Weight Watchers

Get your flex point calculators and food scales! This week, Mike and Aubrey are talking about one of America's most iconic diet programs: Weight Watchers. Along the way, we encounter The Rock, the mating habits of straight people and a new James Bond villain. 

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Links!

• Jean Nidetch, a Founder of Weight Watchers, Dies at 91 
• Mass Firing on Zoom Is Latest Sign of Weight Watchers Unrest 
• Weight Watcher's Kurbo app slammed for targeting kids. Makers defend it 
• What's gone wrong at Weight Watchers? 
• Weight Watchers Is Offering Teens Free Memberships and People Aren't Happy 
• Americans’ new way of losing weight has left Weight Watchers behind 
• How the Oprah effect helped Weight Watchers regain Americans' trust 
• Deal Master Debbane 
• The Population Cost‐Effectiveness of Weight Watchers with General Practitioner Referral Compared with Standard Care 
• Weight Watchers on prescription: An observational study of weight change among adults referred to Weight Watchers by the NHS 
• The Problem With 'Fat Talk' 
• 'Fat Talk' Compels but Carries a Cost 

Thanks to Ashley Smith for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!

Transcript

Mike: Hello, welcome to Maintenance Phase. The show where we sit in a circle and make you feel bad about yourself.

[laughter]

Aubrey: I really thought you're going to be like, “The show that you don't need like a food scale for.” 

Mike: Ooh.

Aubrey: Or, “The show that's points free. [crosstalk] 

[laughter] 

Mike: These are all better than mine. Do we want to do this again? [laughs] 

Aubrey: No, yours is much more to the point. That is the function of this. We'll talk about it.

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post.

Aubrey: I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm an author and columnist, and Fat Lady About Town.

Mike: For the last three episodes, we have been awkwardly piping in canned audio of Aubrey talking about our Patreon, which we recorded [Aubrey laughing] separately from the episodes, and extremely evident from listening to those episodes. But this time, we're going to do it organically.

Aubrey: We're doing it live. 

Mike: [laughs] 

Aubrey: Yeah. We're on patreon.com/maintenancephase. We also have t-shirts on TeePublic. You can find both of those links much more easily. If you go to our website, which is maintenancephase.com. 

Mike: Or continue just listening for free. That's also chill. 

Aubrey: Yeah, totally, do what you want. 

Mike: Today, we are talking about Weight Watchers. 

Aubrey: The Behemoth.

Mike: The Leviathan. 

Aubrey: Yeah, we're going to talk about formerly Weight Watchers now WW. 

Mike: Oh, yeah. 

Aubrey: Mike, talk to me about what do you know about Weight Watchers? 

Mike: Okay. My understanding is that it's a support group for people trying to lose weight. You go there on every Wednesday or something, and you get weighed in, and you have, I guess, weight loss goals or whatever. Then you talk about weight, and weight loss, and your efforts and what's going well and what's not going well. It's like bringing other people along on this emotional roller coaster that everybody goes through when they lose weight, where it always works at first and you project this gleaming future for yourself, and then inevitably it doesn't work because most people can't maintain the restriction. Then you start to gain the weight back and you feel terrible about yourself. It seems Weight Watchers would amplify both aspects of that. The false future that you project for yourself at the beginning of a weight loss effort, and also the sense of shame at the end of weight loss effort when it inevitably doesn't work.

Aubrey: Yeah, I would say that's about right. I was a Weight Watchers member off and on for some time. My first Weight Watchers meeting was when I was 11.

Mike: Which is already just very problematic to have 11-year-olds being told that their bodies aren't cool and that they should lose weight. That's already bad.

Aubrey: Weight Watchers is as a person who later developed an eating disorder. Weight Watchers is where I learned a lot of the building blocks. 

Mike: Oh.

Aubrey: This is true of a lot of diets, that folks will have the entry point of a diet and then it will morph into an eating disorder because in most dieting spaces, there is not an awareness of eating disorders. There is not concern about eating disorders. The goal is "Lose weight at whatever costs." A bunch of the things that they like actively recommend to you, like, I was keeping a food journal, which is what you're supposed to do when you're at Weight Watchers, you write down what you eat, you write down how many points it's worth. For me, anyway, it led me down the garden path a little bit to something that turned into something much, much worse.

Mike: This reminds me that when I was a teenager, my parents sent my brother to an anger management, like a city funded anger management course. 

Aubrey: Whoa.

Mike: It turned out when he went there that all the other kids were super hardcore juvenile delinquents. Instead of learning any anger management skills, he would just hang out with these kids and they taught him how to buy weed and how to steal cars and stuff. [Aubrey laughing] It ended up being this escalation of everything that was going on because of all the group dynamics that were forming. I feel that's kind of a metaphor.

Aubrey: Yeah, I would say that's about right. 

Mike: Can you talk more about your experience in Weight Watchers? What was the narrative arc of you going through this whole process?

Aubrey: Weight Watchers is where I got really good at distinguishing between a half cup of something and a cup of something. There was definitely this very big normalization of binge eating, and Weight Watchers and this constant vigilance was seen as the natural solution. 

Mike: Wow. 

Aubrey: Earlier versions of Weight Watchers also had, like, in our house we had a food scale, like a Weight Watchers branded food scale.

Mike: Oh, they sold Weight Watchers branded foods scales?

