Pioneer in battle of the bulge
AT THE mention of Weight Watchers, what comes to mind? The point value of a doughnut? Folks weighing in and sharing triumphs in a church basement? Chances are, you don’t conjure founder Jean Nidetch, a mid-century housewife who stashed treats in her bathroom and was mistaken for pregnant by a stranger in the grocery store.
Nidetch longed for support on her weight-loss journey and started small, holding the first meeting in her Queens flat.
Before long, she had assumed a larger-than-life presence in her company women needed their husband’s signature to lease office space her charisma, flowing gowns and unabashed love of the limelight. She dated Glenn Ford and Fred Astaire, befriended Bob Hope, tried her hand at Hollywood, moved to Las Vegas (where she traded her food compulsion for a gambling habit), and managed to topple housewife narratives before being phased out of the company, which was sold to Heinz in 1978.
By the time she died in 2015, she’d burned through the $7million she made from the sale.
Nidetch was a pioneer among business executives, a “well-fluencer” well before those existed. Yet, as Marisa Meltzer writes in
literally ended up a footnote in the brand’s lore, her trademark quote (“It’s choice, not chance, that determines your destiny”) etched into the floor of the company’s New York headquarters. “Nidetch is a super complicated, fascinating figure who wasn’t educated. It was easy for her to write herself off as a mascot
Q: Jean mostly managed to maintain her weight loss, but she was never able to relax around food. She insisted dieters refuse their own birthday cakes, and she washed cookies in the sink to make them inedible. That may have seemed quirky in her day, but would probably be considered disordered today, or at the very least, obsessive?
A: Definitely. There’s a scene in the book at an early Weight Watchers meeting when someone is triumphantly describing how she went to a dinner party and brought her own can of mushrooms and weights to weigh out her portion, while everyone else was having creamed spinach. Can you even imagine someone doing that now?
I would be speechless. I would be calling a psychiatrist on their behalf.
Q: Maybe after months of social distancing, our priorities around dinner parties back to them food and more about the company.
A: And you’ll want to eat whatever someone serves you. Nothing sounds better to me than going out for a lovely meal with great friends right now.
Q: Weight Watchers changed its name to WW in 2018 “to reflect its focus on overall health and wellness”. You call it the “least chic diet company”, but it’s one of the most enduring. Could its pivot inclusion of the buzzword “wellness”
A: Weight Watchers is not cool. I always thought about it as a place for people who enjoyed talking about diet swops. None of that appeals to me. But it’s fascinating how it has tried to keep up with diet culture at large. When Jazzercise was all the rage, they were trying to put together their own exercise programme.
Q: The book takes a fascinating look at America’s diet culture. Weight Watchers was founded in 1963, which overlapped with second-wave feminism. Things like the Can Opener Cookbook, packaged foods and fastfood restaurants started to represent freedom for disillusioned housewives
shift.
A: Now we’re so used to the idea of whole foods and farmers markets being progressive and liberating. But it makes sense that to a woman who is bound to the home, all these timesaving measures, like can openers and microwaves and cake mixes, felt like freedom.
Q: You write, “Diet culture and weight loss is directly related to the Protestant work ethic in America”, and “denial, particularly self-denial, is its own kind of pleasure”. You also mention that Ivana Trump once deemed the refusal of food empowering?
A: I think the idea of denial and being elegant are wrapped up together, which seems to be a bit of a class thing. This idea that to be elegant is to say no to things, to minimise – your body definitely goes along with that, as does your diet.
Q: You write a lot about cultural beauty standards and insist they’re endlessly pervasive?
A: You’d have to be a real pioneer to flout all expectations of society. The urge to change how you look, to manipulate beauty, is as old as time.