WeightWatchers, weight loss and work

T/W weight loss, diet, diet culture

There are a lot of ways to spend a lunch break. Catching up with a friend, shopping, exercising - I’ve done them all.

How about getting weighed? Yep, done that too. And yep, I wrote about it (for Look magazine - there’s the piece below, I was one of three women who ‘changed their life in their lunch break’)

In one of the two major forays into Weight Watchers during my life, in the late 2000s I spent lunch breaks going to a community centre and being weighed-in. Shout out to the amazing friend who came with me at the time. Nameless here but the most fabulous human being in case she’s reading.

When I read about the potential bankruptcy of WeightWatchers I had a momentary moment of joy. Finally, it was ending! This programme that had held such power over me for so long. But I know of course that the weight loss obsession in this world won’t end there - it just shifts, changes shape and course, and carries on.

I would say ‘WeightWatchers works’ - because if you stuck to it, it did. If you counted points for every food you ate, and added them up, and stored up some points for weekends to have a chicken kebab and ‘gin and slims’ (the lowest point booze you could have), it’d work.

Seeing WeightWatchers news always makes me think of those lunchbreaks. Of the other things we might have been doing. Of how much of my life and career I’ve spent talking or thinking about weight loss - my own and that of other people, mainly women.

I’ve been featured in magazines many times for weight loss. The one above, another for Top Sante magazine (seeing a bespoke personal trainer in Chelsea), giving up sugar for Reveal, and then another for Bella magazine where I tried the ‘Skinny Bitch’ diet:

Working on women’s magazines in the 2000s, weight loss was a big deal, both personally and professionally. Weight loss stories sold - they still do. I’m sure you see them daily, whatever news sources or mags you consume. People want to know how much someone lost, how they did it, and of course, how much happier they are now they’re slimmer, smaller, skinnier.

Social media is full of videos of people and their weight loss ‘journey’.

It’s strange to ask someone about their own weight loss. You have to ask what they ate, and often there is a ‘trigger moment’ that changes things for them. Back when I was writing those stories it was often that someone didn’t fit in an aeroplane seat, or they were ‘horrified’ by holiday photos.

The narrative around that’s changing - was it a form of body shaming to run those stories? I’m not sure, perhaps. Certainly it was ‘look at this person they used to be bigger now they’re slimmer’.

Yes, weight loss has been part of my personal and professional life for so long now. And of course, the WeightWatchers angle might have changed - it’s just all about weight loss jabs now - but we’re still fascinated by people’s size, shape and how they got it, maintain it, love it or hate it.

I’d love to say that my daily work routine doesn’t have an element of weight loss to it, but it does. My weekly lift selfies I post on Instagram are of course a way to check if I think I’m looking good. I’m a child of diet culture and I don’t see a time when it will ever truly leave me.

But things have changed - I don’t go to lunchtime weigh-ins, for a start. And I now try and focus on strength and being well rather than the idea of just being ‘thin’. I am trying to be happier in my own skin and not writing about it in magazines is part of that.

Looking back I wonder if I regret spending those lunch breaks at a slimming club. I wasn’t forced to go, I liked being slimmer. But I can’t say I’m sad to think of WW closing, on a personal level. What makes me sadder is the idea that the shift is now to a new type of weight loss. The stories will carry on, just in a different way.

As for me, well, I look at the girl in those articles and I think ‘gosh, she’s so young!’ and ‘Wow, I looked GOOD!’. But it’s about how we feel inside that really counts - cheesy but true. I wasn’t always happy, I was striving to be ‘the girl in the article’ even if that meant trying a fad diet.

I am glad I’ve left the weight loss Jenny part of my journalism career behind.

Thanks as always for reading and Happy Friday

xJenny