Weight Watchers Courted Influencers To Sell Ozempic. Now The Company Is Labeled Fatphobic

Is Weight Watchers a model for solutions-driven capitalism or a corporate empire built on yo-yo dieting?

Weight Watchers held a retreat for body positive influencers last month in Los Angeles. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported details about the legacy diet chain’s Ozempic party for overweight internet personalities to promote the company’s latest weight-loss venture. The event, called “GLP-1 House,” presented guests with “gift boxes, lectures, an appearance by RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Kim Chi and ample opportunity for photos, videos and collaborative content.”

“But in some body-positive communities, advocating for weight loss is mutually exclusive with a healthy relationship to one’s body,” the Post added. The paper quoted plus-size New York City fashion blogger Sarah Chiwaya who complained that “eradication” of obesity equates to “stigma.”

“There’s so much value in having a safe space from all the body shame and all the pressure to lose weight, and I know firsthand how important it is, so I am very protective of it,” Chiwaya said.

Kiki Monique, an influencer who attended the Weight Watchers retreat highlighted by the Post, also “lost some followers and received a few angry comments.”

“The level of vitriol surprised her,” the Post reported.

Weight Watchers is now grappling with the irony of ostensibly trying to confront the nation’s number one health crisis while engaged with the same corporate actors who stand to profit from an endemic of obesity.

Last year the company purchased Sequence, a year-old telehealth firm to prescribe and sell the new weight-loss injections fundamentally reshaping how we approach obesity. To Pharma, the type 2 diabetes medications used off-label are a lucrative elixir to capitalize on America’s number one health crisis. To activists behind the contemporary pro-fat movement operating under the banner of “Body Positivity,” the latest class of weight-loss drugs represent the offensive suggestion that obesity would be something considered unhealthy to begin with. To these internet warriors fighting for “fat liberation,” obesity is an immutable characteristic, depicted on the victim hierarchy of social justice and not one that anyone ought to be concerned with let alone have the ability to change. So when the marketing executives behind Ozempic and its sister drugs arrived in the inboxes of online influencers, the response was characterized by an emotional outrage.

“Throughout 2023 and now in 2024 I have been offered free Ozempic for weight-loss by influencer marketing companies and others,” Virgie Tovar, another plus-size author and activist wrote in a January Instagram post. The image featured Tovar presenting a white sign reading “I don’t want Ozempic.”

“Shame on the slingers of Ozempic who are targeting advocates for size inclusive fashion and an end to weight based discrimination,” she added, in all caps.

Ash Pryor, a plus-size Peloton instructor, similarly shared her offer on Instagram with a screenshot of the email from one of the drug’s corporate marketing teams captioned, “F*** all the way off!”

Weight Watchers has always been vilified by pro-fat activists as vehemently fatphobic. In her 2018 book, “Body Positive Power,” the British plus-size model and influencer Meghan Jayne Crabbe characterized Weight Watchers as the “diet industry giant” at the center of “convincing people that their bodies aren’t good enough” to become “one of the most profitable businesses in history.” When Weight Watchers rebranded to “WW” the same year to emphasize “wellness” over “weight,” critics claimed the move “won’t help save the company that built its business around fat-shaming.” The negative sentiments were echoed again two-years later by author and podcaster Aubrey Gordon, who spent years writing under the pseudonym “Your Fat Friend.” In her 2020 book, “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat,” Gordon diminished the company’s weight-loss programs as “an induction into diet culture and the weight stigma that bolsters it.” So new charges against Weight Watchers as anathematic to body positivity over the diet giant’s latest weight-loss curriculum featuring expensive pharmaceuticals isn’t anything new.

Is Weight Watchers a model for solutions-driven capitalism or a corporate empire built on yo-yo dieting? The business model suggests the latter. The company’s marketing director wrote in an email to the Washington Post last week that their work with influencers was intended to empower audiences to “reclaim their health” by “bringing healthcare into the living room and providing a safe space free of bias, stigma, [and] shame to discuss their medication experiences.” But for years, Weight Watchers relied on a broken calorie-counting model based on the federal government’s promotion of the low-fat diet. Not only do dietary calories count for virtually nothing, however, but the low-fat diet craze turned into another Big Government mistake. It’s no wonder, then, that Weight Watchers sold lifetime memberships for years. Gordon, i.e., our “Fat Friend,” explained in her 2020 book that “as a fat kid, Weight Watchers was my primary education, and it was by way of points calculation.”

In October, Weight Watchers CEO Sima Sistanti conceded the company’s prior weight-loss remedies were ineffective. “We introduced the shame for people for whom diet and exercise wasn’t enough,” Sistani said. “We want to be the first to say where we got it wrong.”

Now the weight-loss behemoth has bet the company’s future on another weight-loss trend featuring a permanent treatment for a preventable condition which already has a cure. But shares dipped when the decade’s diet pill received criticism as the “easy way out,” by Oprah Winfrey, a top investor and one of America’s most famous dieters who spoke on the same panel seated next to Sistanti.

Winfrey later told the Wall Street Journal her statement was “misconstrued and taken out of context.”

“To be clear, I believe that prescription medications are an important and viable option to consider for people who struggle with weight and health related issues,” Winfrey said. “Every person should be able to choose what wellness and good health means for them without scrutiny, stigma or shame.”

Winfrey later admitted to using the drugs herself with an interview to People Magazine in December.

“The fact that there's a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for,” Winfrey said. “I’m absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself.”

On the other hand, some of the same online influencers who trashed Weight Watchers have been sponsored by corporate food giants to sell health at every size. Tovar, the author of “You Have the Right to Remain Fat,” was promoted by Dove soap’s Campaign for Size Freedom last March. Dove is owned by Unilever, one of the world’s top food processors and the company behind Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Crabbe was also recruited for the corporate campaign to “end body size discrimination” along with the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). Chapter three in Crabbe’s 2018 book is titled, “Dessert Every Damn Day” wherein pursuit of complete nutrition paired with dedication to a healthy lifestyle is itself disparaged as a mental illness.

“The latest trend of clean eating has spawned a whole new eating disorder called orthorexia,” Crabbe wrote, “characterized by an all-consuming need to only eat nutritionally ‘pure’ foods, to the point at which fixating on healthy eating ends up destroying mental health.” In other words, clean eating is a mental disorder, and readers should enjoy tubs of ice cream without restraint.

Links:

Wall Street Journal: Ozempic Is Taking Off With the World’s Largest Obese Population

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