Aubrey: Uh-huh. So, people would like weigh their food before they ate it. This was pre like the point system.

Mike: Rough.

Aubrey: I will also say, I grew up around a ton of Boomer ladies who were Weight Watchers devotees. The thinking was diets come and go, but Weight Watchers is the one that's really stood the test of time. It's like Ponds cold cream. Like, “You go get your fancy skincare, whatever. Ponds has been here, it's not flashy, but it gets the job done,” is the vibe at Weight Watchers. What I learned in this research is that lore is really categorically incorrect in some big ways.

Mike: [laughs] First time that's ever happened. 

Aubrey: Shocking.

Mike: A widespread societal understanding of a phenomenon is based on incorrect information.

Aubrey: It's as if one of the people of this podcast has built a career out of debunking. [laughs] 

Mike: If only there was some sort of pithy phrase that we could use for this kind of revelation. 

Aubrey: Your perceptions of Weight Watchers may be incorrect. 

Mike: [laughs] 

Aubrey: Here's what I would say, first, you are unfamiliar with Weight Watchers, Weight Watchers at its core is a low-fat, low-calorie diet. You go to weekly meetings, you pay a weekly membership fee that ranges depending on how you engage at this point, I think, the low end is like $3 a week, the high end is $13 a week. Group leaders are people who have hit their target goal weight and have maintained it for at least six weeks. The belief is that your group leader has done it, so, so can you. They're a “success story” in every room. I want to just start us at the start of Weight Watchers. Are you ready for just like the story of Weight Watchers? 

Mike: Do it. Take me down the WW path.

Aubrey: Delightful. Part of the lore of Weight Watchers was that it was started by this lower middle-class lady, Jean Nidetch was from New York, she is from Queens. She weighed about 210 pounds when a friend of hers mistook her for pregnant.

Mike: Oh.

Aubrey: That was when she decided to go on a sort of drastic once-and-for-all diet.

Mike: I feel that's one of the things, if somebody has an interesting thing about them, like they seem pregnant, you probably should just be like, “Hey, any news?” Or something. [chuckles] Maybe don't go straight for the, “You must be pregnant thing.”

Aubrey: Also, do you need to know? Maybe just skip it.

Mike: Also that.

Aubrey: Jean Nidetch is fatter than she wants to be, she decides to go on a diet. When she talks about how she was eating before going on this diet. What she describes is binge eating disorder. She talks about eating multiple boxes of Mallomars in one sitting.

Mike: What are Mallomars?

Aubrey: Oh, they're like cookies. Cookie candy sort of hybrid.

Mike: Proto-Snackwells. 

Aubrey: Yeah. Except they're not trying to be good for you. She is getting boxes of cookies and hiding them from her family and eating them in secret, and feeling these big waves of shame after she eats them. She's truly just like ticking down the list of diagnostic criteria for binge eating disorder because that's not a framework we had at the time. She thinks, “Well, I'm fat and I need to lose weight,” not, “Uh-oh, something's going on in my brain, and maybe the solution here is a brain thing and not a body thing.”

Mike: That's also an interesting thing of how we talk about on the show a lot, the difference between behavior and weight. You can be alarmed by your binge eating behavior and try to work on that behavior in a way that is not necessarily about weight loss or about seeing yourself as a fundamentally failed person. Losing 20 pounds is not her primary problem right now. That shouldn't necessarily be the goal.

Aubrey: Totally and absolutely. Interestingly, she famously lost 70 pounds. 

Mike: Oh, wow.

Aubrey: She lost her weight, interestingly, through the New York City Board of Health Clinic, which developed a weight loss program and a diet called the Prudent Diet.

Mike: Wait, so this was like a municipal program? This is like socialist weight loss?

Aubrey: It sure was. Yeah. 

Mike: Okay. 

Aubrey: It was developed by the Board of Health. It included a support group element. The diet itself is like extremely early 60s. That's when all of this is happening. 

Mike: Just like breakfast, aspic. Lunch, aspic. At dinner, it's like crab cocktail. 

Aubrey: [laughs] It is fish five times a week, and two glasses of skimmed milk a day, and whole wheat bread. Basically, she went through this whole program. She lost 70 pounds using this program, but she didn't like how their group leader ran the group. She started running it out of her living room with other people, predominantly women trying to lose weight, and she started charging people.

Mike: Wait, so is this a story of private sector “innovation” that’s actually just a person stealing an idea from the public sector?

Aubrey: 100%. 

Mike: Like, how tech people and Silicon Valley keep accidentally inventing buses?

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: What if Uber but if it was like lots of people at once?

Aubrey: Yeah, that's exactly right. So, basically, she lifts the Prudent Diet whole cloth, and copies a bunch of their materials and runs the support groups out of her house, just using the exact diet that she got for free from the New York City Board of Health Clinic.

Mike: But she's a better camp counselor or whatever. 

Aubrey: [chuckles] Totally, yeah. The business takes off like wildfire. By 1967, so just four years in, she has over 100 franchises in the US and Canada and Puerto Rico, in Israel, in the UK and that same year, their franchises reached 43 of the 50 states.

Mike: This is what we're always saying. Fat people are a massively underserved market. People are leaving money on the table, not thinking of fat people as an actual consumer demographic.

Aubrey: Totally. Around the same time, they publish the first Weight Watchers cookbook. There have been many since then. It sold 1.5 million copies in 1966, which is humongo.

