Jean Nidetch

Previously overweight housewife who founded of the Weight Watchers empire

Jean Nidetch, diet company entrepreneur. Born: 12 October, 1923, in Brooklyn, New York. Died: 29 April, 2015, in Boca Raton, Florida, aged 91.

SHE never ate dessert in public. But at night, by the dim light of the fridge, she gorged on goodies. Then one day in 1961, Jean Nidetch, a 214-pound New York housewife with a 44-inch waist and an addiction to biscuits by the box, ran into a neighbour at the supermarket.

“Oh, Jean, you look so good!” the neighbour beamed. “When are you due?”

That was it. Nidetch, who had tried many times to subdue her compulsive eating – dieting, losing weight, then gaining it all back again – had to do something.

She shed 72 pounds and cofounded Weight Watchers, the organisation that turned the drab, frustrating diet into a quasi-religious quest, with membership commitments, systematic eating, inspirational meetings and cookbooks, food products and motivational success stories to reinforce the frail of heart.

Nidetch, the organisation’s public face for decades, proclaiming its manifesto that managing weight is a lifelong task, died on Wednesday at her home in Boca Raton, Florida. She was 91. A visitor in 2011 found she weighed 142 pounds, the same as she did after her dramatic weight loss in the early 1960s.

With her overweight husband and two overweight friends, Nidetch incorporated Weight Watchers in 1963. It spawned thousands of franchises and enrolled millions around the world. It spurred weight-control classes that resembled group therapy sessions, summer camps for overweight children, a daily syndicated television programme, magazines and many other enterprises.

Raised in a family that ate as a consolation for disappointments, Nidetch became a vivacious celebrity delivering the Weight Watchers message and her own rags-to-riches story in magazines, best-selling books, lectures and radio and television appearances.

In 1973, 16,000 Weight Watchers jammed Madison Square Garden for the group’s tenth 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 Nidetch, with her own evangelical message: Overeating is an emotional problem with an emotional solution. Crowds surged for her autograph, to touch her or even for eye contact. She looked as if she had never had a biscuit in her life. Weight Watchers went public in America in 1968, turning its founders into multimillionaires, and in 1978 the company was sold to HJ Heinz for $71.2 million. Nidetch, who had been president in its early years, was in charge of public relations until 1984, travelling widely and making public appearances for Weight Watchers International, one of the world’s most successful weight-loss businesses.

She was born Jean Evelyn Slutsky in Brooklyn in 1923, the daughter of David and Mae Rodin Slutsky. Her father was a taxi driver and her mother a manicurist.

Her compulsive eating habits began as a child, as she recalled in a memoir, The Story of Weight Watchers, (1970, with Joan Rattner Heilman).

“I don’t really remember, but I’m positive that whenever I cried, my mother gave me something to eat,” she wrote. “I’m sure that whenever I had a fight with the little girl next door, or it was raining and I couldn’t go out, or I wasn’t invited to a birthday party, my mother gave me a piece of candy to make me feel better.”

Jean and her younger sister, Helen, grew up chubby, and struggled physically and emotionally to control their weight problems. But Jean was a talker and popular in a circle of overweight friends. She graduated from Girls High School in Brooklyn, and joined the Internal Revenue Service as a clerk in 1942.

In 1947, after a two-year courtship largely spent gourmandising, she married Martin Nidetch. They had two children, David and Richard. Richard died in 2006. The marriage ended in divorce in 1971. She was married again, for a few months, to a bass player she met on a cruise in 1975.

Survivors include her son, David, and three grandchildren.

In 1952 Martin became an airport bus driver. Mrs Nidetch raised funds for charitable groups, including the North Hills League for Retarded Children, and was its president for two years.

She ate compulsively. She tried pills, hypnosis and fad diets, but cycles of weight loss and gain went on. In 1961, after encountering the woman who thought she was pregnant, she went to a city obesity clinic. For ten weeks, she pretended to follow its diet. But she was clandestinely obsessed with Mallomars, chocolate-coated marshmallow cookies. She hid them in the hamper, and at night gorged on them in the bathroom.

Trapped in a gluttonous secret life, she decided she had to confide in someone. She invited six friends, all overweight women, to her home for what turned into a joint confessional, an exorcism of caloric demons that was the informal beginning of Weight Watchers.

They all went on a diet, pledging mutual help through the abysses of anxiety, doubt and gnawing hunger. It worked. They soon brought more overweight friends to the meetings. Within two months, 40 women were attending.

In October 1962, Nidetch reached her goal of 142 pounds, and vowed to undertake a mission to help others lose weight. With Felice and Albert Lippert, an overweight couple she had helped, she and her husband formed a corporation, and Weight Watchers was born in a loft over a cinema in May 1963.

The programme featured weekly meetings with dieters paying a $3 fee, weighing in and providing mutual support. The original Weight Watchers diet was the nutritionally balanced regimen recommended in city obesity clinics: lean meat, fish, skimmed milk and fruits and vegetables. It banned alcohol, sweets and fatty foods.

But the crucial ingredient was psychological – journals to keep track of what one ate, diets with realistic goals and maintenance programmes for life, supportive magazines and books, television forums, camps and meetings like those for alcoholics, with confessions and motivational speakers.

The business boomed. Hundreds of franchises were organised around the world. By 1968, five million people had enrolled. She became a dynamic speaker and a role model whose background and common-touch sincerity captivated listeners. If I can do it, anybody can do it, was her message.

She wrote a regular column for Weight Watchers Magazine, and Weight Watchers Cookbook (1966), Weight Watchers Party and Holiday Cookbook (1984), and The Jean Nidetch Story: An Autobiography (2010). In her later years, she was a consultant to the company, owned since 1999 by Artal Luxembourg.

Nidetch established scholarship programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Nevada. In 2006, she moved to Florida to be near her son, David. Even in retirement, she continued preaching the Weight Watchers’ gospel.

“We ourselves hold the instrument that makes us fat,” she said, waving an imaginary fork in a 2011 interview. “I just shake my head when I see someone eating cake and saying, ‘Oh, I wish I wasn’t heavy.’ But they keep eating the cake!”