Last week, Weight Watchers announced that it plans to offer free memberships to teenagers in the US. For a six-week period this summer, teens will be able to join Weight Watchers and not pay a dime.

I read many articles about this announcement and made the time-sapping mistake of perusing the comments sections. To say that this decision has divided opinion is an understatement.

So let me give my two cents.

Teenagers are already insecure in their bodies.

I’ve never inhabited a bigger body and yet there’s not a single part of me that would want to go back to being a 15 year old. And thankfully I was a teenager during a time where there wasn’t social media.

You take that insecurity and then make a teenager stand on a set of scales in a group meeting. Yes, the weighing may happen behind a curtain and no one else knows the exact number, but this can still be traumatic (as the teenager feels like the number is written all over their face as they walk out).

They learn from watching others that a good day is when your weight is lower, a bad day is when there’s no change, and a worse days is when it actually increases. Pretty soon, this teenager learns that the number on the scale dictates their self worth.    

Many people were coming to the defense of Weight Watchers, repeating the indoctrinated phrase of “it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change”.

So what’s the difference between a lifestyle change and a diet?

For me, the difference is whether or not the goal is weight loss.

Let’s imagine someone attending Weight Watchers starts to make lifestyle changes. They include more fruits and vegetables; they start doing more walking and spend more of their day standing. They are getting more sleep. All positive lifestyle changes.

They then stand on the scale at a meeting, but their weight hasn’t changed. What do you think happens? Are they applauded for the changes they’ve made? Or do they instead look at ways things can be altered so that weight loss does occur?

My sense is that it would be the latter, and if this is the case, how is this not a diet?

It leads people to distrust their own body.

With Weight Watchers, you are allocated a certain number of points and this is how much you can eat. Rather than listening to your hunger and what you feel like eating, you listen to the math.

Hunger varies. Some days you’ll want to eat more, some days you’ll want to eat less, and there are biological reasons for this.

For example, over a woman’s menstrual cycle, her basal metabolic rate will increase. So for the five days before her period, she physically needs more food than she does after her period has stopped. Many women instinctively know this, as they notice they are hungrier and want to gravitate towards chocolate or other calorie-dense foods around this time.  

But with a points-based system, there is no accounting for this. Any time you are hungrier, this is thought of as a bad thing. Any time “extra” food is eaten during these times, it’s thought of as “emotional eating” or a “binge”. And then the prerequisite negative emotions of shame or self-loathing appear because you tell yourself you should have more willpower and are a failure.

Weight Watchers doesn’t lead to long-term weight loss.

Yes it may help some people lose weight and after 6 months or 9 months, they might still be hanging in there. But by 5 years, barely anyone has kept the weight off. This article states that only “about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years.”

I should also add that there is a difference between what people think of when someone says, “weight loss is achievable” and what it actually means in the scientific literature.

When people hear that some study showed weight loss is achievable for some percentage of participants, in their mind they are thinking that someone who is obese on the BMI scale is brought down to being in the normal weight range.

But what is typically deemed as an “achievement” is weight loss of 5% or 10%. And interestingly, when you look at individual weight year on year after the initial loss, it is increasing. So while they may be in the 5% band now, give it another couple of months or a year, and the losses will have vanished.

If you were to have a conversation with the nearly every one of these people, they would feel like a failure and that they haven’t achieved the results they were after. But according to the weight loss researchers, they are marked down as a “success”.

It also leads to eating disorders.

Not everyone who diets ends up with an eating disorder, but nearly everyone with an eating disorder started out with a diet. And initially this diet appeared innocuous and someone would say, “what’s the harm?”

But we know that eating disorders are much more likely to start around puberty and in teenagers, in part because of the brain and hormonal changes taking place at this time. So while a diet can feel small and inconsequential, it can be part of the trigger that starts the disease.  

I see the damage it has caused.

Many of the clients that I work with now did Weight Watchers when they were teenagers. They were taken by their parents, who were often yo-yo dieters.

They talk about how they’ve been on one diet or another almost ever since. A fantastic business model for Weight Watchers, not great for someone’s health and self esteem.

They tell me how they have a shop’s worth of dress sizes in their closet because their weight is constantly fluctuating.  

They mention that when they look back on photos of themselves as a teenager, they realise how normal they were and wished they’d never started dieting.

People come to me because they want to get off dieting. They want to be able to feed themselves without having to rely on points. Or without having patches of being “good” interspersed with long stretches of being “bad”.

And the great irony is that when people learn to listen to and trust their body and stop with the arbitrary rules, their eating improves. And not only are they eating more nourishing food, they are also enjoying it. They aren’t battling against themselves every day; it’s just what they do now.

I don’t believe in the Weight Watchers model. And this isn’t a belief based on faith, it’s based on the results. Opening up their business to focus more on teenagers isn’t going to lead to the reduction in the “obesity crisis” like is promised.

Just more life long dieters who are heavier than if they never went on a diet. And more eating disorder sufferers dealing with a disease that could have been avoided.  

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