Mike: Like half of the sales of what we don't talk about when we talk about fat. 

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: Half to one-third.

Aubrey: How dare you?

Mike: One quarter, yes.

Aubrey: The 60s also saw the launch of Weight Watchers branded foods, spas, scales, and fat camps. 

Mike: Oh, [laughs] that's dark. The scales are dark, but then it got even darker. 

Aubrey: Yeah, so Weight Watchers fully operated fat camps for kids. In my notes, it says, “Fuck all the way off.” 

[laughter] 

Aubrey: Interestingly, the 70s rolled around and Weight Watchers starts to shift its approach. It talks less about dieting and more about eating skills. They also branch out, they no longer stick just to the Prudent Diet, they start coming up with different eating plans for different members. They now have these tailored eating plans as the way that they talk about it. This is the beginning of a trend that will continue with Weight Watchers where they keep trying to adapt to popular thinking about food and eating and dieting. That means that they change their formula for a bit.

Mike: Which also gets us to this eventual dropping of weight from the name too. They're basically surfing on whatever the diet trend is at the time. They're just incorporating it into what they're already doing.

Aubrey: Pretty much. During the same time, the 60s and 70s, Jean becomes more and more of a celebrity. She is gorgeous, she's glamorous, she's now thin. She is famously very good friends with Maya Angelou.

Mike: Not the cameo I was expecting in this episode. [laughs] 

Aubrey: Fucking me neither, man. It's so weird. 

Mike: Yeah.

Aubrey: I'm not spoiling anything to say that Jean has since passed away. So, I'm going to read you a little quote from the New York Times obituary for Jean. “In 1973, 16,000 Weight Watchers jammed Madison Square Garden for the group's 10th anniversary. It was like a revival. Bob Hope, Pearl Bailey and Roberta Peters were there, but the star in a drift of white chiffon was Mrs. Nidetch. A combination Cinderella and Aimee Semple McPherson, with her own evangelical message. Overeating is an emotional problem with an emotional solution. She looked as if she had never eaten a cookie in her life.” 

Mike: She kept the weight off the rest of her life. 

Aubrey: She sure did. Famously, she actually died at her goal weight.

Mike: Her explanation for that was her getting the emotional eating under control. 

Aubrey: Yep. Through this sort of support group set up, but not through treatment of an eating disorder. Jean stays involved in the company until the 80s-ish. In 1979, she sells the company to Heinz Ketchup. Heinz Ketchup fully owned Weight Watchers for 20 years from 1979 to 1999 until they sell it to a group of investors who had just made all of their money off of, no joke, a sugar factory.

[laughter] 

Mike: I can just see your face when you found this out, Aubrey.

Aubrey: I was so delighted, the Heinz Ketchup one, ketchup nowhere on any diet.

Mike: Ketchup is basically a red milkshake.

Aubrey: It's just high fructose corn syrup as far as I can tell. Which is fine, have ketchup. If you want ketchup, have ketchup. 

Mike: But then I also think there's something in here about capitalism too, that in these, I don't know, big conglomerates that by up a bunch of companies and spin them off and sell them and merge them whatever. They're content neutral. They don't actually care whether they own a sugar factory or a weight loss company. It's just profit and loss margins.

Aubrey: That's exactly right. The company that now owns Weight Watchers is called Invus, which is short for “Invest in the US.” It's a family of “Belgian sugar barons” according to Forbes. This is what they say about Invus. “Private equity firm Invus is essentially the family office of Eric Wittouck, a descendant of Belgian sugar barons, who now lives in Monaco and spends most of his time exploring the world in his 164-foot luxury yacht, The EXUMA, which includes an amphibious car. Wittouck who's 72 is worth an estimated $7.6 billion.”

Mike: He's just straightforwardly a James Bond villain. 

Aubrey: [laughs] Yeah, absolutely.

Mike: That's what we're dealing with here. 

Aubrey: He is investment manager apparently saw value in Weight Watchers because of the ways in which it had so many repeat users because people would lose weight, they would dropout, they would come back, they would lose weight again, they'd stall out. Part of the appeal of Weight Watchers, it is this constant state of being. And that's how Weight Watchers sells it, is there just it's forever. This is how you manage how you eat.

Mike: Which is the same as every consumer product, like people buy Pringles because they like Pringles and they eat Pringles habitually, which is fine. But then, Pringles isn't promising to get you to never eat chips again. This represents the complete failure of the reason that Weight Watchers exists, that indicates that maybe they don't have the secret to weight loss figured out.

Aubrey: We're going to backtrack a little tiny bit and start talking about a thing that I wasn't fully tracking before doing this research, is that Weight Watchers has been in pretty severe financial trouble for a while. They'll lose a million subscribers in a couple of quarters, that's kind of really significant hits.

Mike: Is this why they dropped the full name because they couldn't afford all those letters anymore? 

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: Like we're trimming fat, we're down to WW. 

Aubrey: That challenge, the financial troubles that they're in, starts in earnest in the 1990s when the field starts to become more crowded. There are other diets, there are other sort of fads, but in terms of enduring corporate phases of weight loss, Weight Watchers is the main deal. In the 90s, Jenny Craig joins the fray. 

Mike: Oh, yeah. 

Aubrey: [crosstalk] Nutrisystem.

Mike: Future episode, future episode, future episode. 

