When I was a little girl, I had one big ambition. What did I want to be, when I grew up? Thin.
I was born in 1985. Any Elder Millennial will be quick to bore you with tales of coming of age on the analogue/digital cusp. No broadband, not that much TV, ten pence a text message and endless games of Snake. However, it’s not entirely accurate to suggest that the eighties and nineties were happy, halcyon days of relative commercial quiet. As a child, I was very aware that thinness was glamorous and aspirational, and that there were businesses dedicated to making women slimmer. I was bullied about my body, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough, I’d do something about it. I was going to join Weight Watchers at the earliest opportunity.
So I was hit with a strange pang of sadness when I heard that Weight Watchers was filing for bankruptcy in the USA, as more people are choosing weight loss jabs over weight loss programmes. As a feminist, I feel strange about the company. It made a profit out of the insecurities and anxieties of people – overwhelmingly women. Although their programmes are open to everyone, the advertisements were largely focused on women. It uses a points system, in which users are advised to track their food, with a budget of ‘points’ to spend. Some foods cost a lot of points; some are point free. I have a history of disordered eating, and I know that following this system would have compounded a lot of painful, problematic aspects about my relationship with food. It would have cost me more than points.
But as an insecure woman, living in a human body in the 21st century, I feel a little lost. Weight Watchers, for all its flaws, was about community. It began when founder Jean Nidtech gathered a group of like-minded friends and formed a weight loss club, in the early sixties. Nidtech’s vision succeeded because she was just like her customers. In 2025, the idea of a social group bonding over their weight loss goals sounds archaic, and problematic. In 1963, it makes more sense. Women were trying to understand their bodies, their lives, and who they were becoming in the aftermath of WWII. Supplies had been so scarce, for so long. Now that it was readily available, how would women cope with their appetites for food and life? Thanks to Nidtech, they didn’t have to do it alone.
Ultimately, shame kept me away from Weight Watchers. When I was 12, I started to become secretive and anxious about food, bingeing and purging, lying about what I’d eaten, throwing food away and skipping meals for days. I hated my body, but I hated my hatred more. I believed that I could silently punish myself for looking wrong and being wrong, until I came out the other side, an acceptable size. I shouldn’t have been dieting when I was 12. But I suspect I would have been a lot happier and a lot safer if I’d been attending weekly meetings with a group of women who were prepared to talk, openly, about the way they felt about their bodies, and the way they felt about food. I believed there was something very wrong with me. If I’d met other women who wanted to lose weight, I think my behaviour would have been much less extreme, and I would have forgiven myself for not being perfect in the first place.
Body positivity campaigners would argue that Weight Watchers has no place in the 21st century. I don’t disagree. However, it’s been replaced by something even trickier and more contentious – the Semaglutide jab. Originally prescribed to treat diabetes, it started to be used ‘off label’ for weight loss in 2023, and available for private purchase. Last year the global market was worth approximately $23 billion.
I know people who have used Semaglutide and loved the results. They report feeling happier, more confident and calmer. Their relationship with food was hijacking their brain. Research has found that ultra processed food can be addictive. Maybe the weight loss jabs have the power to free us from that addiction.
But Semaglutide is taken very privately, sometimes secretly. It’s a seductive ‘fix’ for your perceived problems with food and your body. You can inject yourself with the drugs you bought on the internet and become outwardly and rapidly transformed. But is anything changing on the inside? In theory, an organisation like Weight Watchers gives members a space to share their experiences, and understand the difference between using food, and abusing it. In a group, you can talk about the big emotions that you’re burying, when you eat – which means that those emotions become easier to bear.
I lost a significant amount of weight between 2018, and 2019. I didn’t go to Weight Watchers, but I did follow a protocol that helped me to understand I was abusing food as a way of avoiding painful feelings. I became more open – better at sharing, and better at asking questions. In 2022, I stopped drinking alcohol. If I’d lost weight using Semaglutide jabs, I don’t think I would have gained the insight and understanding that helped me to get sober and made me realise why I’d been so unhappy for so long. My body changed, but my mind changed so much more. That said, I think many of us have been unhappy in body and mind for a long time, for many reasons. If a weight loss jab makes you feel good about yourself and leads you back to yourself, maybe it’s worth trying. Maybe anything is worth trying.
Ultimately, I believe that our issues with our bodies begin and end in our minds. My mind can be a hostile place. It lies to me. It tells me everyone else is perfect, and I’m the only one flailing and failing. It feels as though it’s getting harder than ever to find real life community spaces, in which everyone openly discusses their struggles. We need these spaces to be reminded that we’re all equal, we’re all human, and that we all have big feelings that we need to learn to sit with.
The demise of Weight Watchers means the demise of one more community space. It was far from perfect. And maybe that’s precisely why we need those spaces. To shatter the illusion of perfection that we see on our screens, an illusion that is possibly being perpetuated by Semaglutide jabs.