Weight Watchers rings in the Ozempic era as the end of "diet culture"

Companies that have complicated the concept of diet for years are now willing to sell you the easy out in weight-loss.

Edit for clarification 7.26.2023: In the comments reader GLK provided an anecdotal account of how Weight Watchers helped him and his wife with their weight loss. As he mentions, many people may not commit to WW, which includes behavioral and lifestyle changes that are intended to steer people towards better choices, and so some people may not take that into account. In writing this post my main point wasn’t to argue that WW has not helped people, and in hindsight I should have caveated the point argument by remarking that there’s likely people who don’t care to figure out how the points work, and therefore easily give up. Rather, it’s more of the hypocrisy of companies that are more intent on following cultural trends if it means they can attempt to line their pockets. WW seems to have gone down the route of “body positivity” which completely contradicts the well-known fact that obesity is associated with a myriad of diseases. Then, for them to go back and get into the business of selling weight-loss drugs is extremely telling of what their intent is, especially for a brand that has lost many investors and subscribers over the years.

Tl;dr: Companies may choose to take whatever position they want if it means that they can make money off of it, irrespective of whether that position is an overall benefit to customers.

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As the Ozempic era rages on more and more companies are trying to hop onto the Big Pharma, weight-loss bandwagon.

A new player is the not so new company Weight Watchers, or WW I should say, as the company chose to rebrand a few years ago, even though it’s not secret what the W’s stand for.

Weight Watchers is a multibillion dollar corporation known for their point systems which they argued allowed people to eat whatever they want so long as they stayed within the realms of their daily point allotments.

Many readers may recall several celebrities that have endorsed Weight Watchers over the years, with the most well-known celebrity being Oprah Winfrey, who became a spokesperson and advocate for Weight Watchers several years ago.

Here’s one of her videos on their “Smart Points” system. In another video she remarks how she was able to eat bread while also losing weight because of Weight Watchers.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Oprah’s endorsement of Weight Watchers was met with a sudden jump in stock prices, although over time this seems to have dissipated.

There’s been a lot of controversies surrounding this point system as it raises a pertinent question of how points are assigned to foods. Are points assigned based on the amount of fat or sugar an item contains? Are preservatives counted in this point system as well, given what we know about the microbiome and obesity? Who really knows.

In any case, Weight Watchers seemed to have an answer with this number confusion by releasing their own products which provide you the points right on the packaging. With these products you don’t need to count calories anymore, just count the points.

Image from Diet Wiki

But in recent years and as the so-called “body positivity” movement gained traction Weight Watchers chose to rebrand to keep up with the ever changing and more sensitive cultural zeitgeist, leading to WW which was met with widespread criticisms.

In a 2019 BBC article it was reported that the the rebrand was done for the following reason:

The intention, under new chief executive Mindy Grossman, was to modernise the brand amid a cultural shift to body positivity that now emphasises health and wellness as opposed to counting calories.

For anyone critical of modernity’s incessant need for narratives, we should see serious fatal flaws in this argument, which really encapsulates egregious issues in the messaging of “diet”.

For all intents and purposes, we should argue that a diet is whatever is necessary to sustain one’s being. Diet inherently does not refer to a specific way of eating- it’s only through some affixed term that we categorize different ways of eating into different modalities of diet such as the keto diet.

But more to the point, what has happened in recent years was a ridiculous delineation in which weight and obesity are made to somehow not correlate with disease and poorer health outcomes. In that regard, diet itself became a bad word because it was made out to be too restrictive and difficult to maintain. Thus, the term diet was conflated to mean something negative, and therefore to be conscientious of your diet was to be something frowned upon in modern society. Again, here the term diet as being suggestive of the foods and drinks we intake began to be replaced with the concept of dieting and more restrictive associations.

It also adds to a serious paradox of health and fitness where we ascribe one’s health to one’s physical appearance. This is where both fit and obese individuals get the concept of health all wrong.