Aubrey: [laughs] Yeah. According to Forbes, in 2012 Weight Watchers stock was $80 per share, by 2015 it was less than $4 per share. 

Mike: Oh, wow. 

Aubrey: They lose about 7% of their subscribers in 2014. They generally don't have men participating in Weight Watchers at the same level.

Mike: Oh, yeah. I forgot about men. What do you think actually explains it, though? Why do you think it just stopped being successful in the 90s?

Aubrey: I do think they were not very good at running a fucking business. 

Mike: Oh, okay. [chuckles] 

Aubrey: It genuinely sounds like, “Oh, what we're surprised that there might be competition.” They were resting on their laurels, that's the impression that I've gotten from the research. They also get caught off guard in the early 2010s when people start getting smartphones. Suddenly, there's this new flood of competitors. That's when we get MyFitnessPal. That's when we start getting all of the like Cronometer. That’s when we start getting all of these like diet apps. 

Mike: Right. Counting steps, going to Chipotle, counting calories. 

Aubrey: Making copies, that’s right.

Mike: I went on a single date with a guy who's a data scientist, who specifically studies fitness apps and he said one of the central problems with these apps is that it's much harder to calculate the calories for foods that you make at home. If you're making a salad at home, it's like nobody wants to weigh out ounce by ounce, all the sort of those three walnuts that you put in. It's a massive pain. Whereas if you go to Panera Bread, the calories are right there on the menu. A lot of people that have these fitness apps or these sort of points system like any quantification of their diet and exercise, it actually pushes them toward eating more fast food and eating more packaged foods and eating out more and anytime you eat out, it's generally going to be less healthy than when you eat at home.

Aubrey: Yeah, totally. Weight Watchers is continuing to take these big hits. In one quarter alone, they lose 600,000 subscribers. And that's when they start making big moves to try and get more again, like lifelong members. That is their language. That is how they talk about their approach. As their stock continues to tank, they start making really big, bold, and I would argue, extremely shitty choices.

Mike: When companies get desperate, this is when they get extra unethical.

Aubrey: Their first big weird play for new members happens in 2018. Weight Watchers announced that it was going to start offering free six-week memberships to teens as young as 13. 

Mike: Nice. 

Aubrey: Do you know any 13-year-olds, currently?

Mike: Absolutely not. 

[laughter] 

Mike: It would be so weird if I was like, “Yes, I know, Jenny. I know Tom. I know Steve.” No.

Aubrey: I just mean, like, I have a niece, that's what I'm thinking of, I have a niece who is 13.

Mike: Just hanging out at playgrounds, saying hi to the kids.

Aubrey: Gay man hanging out alone near some teens. 

Mike: Just an effeminate man in his 30s. 

[laughter] 

Mike: Introducing myself to the neighborhood children. I do have a niece, but she is seven.

Aubrey: Oh God, we'll get to your niece's age group in a minute. 

Mike: Jesus Christ.

Aubrey: The reason that I ask about whether or not you know a 13-year-old is like, I know fucking 13-year-olds, and I would be so fucking heartbroken if they started on Weight Watchers, not just because of my politics, but just because of you know that this is the long death march toward a lifelong path of just hating your body and wishing you looked different. If we can just delay the onset of that, that would be great. Weight Watchers, meanwhile, is aggressively marketing specifically to those kids and there is this really strong response. The National Eating Disorders Association issues a statement, a big public statement. They say, “In a large study of 14-and-15-year-olds, dieting was the most important predictor of developing an eating disorder.” They also say in that same statement, “That teens who diet are twice as likely to become fat, regardless of the size that they start at.” Trying to lose weight generally leads folks to gain weight. What they're saying is like, “You're also saying you're trying to get kids thin, but this is going to make them fat,” can you not.

Mike: It's also really pouring gasoline on hormonal fires at that age too, where kids are really, if you're 13, 14, 15, you're like, just going through puberty, you're in adolescence, you're just becoming aware of yourself as having looks and being judged on your looks. So much of sort of the experience of puberty is discovering self-consciousness. I remember when I was 13, my parents told me I couldn't wear sweatpants to school anymore and I was devastated. I was, “What do you mean?” 

[laughter] 

Mike: Because literally, I had not thought about the fact that other people would be assessing my appearance. That was not something that occurred to me. I'm being way too universalistic here, but in general self-consciousness is something that is a big part of puberty. When kids are in, they're literally discovering how to feel self-conscious. Throwing in your looks aren't good enough at that age, you're just unleashing Godzilla into a Walmart at that point.

Aubrey: Totally. This is the John Mulaney horse in a hospital bed. It's already going to be bad and you are hastening that and deepening [crosstalk] that in ways that are totally unnecessary. 

Mike: And then those kids are going to end up 38 years old and still mad about the fact that they can't wear sweatpants in public anymore.

Aubrey: Or 37 years old and still mad that they had to go to fucking Weight Watchers.

Mike: Or that for example. Yes. 

Aubrey: Yeah, hypothetically. The National Eating Disorders Association releases this big response, “You don't have doctors working with kids. You're not screening for eating disorders.” And here is Weight Watchers’ response. Are you ready? 

Mike: Give it to me. 

Aubrey: “Last week, we shared the future vision of Weight Watchers including some changes we were making to bring health and wellness to all, not just the few. As part of that, we announced that we would open WW to teams for free. We know that the teen years are a critical life stage and opening WW to teens with consent from a parent or guardian is about families getting healthier, not dieting. We have and will continue to talk with healthcare professionals as we get ready to launch this program.

