Weight Watchers announced on Monday that they are changing their name to WW to reflect their focus on wellness and health. This is probably a clever move, though it’s not the first time they’ve made it. In 2015, they launched a program called “Beyond the Scale” that seems to be the same thing they are talking about now, minus the name change.
This idea that “everything old is new again” has been a long-running theme for the company. They have built their business model on getting repeat business from the clients they repeatedly fail.
You see, WW has never had success is creating sustained long-term weight loss. It’s a shameful track record — one they share with literally every other diet and lifestyle company that claims they can produce sustained, long-term, intentional weight loss. They know that most people lose weight short-term and almost all of them gain it back long term (with a majority gaining back more than they lost).
Moving forward, they will go by WW and will “focus on wellness.” They made sure to mention that they are still weight-loss focused, saying “We will never abdicate our leadership in the best healthy eating program for weight loss in the world, but we can be so much more today…” This isn’t their first foray into attempting to co-opt the language of Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size to sell diets — even as they’ve put out blatantly body shaming ads.
It’s easy to see the profit rationale for their hypocrisy. They get to continue selling their program to people, who they spent years successfully convincing to hate their bodies, and try to open up a new market amongst the people who have crawled and scratched their way up and out of the diet culture that Weight Watchers, excuse me, WW, immersed them in. So, it will likely make money, but that doesn’t make it right.
People are allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies —regardless of the reasons, risks, or likelihood of success. And while I’m grateful that they seem to have stopped targeting children, that does not change the fact that it is impossible to sell weight loss from a wellness perspective. Here’s why…
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