watchers around the concept of group counseling and instituted an eating program that focused on cutting back on calories, a word and concept that few people knew or understood at the time. She did not distinguish between the different types of calories such as sugar calories, fat calories, protein calories, and complex carbohydrate calories.

40 years later, her concept and weight loss center is still popular. Despite the regular changes in the names of its programs, the fundamentals of Weight Watchers have remained pretty constant. It still focuses primarily on calorie counting and group counseling. The most recent incarnation gives you a couple of choices in the basic Weight Watchers program:

Food:

1. You follow a points-based system ("Flex Plan") of counting calories where every item of food has a points value based on its nutritional content.
2. You follow a "core" plan of balanced nutrition without counting or tracking.

Counseling:

1. Attend Weight Watchers meetings in person for group discussions and counseling.
2. Online chat rooms and discussion groups. You are encouraged to use an online resource called "eTools."

Weight Watchers seemingly has their hearts in the right place and has been the icon of the industry since its inception, but alas they have a pretty bad long-term failure rate by any long-term objective measure. Their studies use too short of a window and are too narrowly targeted.

My theory of why: group counseling inhibits the development of self-reliance and self-discipline. Most of us who have lost significant weight and kept it off did it on our own without counseling and leaning on other people for support. We all know why we're overweight: we eat too much unhealthy food and we don't exercise enough. So why do we put so much faith and hope in programs like Weight Watchers or any other diet and weight loss program or product?

Having said all that, Weight Watchers is still one of the good guys in this industry of pill pushers, scam artists and unscrupulous "experts." The basic program starts at around $45-60 a month and the meetings are extra.