Mike: It's so 'Biggest Loser' trying to disguise a literal weight loss competition as some sort of form of empowerment. It's literally called Weight Watchers. You're there to focus exclusively on your weight. It's not like Cholesterol Reading Watchers. 

Aubrey: Yeah, that's right and they're recasting dieting as some kind of like radical accessibility thing, “We're the champions of the people. We believe that wellness belongs to everyone, not just the few.” That's not just the few statements, I'm like, “What the fuck? Are you Robin Hood?” 

Mike: It's also I love the thing where people repackage the most fucking normie conventional wisdom as somehow forbidden knowledge. The idea that people need to lose weight to be healthier is the most widespread societal belief imaginable. There're things like, “It's only the elites that are trying to lose weight.” It's like, no, that's literally the majority of the population at any given time believes that it is healthier to be thin. You are not saying something that's going against the elite consensus. You're literally just repackaging the elite consensus. 

Aubrey: Totally. None of this is new. 

Mike: Yeah. 

Aubrey: Also, you're not new. This is what you've been doing since time immemorial. If you believed in the wellness for all, not just the few, then make your whole fucking program free. I don't know, man. This is also where we get into some of the shortcomings of this “support group model.” Growing up it seemed like one of the parts about Weight Watchers that was sort of beyond reproach. Actually, the data on these kinds of “support group” spaces is super not good.

Mike: Oh, yeah?

Aubrey: It's bad enough that there is a term for it. Psychologists call it 'normative discontent.' 

Mike: Oh, does that mean a bunch of people just like wallowing in their sadness together?

Aubrey: Mm-hmm. Specifically around their negative body image. 

Mike: [gasps] It's like fucking incels. That's totally what it is.

Aubrey: Totally. It's the ways in which people and again particularly women bond over disliking their bodies. “Oh my God, my thighs are so fat. Nobody wants to see my thighs.” And then someone else will go, “Your thighs look great. You look amazing. I look like shit. Look at this double chin.” Those are the conversations. Researchers call it fat talk, which is not my favorite because that's not totally what's happening there but okay. As of 2011, 93% of women reported engaging in social quote “fat talk,” which they define as this practice of like expressing dissatisfaction with their own size or talking about “feeling fat.” People who engage regularly in those conversations have lower body satisfaction rates. They're at more risk for disordered eating, for fat people who are part of those conversations and on the receiving end from thinner women. It often registers as an insult because they're like, “You're listening to a thinner person talk about how disgusting and fat they are.” And you're like, “What the fuck? I'm right here. What do you think of me then?” That's also borne out in the research. There's quite a bit of research that's just like, “If you think you are fat, then what do you think of me?” Yikes. 

Mike: Oh, my God, can I scratch like a decade long itch right now? 

Aubrey: Yes. 

Mike: Do you remember when Britney Spears was on-- What was it the VMAs or something and she had a snake around her neck, remember? 

Aubrey: Uh-huh. Yeah. 

Mike: She gave a really lackluster performance. A lot of the discussion of why her performance is lackluster was that she was fat and she had like a bare midriff or whatever. And they're like, “How far Britney has fallen.” I remember looking at the footage and being like, “She is smaller than two thirds of American women. She's still extremely small.” It just felt reading people talk about somebody with a body like that as irredeemably fat, just felt it would be so fucking damaging to the population. They're like you're looking at the photo and then you're looking at the rhetoric about the photo and you're like, “Oh, this is how most women look and we're being really mean to her.”

Aubrey: Totally, totally. The research bears out also exactly what you're saying about that. There's some research into college students of all genders. They found that positive body image and positive body talk were linked to greater optimism, higher self-esteem, stronger relationships, and higher sexual satisfaction, stronger relationships. All of that kind of stuff sort of comes together. 

Mike: Just orgasms, constantly having orgasms. 

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: Nice jacket. [moans] 

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: Yes, satisfied, happy, depression is gone. I love it. 

Aubrey: Also, if you looked at any of the data about how often are straight women having orgasms, it's a real fucking bleak. 

Mike: Oh, really?

Aubrey: I'm like anything that helps them, oh, my God, it's so bad dude.

Mike: Digression. Take me on this digression. What does the data say?

Aubrey: Oh, I haven’t done the deep dive into the research, but every few years, there's a big story that's like, “We know more about the orgasm gap.” And it's basically like, “Lesbians and bi women are having great sex. Women who exclusively have sex with men are having shitty sex and many of them are never experiencing an orgasm.”

Mike: That's really rough. 

Aubrey: It's so rough. It's basically, like, “All men are having good sex. Gay and bisexual women are having great sex. Straight women are fucked and not in a way that they like.”

Mike: Sometimes you hear these findings from research and you're like, “Why aren't we talking about this all the time every day?” [laughs]

Aubrey: It's so rough.

Mike: It seems like a huge deal. Just like women are not having great sex like as a population. [laughs] 

Aubrey: There's also a bunch of data that's just like, “A bunch of women who are in long-term relationships or who are consistently dating and sleeping with people or whatever report never having experienced an orgasm.” 

Mike: Oh, my God. 

Aubrey: Of course, asexual people exist. People who are not driven by sex exist, like all of the stuff is true. Also, there is a group of people who are desiring of orgasms and not getting them. This feels such a weird shitty window into how straight people talk or don't talk about sex, like how much isn't negotiated or even spoken.

