TOO YOUNG TO DIET?
Weight Watchers is targeting teens with a free program. Some say it could help the youth-obesity epidemic, but others worry it could contribute to lifelong eating disorders
WHEN Weight Watchers announced earlier this month that it would offer free memberships to teens this summer, the backlash was swift.
Eating-disorder treatment center Balance tweeted its frustration, using the hash tag# Wake Up Weight-Watchers and encouraging others to do the same.
Harriet Brown, a Syracuse Uni-- versity professor and author, agreed. “Diets don’t work. Enticing teens into a lifetime of #dieting is like giving cocaine to 10-year-olds: dangerous, destructive, and dumb. #WakeUpWeightWatchers,” she tweeted.
Disappointed dietitians and therapists spoke out about the perils of teaching teens to diet.
The company’s announcement — and the reaction to it — highlights a larger rift in how people approach dieting and weight loss. Nearly one in five American school-age children is obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control — a percentage that has more than tripled since the 1970s — and teens lead increasingly sedentary lives. But, at the same time, a movement against dieting has exploded in recent years, as studies have shown that food restriction rarely has positive results, and that weight isn’t as strong an indicator of health as previously believed. Even Weight Watchers has shied away from identifying as a diet brand, shifting its focus from low-calorie foods and body mass indexes to an emphasis on fruits and vegetables and body positivity. However, critics still worry that offering the program to teens could
have serious unintended consequences.
“We know that adolescence is a prime time for the onset of disordered eating, and we know that dieting and weight-talk can be major predictors of both eating disorders and obesity,” Claire Mysko, the CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association, tells The Post. “We also hear regularly from our community, from people who are struggling, that dieting was a trigger for them.”
Stacie Sherer, senior vice president of corporate communications at Weight Watchers, says that the company hasn’t finalized what a teenage membership will look like, and that the company is working closely with adolescent-obesity experts. She couldn’t say whether the free program for teens will include long-standing Weight Watchers methods, such as setting a goal weight, weekly weigh-ins and keeping track of food choices using points.
“We’re formulating and firming up the details,” Sherer tells The Post. (Teens are currently allowed to sign up and pay for the standard adult version of Weight Watchers.)
But, experts say the idea of marketing any form of weight-based education to teens is risky business.
“My first reaction was: This must be a joke,” says Katy Weber, a health coach, anti-dieting activist and former Weight Watchers devotee. She worries that the diet’s point system will stop teens from developing their own understanding of which foods make them feel good, and which don’t. “Once you start to believe that there’s a program that will tell you how to eat, that’s when you start to lose the sense of your body’s intuitive relationship with food,” she says.
Brooklyn-based registered dietitian Christy Harrison agrees.
“I think teaching teens about nutrition is a good thing, if they can be taught in a way that’s not steeped in diet culture,” she says. “[But] Weight Watchers comes with all this baggage. There are fundamental principles of nutrition there that may be valuable, but there’s so much cluttering it.”
And, she says that the company’s motivation isn’t just to help overweight young people. It’s also to hook people for life.
“It’s smart of them from a marketing perspective, because usually, people’s first [diets work for a while]. For a lot of people, their body’s natural defenses against weight loss haven’t kicked in yet,” says Harrison. “Then they’ll see rebound weight gain, rebound binge-eating, and they’ll say, ‘If I could just get back to following the plan like I did in the beginning, I’ll be fine.’”
But Dr. Christopher Bolling, chair of the section on obesity at the American Academy of Pediatrics, sees it as a positive in terms of development.
“Weight Watchers [is a] good [partner] in terms of obesit,y and we have clamored for [it] to enter this market for years,” Bolling told The Post earlier this month. “I think there is potential for this program, because learning about good nutrition is very appropriate.”
Alex Tritto, a 23-year-old who first joined Weight Watchers at age 17, says she didn’t get an education about how to eat properly on the company’s plan. In college, that became an issue.
“I had no idea how to track anything that was complicated, which was 90 percent of the food [in the dining halls],” says the Upper East Sider, who works in publishing. “I’d think, ‘I should just eat from the salad bar because I know how to track that.’ ”
She hit a breaking point when she reached her goal weight of 130 pounds. That qualified her for a free “lifetime membership,” as long as she kept her weight consistent for and attended monthly check-ins.
“The next week, I came in and weighed 127 pounds, and they took that lifetime membership away from me,” she says. “I was like, wait, what?” (In order to gain lifetime membership, members cannot fluctuate more than two pounds from their goal weight for the first six weeks after meeting their goal.)
So she decided to try to eat normally for a week, but found that she was 10 pounds heavier at her next weigh-in. She called her mom, hysterical, and ended up needing to be escorted to the campus counseling center, and then back to her home in Manhattan. She spent the next semester struggling with anorexia while living at home and attending Hunter College. Over the summer, she had to seek inpatient treatment.
She doesn’t think Weight Watchers was the sole cause for her eating disorder, but she worries that focusing too much on weight goals might push teens into dangerous territory, as it did for her. She cautions that the need to shed pounds can be hard to shake, and that even though she’s in a healthier place now, she still struggles with eating and body-image issues.
She says: “Once you start thinking about food and exercise in this way, it can so easily take over.”
“Adolescence is a prime time for the onset of disordered eating.” — Claire Mysko, the CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association