In 1961, when Jean Nidetch was a 200+ pound bowling alley babysitter in a size 44 dress, she went on a diet supervised by the New York City Department of Health Obesity Clinic. But Mrs. Nidetch cheated. She couldn’t stop eating Mallomars, two packages per night. She was so embarrassed by her transgression that she didn’t admit it to the clinic. Instead, one afternoon she called six overweight friends and invited them to her Long Island apartment, where she told them about her diet and, more important, unburdened herself about the forbidden Mallomars. With great relief, the women shared their own diet-busting sins. One confessed she hid peanuts behind asparagus cans in the cupboard; another snuck down to the refrigerator after her husband fell asleep. “All overweight people have this tremendous desire to talk,” Mrs. Nidetch observed.
Each of the women took home a copy of the diet, and the next week, when they met again, they brought more fat friends who listened eagerly to stories that showed they were not alone in their dieting frustrations. The group grew. They chipped in and bought a medical scale for weekly weigh-ins. Soon there were forty of them, and as word spread across Long Island, Mrs. Nidetch found herself speaking to strangers who had been inspired by her group to get together to form their own. In May 1963, she created Weight Watchers and began charging two dollars to attend a meeting. Before the term “support group” had been coined, members were sharing anxieties about forbidden Entenmann’s and revealing the secret hiding places for their emergency stash of Chunkys.
Calling it “Alcoholics Anonymous for the overweight,” Business Week marveled in 1967 about the many ways Weight Watchers was making money, which soon included a cookbook, packaged nonfat milk and low-calorie sugar, food scales, whole frozen meals, and summer camps for obese girls. Two years later, Look magazine wrote about “Weight Watcher weddings, where reduced brides and grooms thank her [Nidetch] for making it possible” and said that people were clamoring for franchises around the world, “including undernourished India.” In 1979, Nidetch and her business partner, Albert Lippert, sold Weight Watchers to Heinz for $100 million. Today, with three-quarters of all American women and half of American men believing they are too fat, Weight Watchers has a membership of 1.5 million people and annual sales of $1.4 billion.