Mike: What you're saying is this wallowing effect is in some way a contributing factor. The more self-conscious you are about your body, the less likely you are to have orgasms? 

Aubrey: They don't necessarily talk about orgasms in the research. What they talk about is sexual satisfaction, how would you rate your satisfaction with your sex life? That actually makes some more room. There are people who were like, “I don't have sex and I'm satisfied with that, 10."

Mike: Look, Aubrey, some of us are extremely mediocre at sex and very fine about it. Some of us are lazy, selfish lovers.

Aubrey: [laughs] Basically, people who engage in this kind of fat talk have significantly weaker romantic relationships and friendships. Relationships of all stripes are weakened by this. It really does seem to have this weird pervasive impact on folks’ lives. Weight Watchers is a place that has systematized and participated in the popularization of this phenomenon. If you have rooms full of people who were at these Weight Watchers meetings, talking about all the ways they want their bodies to be different, talking about all the ways in which their lives will just fall into place when they lose weight, they are reaching millions of subscribers over the years, it's hard to imagine that that hasn't somehow increased the social expectation and ritual.

Mike: But so, help me understand how these meetings actually work because what is the content of one of these meetings? What does it actually look like? 

Aubrey: My recollection from being there as a kid was that people would have space to share where they were at, you would talk about shared strategies for hard situations. If Thanksgiving was coming up, you would talk about, “What do you do on Thanksgiving?” A lot of it was also just space for people to grieve their body's not being what they wanted them to be. A lot of space for people to indulge in this total magical thinking that was like, “When I lose weight, my marriage will heal itself.” “When I lose weight, I will get this promotion for my job.” That it becomes the sort of peg that people hang all of their hopes on. It fortifies their commitment to weight loss, but also it deepens the despair, I think, that people feel when they don't lose weight. That's what it did for me. Again, speaking only for myself. That's where we get all this data that's like, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's something 30% of American women say that they would rather become an alcoholic or walk away from their relationships than get fat. 

Mike: I mean it depends on the relationships. But, yes, because these women are not having orgasms, Aubrey. Keep in mind.

Aubrey: [chuckles] Totally, yeah.

Mike: This is yet another reason why fucking 11-year-olds, 13-year-olds should not be in these groups, is because you're also the meta message that you're getting is that your weight is central to who you are. If you're, whatever, you're larger than you'd like to be or something that doesn't actually have to be seen as a central failing. You can focus on getting into a super dope college, reading 50 books a year, or there's all kinds of other things that you can be focusing on, and that you can make central to your life. But you're just reinforcing this message that your weight is who you are.

Aubrey: Yeah, totally. This is also a stream of thought in feminist circles, being constantly engaged in dieting and weight loss is part of how women disengage from fighting for their own rights and expecting better of the world around them, that it's placates women and distracts us is the thinking.

Mike: What they should be mad about is the lack of orgasm. 

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: There should be people with picket signs outside of men's houses at all times. 

Aubrey: Around the same time that Weight Watchers introduces this free membership for teens business, they also announced interestingly that they're going to stop using before and after photos in their ads, which is legitimately big deal. Their CEO, Mindy Grossman goes into the press and is talking to them about this shift away from before and after pictures. What she says at this, “What I find is that people want to know about the journey. They want to know what people are experiencing. They want to know how it relates to their own life. When I talk to people who have had an incredible experience with Weight Watchers, whether they have lost 10 pounds or 200 pounds, the consistent thing they are saying, is how it made them feel versus how it made them look.” They're saying, “We're not going to use these photos, but also it's not about how you look, it's just about how you feel and you feel better when you look better.” We're like, “Okay, fine.” 

Mike: I have their website in front of me. It's just all a bunch of people who are thin and playing with their kids and exercising and doing happy stuff, but there's not a lot of representation of actual fat people. The project is not to humanize fat people necessarily. It's like, “Let's get you thin.”

Aubrey: It's not like, “Look at all these fat people eating healthy foods and doing whatever and whatever size they end up, it is fine.” They're still very clear that they are Weight Watchers. Interestingly 2018 is the same time that they changed their name to WW. Their tagline at the time was “Wellness that works.” They launch an incentive program called “Wellness Wins.” And it feels like this microcosm of a larger trend that you and I have talked about, which is this search and replace that searches for weight loss and replaces it with wellness. But everything else is exactly the same. It's now just coded language for weight loss. When we talk about “wellness,” what we're still talking about on some level is weight loss but it feels more aspirational than just weight loss. So, it feels more neutral or empowering or something to people. When it is truly just, “Diets, just change their clothes.”

Mike: I guess the idea is, you're skipping the middleman because the rhetoric around weight loss is you must lose weight to be healthy. Now, instead of saying you must lose weight, you're saying you must be healthy. The way to be healthy is to lose weight. The same message is embedded in there.

Aubrey: That's exactly right. The next year, just after this rebrand after the free membership for teens, Weight Watchers makes another big wild swing. They acquire an app, a smartphone app called Kurbo. Did you hear anything about Kurbo? 

Mike: Kurbo? No, never heard of it. 

Aubrey: It is an app that is designed and marketed towards kids as young as eight. 

Mike: [laughs] Fuck, it's like cartoon evil. 

