As WeightWatchers scaled up, that model stuck. Back in the 1990s, the last time I tried the program, it was still defined by the element of community. You’d get to your meeting. You’d weigh in at reception. Depending on what the scale said, you’d either celebrate or sulk. And then you’d sit on a folding chair, in a church basement or a bare-bones conference room where your leader (later called your coach) would take you through that week’s lesson, which could be about anything from exercise to nutrition to “finding your why.”
Members could talk about their victories or their challenges, sharing tips and tricks and encouragement. Business trip looming? Birthday party or anniversary dinner ahead? Help was available, from the leader and the rest of the staff members, from the lessons of the program’s success stories and from the fellow members who were still in the trenches, struggling with the temptation to polish off a second slice of sheet cake or to give in to the siren song of the airport Cinnabon.
WeightWatchers meetings were a third space, those increasingly rare places that are not work and are not home. In 1990s Philadelphia, as in the rest of the world, WeightWatchers groups were almost entirely made up of women. But they were otherwise diverse, bound not by race or religion, politics or class, but by a common goal. In recent years, WeightWatchers meetings became one of the all-too-rare places in America where conservatives and progressives found themselves sitting side by side, commiserating about the same plateaus or the same frustrations or the same annoyance that the powers that be had changed the point value of avocados, again.
It wasn’t the diet but the connection — “the gathering, the community” — that was Weight Watcher’s secret sauce, said Zibby Owens, the author, publisher and book influencer who spent some time working as a Weight Watchers leader. “When you lost five pounds you would announce it and get a special bookmark, and everyone would cheer,” she told me this week. “There are so few opportunities to have a room full of people cheer you on for doing anything.”
Recently, Mrs. Owens has been open about her significant GLP-1-fueled weight loss, but she still sees the value of the connection and support that the old-school WeightWatchers meetings provided: “The loss of those meeting rooms is another way that our world today is becoming more disaggregated, more separated.”