Fit people may argue that they are healthy since they look healthy, but as I’ve mentioned quite often many things can be going on underneath that may point to serious issues, such as the phenomenon of the athlete’s heart. Athletes and other fit individuals may also take egregious measures to get their bodies including the use of performance enhancing substances and overlooking wear and tear on the body, which may prove harmful in the long run.

Fat activists may latch onto these arguments as a way of arguing that being skinny is not a paradigm of health, but in doing so they wrongly infer that being overweight is better for them, even though we know many diseases are associated with obesity. This is one of those concepts of health and science that tends to have an agreed upon consensus, which is only argued against by activists who try to subvert decades of evidence in order to rationalize their lifestyles.

But the biggest problem both groups neglect is the fact that our diets dictate a lot of our overall health. It’s the primary way we meet most of our energy needs, whether it be through carbohydrates or a high fat diet. It’s also one of the only ways that we receive nutrients such as vitamins and minerals.

Therefore, the argument shouldn’t be that you can eat whatever you want so long as you look skinny, but that your weight and overall health will be dictated in large part by what you put into your bodies. It just so happens that better eating will inherently lead to less inches on our waistlines.

An athlete such as Michael Phelps who sustains his high energy expenditure by only eating McDonald’s can’t be argued to be healthy. There’s also no denying that caloric intake also has an overall effect on our bodies.

All this to say that this strange rebranding to WW does nothing more to add to the confusion on weight loss and health for the sake of activism. More importantly, it shows that corporations are willing to overlook clear scientific evidence if it means that they may see an increase in investments and stock prices. It’s never really been about helping out individuals more than it has been to help out their pockets.

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And all of this leads us to the rather perplexing state of Weight Watchers. Suppose that your position is to subvert the concept of diets and to lambast so-called “diet culture”, how would such a company operate in the Ozempic era?

In March 2023 it was reported that Weight Watchers bought a telemedicine startup company called Sequence. In contradiction to Weight Watcher’s removing the weight part of their name, it was reported that Sequence was intended to provide weight-loss help, as well as medical consultations and- no surprise here- prescriptions for medications such as Ozempic (from NBC News):

Sequence, which describes itself as a "weight loss program," offers its monthly subscribers telehealth consultations with clinicians, fitness coaching, access to dietitians and, in some cases, prescriptions for drugs, including the popular diabetes and obesity medications Ozempic and Wegovy.

Strange, as it seems to go against the new activist approach of WW. But what may seem a bit strange can also be rather obvious.

This past week Weight Watcher's CEO Sima Sistani has argued that the era of Ozempic will now be the end of diet culture (excerpt from Fortune; emphasis mine):

For decades, companies like WeightWatchers, Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, and Noom have made billions of dollars by preaching diets, exercise, “behavioral changes”—and above all, willpower. But now it’s much easier, and often more ef­fective, to just take a weekly shot of Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, or another so-called miracle drug. As customers embrace the pharma alternative to their traditional businesses, WeightWatchers and Noom are trying to pivot.

“We’re admitting that we’re learning; that the science has evolved—and therefore we should, as well,” WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani told me, about her company’s March deal to buy Sequence, a telehealth business that allows patients to obtain virtual prescrip­tions for the new weight-loss drugs. Two months later, Noom officially unveiled Noom Med, a similar telehealth platform.

Hey, there’s that language of “evolving science” that we all should be familiar of!

It appears that the Ozempic era is now a boon for health contradictions where even Weight Watchers will now jump onto the magic weight-loss train if it means making money for their failing brand.

The Fortune article above even ends with this contradictory paragraph:

“I do see this as the end of diet culture. The focus has shifted from weight loss to weight health,” acknowledges Sistani, who became WeightWatchers CEO in 2022. However, she’s quick to argue that her 60-year-old company will always be an important part of achieving that new kind of health: “I want to be clear that the way you achieve it is through weight loss."

Now, if your response is just like my own you may be asking yourself what the hell “weight health” is. After all, weight is associated with health, so isn’t this being a bit redundant?