Aubrey: It's so fucking dark, dude. My niece is 13, my nephew is nine. When I think about either of them engaging in these programs, it makes me want to cry, barf and punch all at once. Once again, because there had been this almost trial run of backlash to the free teen memberships. You can imagine when they're like, “Anyway, now we're getting younger.” Like the same group of people.

[laughter] 

Aubrey: Like had a fucking freak-out. Fuck off, eight-year-olds? 

Mike: I feel they only did it to take away the backlash from the teenagers. They're like let’s get them [crosstalk] to not be pissed off by the 13-year-olds, [crosstalk] years-old in there, and then everybody's going to forget about the other stuff.

Aubrey: Yeah, be pissed off about this other garbage. Once again, NEDA, the National Eating Disorder Association releases a specific statement on this. They asked them to pull the app. There's even an organization in the UK called Obesity UK. And they're like, “This app is irresponsible,” is what they say publicly, and I'm like, “Fuck, man.” If the obesity epidemic “organizations” are like, “Your app is irresponsible,” like, Jesus.

Mike: Even the institutional fat phobia institutions are like, “Let's slow down.” [chuckles] 

Aubrey: Things have turned around a little tiny bit for Weight Watchers, but then it has returned to this downturn. Basically, the single biggest boon to Weight Watchers success today is Oprah Winfrey.

Mike: Really?

Aubrey: In 2015, Oprah bought a 10% stake in the company. 

Mike: Oh.

Aubrey: After that happens, the company breaks the one-million-member mark that they've been looking at, their profits shoot up about 20%. The Oprah effect is huge. It's not the program. It's just Oprah but even with the Oprah effect, they start losing subscribers again by the end of that year. 

Mike: Do we know why?

Aubrey: The way that I read all of this and this is just my own assumptions, is Oprah brings you a big new bump of people, it brings you a ton of Oprah loyalists, lovely people remembering their spirits, and they still have the same functional problems with Weight Watchers that they've always had. They got a big boost of people and then I suspect they had attrition at a similar rate that they normally do but because that initial boost was so big, the attrition looks huge too. When they get Oprah, they also get the Vision 2020 tour. Have you and I talked about Vision 2020?

Mike: Vision 2020? No. 

Aubrey: Oh, my God, Mike. In 2020, before we knew that 2020 was garbage, in January and February, Oprah does this national tour. It's about how to become your best self and how to set your goals for the year, and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. But ultimately, it is sponsored by Weight Watchers. 

Mike: Oh, God.

Aubrey: At one point they have NYPD officers or New York Fire Department officers, who get up on stage and they're like, “We all did Weight Watchers and here's how much weight we lost.” Julianne Hough, who's on Dancing with the Stars comes on and does her like weird, I can't remember what it's called.

Mike: Tango, salsa.

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: What did she do?

Aubrey: It's not dancing. It's some combination of energy work. It's like Reiki plus yoga plus cardio kind of thing.

Mike: That's less cool than salsa.

Aubrey: Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, The Rock. It's a very bizarre thing to have this weight loss tour and have all of these people who are famously thin.

Mike: Do not take diet and exercise advice from The Rock. If you learn nothing from this show, do not. Have you seen those Men's Health articles where they walk you through what he eats in a day? 

Aubrey: Listen, man, sometimes the guy just wants to eat 17 pounds of cod. 

Mike: That's the thing. It's 7:30 AM dried cod and a handful of peanuts. 9:30 more cod and a bowl of yogurt with nothing on it, and then 10:00 cod. Whatever you're doing in your life, do not emulate the fucking Rock, man. 

Aubrey: I love fish. I'm a major seafood person, and I absolutely saw that and I was like, “This is upsetting.” 

Mike: It's so upsetting. [laughs] Oh, my God.

Aubrey: Here's where we get into the research around the effectiveness of Weight Watchers. Johns Hopkins does some research and they found that Weight Watchers participants lost 3% to 5% more than a control group. It's a real nominal. 

Mike: Ooh. That's like four extra pounds. 

Aubrey: There's one other study that gets a ton of big splashy headlines that are like, “Weight Watchers is twice as effective.” This is a big get Weight Watchers loves pointing to this study. But the actual numbers in the study are not that impressive. After a full year, people in standard medical care lost five pounds and people on Weight Watchers lost 11 pounds. Dude, I am 350 pounds, 11 pounds makes me 339 pounds. I am not 'no longer fat.'

Mike: Yeah, always beware of relative statistics. I remember a friend of mine who worked at a smalltown newspaper, got a press release from a church saying, it was the fastest growing church in the city that he lived in. It added 50% to his congregation over the course of one year, which was totally unprecedented. And then he looked into it and they went from 8 people to 12 people. 

[laughter] 

Mike: It still fits within a minivan.

Aubrey: Totally. 

Mike: Also, Weight Watchers has before and after photos on their website by the way. They have what are called member stories. I've got three of them. The three that they featured on their website, one of them a woman loses 108 pounds, another is a couple who lost a combined 91 pounds. And another is, a woman who lost 89 pounds. Before and after stories that they're featuring in their marketing is not 11 pounds.

Aubrey: That's right. They're still projecting out, “This could be you, you could be the 91 pounds person.”

Mike: Oh wait. Although, I should say in the headline of all of these stories, there's an asterisk after pounds. 

[laughter] 

Aubrey: What?

