Weight Watchers bankruptcy: Counted

For four decades, Americans have been able to watch Oprah Winfrey struggle with her weight. For a long time, the presenter and businesswoman swore by the Weight Watchers program for weight loss . Each food item is assigned a point value. Participants are free to eat anything as long as they don't exceed the individually determined number of points per day. Thanks to the point system, Winfrey once boasted in a company commercial that she could still eat bread every day. Her enthusiasm was so great that in 2015 she joined the Weight Watchers board of directors and acquired 10 percent of the company's stock.

Winfrey has been away from the Weight Watchers world for a year now. In February 2024, she resigned from her seat on the board of directors and sold her shares. She donated the proceeds to a museum. Considering the size of Winfrey's stake, this was a relatively small sum. Even then, the stock had lost a significant amount of value. Since the beginning of the year, it's even been a penny stock, currently trading at 37 cents. Added to that is nearly two billion dollars in debt.

For months, US media had been speculating about Weight Watchers' imminent bankruptcy. Now it's finally happened: Last week, Weight Watchers filed for bankruptcy. With the help of a "financial reorganization transaction," as the company announced, Weight Watchers intends to get rid of a large portion of its debt. CEO Tara Comonte, however, makes this sound less dramatic. Bankruptcy "gives us the flexibility to accelerate innovation," she explained. All programs will continue as usual. Nothing will change for the more than three million customers worldwide.

In fact, the future of Weight Watchers is more than uncertain. The diet and fitness market has changed dramatically in recent years. Nothing revolutionized it more than the success of Ozempic and Wegovy, better known as weight-loss injections. Weight Watchers tried to keep up.

Sima Sistani, former CEO of Weight Watchers, compared her company to Netflix in the Financial Times a year ago. The entertainment company had transformed from a DVD mail-order company to a streaming platform. Weight Watchers was on the verge of a similar transformation, but it failed. When Oprah Winfrey revealed herself as an Olympic fan last year, she likely delivered the final blow to the company.

Yet Weight Watchers was once one of the pioneers in its industry. Jean Nidetch, a housewife from New York, lost more than 30 kilograms through a strict diet. From this, she developed a weight-loss program that laid the foundation for the company Weight Watchers, which she founded in 1963. And Nidetch became one of the not so few self-made American millionaires who changed people's everyday lives more lastingly than many male CEOs.

The entrepreneur invented a market that hadn't existed before: the weight-loss business. Even back then, society told women they had to be thin, but they secretly starved themselves. Nidetch changed that. She organized weight-loss meetings, creating a group dynamic—some called it peer pressure. Initially, she dictated a list of "forbidden foods" to her clients. Later, Weight Watchers introduced its points system. In 1970, Weight Watchers expanded to Germany.

To this day, the global diet and fitness market remains huge. Annual sales: around one trillion dollars. This is partly due to the fact that its target audience has grown steadily over the years. Almost three out of four Americans are overweight or obese; in Germany, this applies to one in two. Very few people manage to lose weight permanently or are satisfied with their reflection in the mirror. These are perfect conditions for diet providers. Actually.

At some point, Weight Watchers could no longer profit from this. A new generation of women believed that beauty and health weren't a question of weight. Influencers demonstrated that women, too, could build muscle in the gym. At Weight Watchers, however, it was long customary to weigh oneself before the start of each meeting. This no longer fit with the new zeitgeist of body positivity – the rejection of old beauty ideals and the acceptance of all body shapes – and weight-neutral medicine that doesn't focus on weight. As a result, Weight Watchers lost more members year after year.

The company tried pretty much everything to halt its decline. It organized cruises in the hope that these would open up new revenue streams. It replaced its CEO several times. It banned the word "diet" from its programs, which it felt too strongly about deprivation. In 2018, Weight Watchers even renamed itself WW International—only to revert to its old name shortly thereafter. In the end, none of these efforts had lasting success. The company simply couldn't shake its outdated appeal.

And then Ozempic, Wegovy, and similar products came onto the market, curbing hunger with the active ingredient semaglutide. They promised to take the effort out of losing weight, while Weight Watchers, despite all its image tweaks, ultimately still preached abstinence. The shift in power can be seen on the stock market. The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which markets Wegovy, is now worth about 23,300 times as much as Weight Watchers.

But Weight Watchers doesn't want to give up completely just yet. If the financial restructuring is successful, the company also plans to focus on the weight-loss injection business in the future. For this purpose, it acquired a telemedicine provider in 2023. Since then, Weight Watchers customers have been able to obtain semaglutide supplements through this provider. Business grew by 57 percent in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the previous year.

Weight Watchers now wants to be even less associated with diets than ever before. The former weight-loss company now officially calls itself a "people-centered technology company."