This article discusses food, diets, eating disorders and weight, including numerical values.
The first time I went to Weight Watchers I was in my school uniform. I was not a fat child, nor was I a fat teenager.
My fifth-year skirt – a hand-me-down from someone taller and naturally more willowy than me – just about fit me at the best of times. It sat more comfortably when I gently starved myself the autumn I was 17, and was tight again a few months later when my body fought to renourish itself.
My best friend and I, devils for a Snickers at little break, thought Weight Watchers would be the answer to all our burgeoning body image issues. And so, it began.
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Weight Watchers as I knew it on and off for two decades worked by assigning each member a points limit per day, and assigning foods a points value based on their nutritional value.
It was more complicated than high calorie = high points, but that was the gist. You could earn points through exercise, and you could save up points for special occasions such as nights out or holidays. There were mild safeguards in place, but in my experience they were rarely honoured. You weren’t supposed to eat below your assigned points for the day or week, yet I remember being praised for doing so.
I was congratulated for losing half a stone in a week. I would eat next to nothing on the weekly weigh-in day until after I’d stepped on the scales. This was widely accepted as common practice. Afterwards would come the inevitable binge as my body gasped for sustenance.
Two decades later I still have ingrained attitudes to certain foods because of what I learned at Weight Watchers. I struggle to eat peas and sweetcorn without guilt. Peas. And sweetcorn. Literal vegetables, demonised.
Purple Snacks and Curly Wurlys remain the acceptable face of sweet treats. Small, with relatively low points values, and to be nibbled slowly to make the joy last longer. A search of my email inbox tells me I was engaging with Weight Watchers online as late as 2019. In January 2020 I entered psychiatric care for my eating disorder.
When I read the news last week that WW (formerly Weight Watchers) is on the brink of bankruptcy I felt surprisingly unmoved. The company pulled out of Ireland at the end of December 2021, ceasing support for its groups and group leaders. Despite a global refocus on “wellness” and movement towards weight-loss medication, WW is floundering. I should be pleased. I know first-hand how damaging diet culture and its products are, so should be celebrating a nail in the coffin of one of its pillars. Instead, the whole thing just leaves me sad.
I remember each of my group leaders in the various meetings I attended. Often women in their 50s with a success story and a wardrobe full of form-fitting dresses. One of them was so encouraging when I informed her I was attending my meeting even though my father was literally on his death bed. “He’d be so proud that you’re here.”
The idea that my dad’s dying wish might be that I might lose even more weight haunts me. Despite the damaging rhetoric though, there was connection in those meetings. There was a shared shame. A feeling of hope. A coloured pebble for every half stone lost.
More than three years after Weight Watchers left Ireland there are still groups online following the old points programmes. There are people who’ll be counting points for life. One Curly Wurly at a time.
Just because WW is taking its last breaths, it doesn’t mean any of it is going anywhere. Daily on social media I check boxes requesting the apps to “hide ad” and “don’t show me this content” in a futile attempt to stem the barrage of weight-loss content. Noom, Limbo and Bodyslims are just some of the products that haunt me around the internet, capitalising on my personal data which, no matter how much I try to skew it otherwise, will never convince them that I’m not just another fat girl desperate to be smaller.
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My most berserk WW story isn’t even about meetings or points. It’s a remark by a locum GP while I was in that psychiatric hospital in 2020. “Have you ever considered Weight Watchers?” he asked. I checked that he knew I was from the eating disorder ward. He didn’t seem to grasp the conflict of interest. As long as someone’s losing weight, isn’t that all that matters?
- Visit bodywhys.ie or call the helpline on 01 2107906