Mike: It says, “Alicia 32, has lost 89 pounds*." Then when you go to the page, you have to click on the headline and then the asterisk says, “People following the WW program can expect to lose one to two pounds a week.” So, that's good disclaimer and then it says, “Alicia lost weight on a prior program and is continuing on my Weight Watchers.” The weight loss that they're advertising on their website was literally from another diet. [laughs] 

Aubrey: I truly was really hoping that you're going to be, like, “This person lost 89 pounds,” and then the asterisk was like British Pound sterling.

Mike: Oh, my God. 

[chuckles] 

Aubrey: This person lost like 180 bucks [crosstalk] to a dumb diet that didn't work. 

Mike: That's on you for thinking we're talking about weight. 

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: We never said weight. 

Aubrey: Again, it's really hard to study the effectiveness of this because of how many times its formula has changed. These are the years when Weight Watchers changed with their plan. You're ready?

Mike: Hmm.

Aubrey: They changed their plan in 1963, 1979, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2017. As time goes on, the plan is changing more and more and more.

Mike: Yeah, you can really smell the desperation with those last few. 

Aubrey: Totally. When people talk about, “Weight Watchers is the one that really works. It's the one that stood the test of time.” I'm like, “Has it?” It seems like it has changed a lot. 

Mike: Man, we're really coming up with, “Now that's what I call Maintenance Phase themes.” 

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: So much what we talk about is just capitalistic solutions to public health issues are doomed. They're disguised as solutions, but they exist to enrich shareholders.

Aubrey: Yes. And they're not doing things that are like, “This will help you manage your blood sugar.” They're trying to solve the problem of like, “Why are there so many fat people?” I fundamentally don't think that is a public health problem. I think that's a kind of person who exists in the world.

Mike: Using that as this perfect proxy for health.

Aubrey: Absolutely.

Mike: They're bragging about Alicia, who seems nice, losing 89 pounds, but they're not talking about like Alicia's cholesterol levels or resting heart rate or like, what's going on in her life? What is she able to do? What is her income allow her to do? There's no broader context of the individual.

Aubrey: Totally. Listen, if it were not going to be ugly as sin, I would 100% leave this podcast record and immediately make a, “Now that's what I call Maintenance Phase,” logo t-shirt.

[laughter] 

Aubrey: But I don't think anybody wants that logo on t-shirt. 

Mike: No one wants that graphic design back. 

Aubrey: It's so ugly, but I'm very delighted by, “Now that's what I call Maintenance Phase.” 

Mike: What are our concluding thoughts, Aubrey? What do you want to leave us with?

Aubrey: A lot of people have a strong, fond, or positive feelings about Weight Watchers. This sense that it is the thing that works, the thing that has stood the test of time, all of that kind of stuff, honestly, I had the some of those assumptions going into this research. What I have found is that that's just not true. What I found was, “This business that's really struggling with a business model that doesn't really seem to work with people that maybe lose a little bit more weight, but there's no evidence that they keep it off. They just keep people tithing to Weight Watchers.” In a funny way, I have a friend who's in public health world, she'll talk about her favorite viruses as being the ones that are sophisticated enough to keep their host alive. Weight Watchers is kind of a sophisticated version of a diet. They keep you engaged effectively in a way that other diets don't necessarily. That's more a testament to their ability to keep consumers engaged than it is a testament to their ability to help people actually lose weight.

Mike: You respect Weight Watchers the way you respect a tapeworm. 

Aubrey: [blows raspberry] [laughs] 

Mike: Nature has designed you for a purpose and you fulfill that purpose. 

Aubrey: They have done a good job of hitting home this lifetime member thing and getting people to identify with the lifetime member thing. 

Mike: It's such a missed opportunity because fat people really do need support. Maybe your spouse doesn't understand what you're going through, maybe your boss doesn't understand what you're going through. You need other people that share that experience. But instead, it became something that was just another avenue for people to feel shitty about themselves. And so that to me is the huge bummer, if people were getting together in each other's houses on Wednesday nights, they could have passed some cool laws, they could have radicalized each other, they could have done all kinds of really cool stuff, and it just didn't happen. 

Aubrey: They could have shared skills around like, what do you say when people give you shit about what you're eating? 

Mike: How do you push back on dickheads? Yes.

Aubrey: But because they're sort of centered around this idea that your body is changeable and it's your responsibility to change it. Not only did it not go down the road that you're talking about, it actually pushes folks, I think, further away from that road by saying, “Your body can change. It's your responsibility to change it. Therefore, this is in no way a legitimate identity. You shouldn't form relationships with other fat people because you're not going to be fat. They're going to be sad and fat, you're going to be happy and cool and thin. Please only think of your body as a pitstop on the way to your ultimate destiny of becoming a thin person.” It is a big part of the fantasy of a lot of restrictive eating disorders. 

Mike: Yeah. Also, in all of those groups the whole time they could have been talking about how to give each other more orgasms. 

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Mike: Who are the men in your life? Why aren't they delivering?

Aubrey: Look man, if they had Weight Watchers meetings that were like, “Here's how to have great sex as a fat person,” I don't want to tell you how to do your job, Weight Watchers, but come on.

Mike: [laughs] Get in touch.

Aubrey: That is a major gap in the market.

Mike: [laughs] Aubrey is going to be a group leader from now on. 

Aubrey: No, Mike. 

[laughter] 

[Maintenance Phase theme]