I’d argue that this is just another sign of activism throwing around new terms that sound flashy in order to distract people from what these terms actually mean, because if the intent is to suggest that weight is associated with health wouldn’t that just tell us we have come full circle and have returned to first principles as it relates to the concept of health?

But what I find rather disturbing in all of these remarks is the fact that Ozempic is somehow argued to have marked an era of greater knowledge on weight loss, as if Ozempic is an indication that science is progressing. In reality, I would actually argue that it infers that weight is inherently more intrinsic than we are led to believe.

Consider the fact that Ozempic-like drugs have mechanisms of action as GLP-1 receptor agonists. Most of these medications are intended to mimic the incretin hormone GLP-1 that we already naturally produce, so it’s not as if these drugs are doing something completely out of the ordinary from what our body already naturally does.

Instead, it suggests that, for some reason, this balance of GLP-1 production, receptor activation, and subsequent biochemical processes seem to be disturbed in some individuals, whether that disturbance is through weight gain or whether weight gain was a consequence of this disturbance. Regardless, something seems to have happened where the balance of hormones and signaling has become disturbed.

As we gain more knowledge on the significance of the microbiome, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our gut composition may be tied to GLP-1 and other gut-related hormones.¹ Researchers are now recognizing the critical relationship between our gut makeup and hormone production, including the possibility that gut bacteria may produce regulatory compounds that influence incretin hormone production.²

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What seems to be happening now, and really has been going on for several years, is the intent to confuse people and make them more complacent. These remarks by Weight Watcher’s CEO emphasizes the point that health is likely to be dictated by first principles, in that the better the foods are that we eat the better our overall health will be.

In other words, a good diet is best for overall health. Something that seems rather obvious but made obviously complicated.

But rather than provide a more straightforward concept which then comes with different nuances, the messaging instead has been to obfuscate clear messaging to create more obscure, contradictory remarks that leave people ignorant of their own health.

Health is now made to be subjective. Weight is no longer associated with health until you can make money on a medication for weight-loss. Confuse people on what it means to have a diet with the concept of “diet culture” and claim that dieting is more harmful than good, rather than explain that foods that taste good are intentionally addictive in nature. It’s not necessarily that more wholesome foods are boring and bland, but rather that foods that are far more palatable are more addictive in nature and are intended to feed us with that rewarding rush that we have become comfortable with.

In that regard, Weight Watcher’s remarks are extremely dangerous as it emphasizes the point I made above, in that someone who loses weight isn’t going to necessarily be healthy. If the intent of Ozempic is to help people lose weight while also allowing them to continuously eat the foods that put them into that position, can we really say that these people are becoming healthier?

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We are living in a cultural era where people are being made to be less knowledgeable about their own health, where critical thinking and intellect are outsourced to people with some perceived power while we are left to repeat the narratives put forth by others.

This is one of the reasons it falls onto us as individuals to be more proactive in our own health. We should become more informed and aware of the medicines we take or the foods we eat. Many industries and institutions would rather leave us ignorant if it makes us complacent, ready to be taken advantage of for our wants and needs.

Diets may only seem mysterious so long as activists who spout the phrase “diet culture” are allowed to continue to shape the narrative around healthy eating. Weight-loss will only seem unattainable so long as we only allow Pharma to tell us that their drugs are the only way to lose weight. Things are only as mysterious as our ignorance.

The best way to fight against such confusions is to be more knowledgeable and not let people take advantage of your ignorance. Stay vigilant when it comes to your own health.

For those interested in Ozempic:

What's going on with the Ozempic craze?

Will Ozempic be used to treat addiction?

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1. Abdalqadir, N., & Adeli, K. (2022). GLP-1 and GLP-2 Orchestrate Intestine Integrity, Gut Microbiota, and Immune System Crosstalk. Microorganisms, 10(10), 2061. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms10102061

2. Tomaro-Duchesneau, C., LeValley, S.L., Roeth, D. et al. Discovery of a bacterial peptide as a modulator of GLP-1 and metabolic disease. Sci Rep 10, 4922 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61112-0