WeightWatchers served up a super-sized offering of hypocrisy with the launch of its Plate of Our Nation campaign.

Earlier this month the diet company teamed up with the chef and co-host of My Kitchen Rules, Pete Evans, to launch what it calls a ”national movement” to ”investigate the root causes of Australia’s growing obesity problem in a bid to offer real solutions to get the nation healthy again.”

But if WeightWatchers has just cottoned on to researching ”real solutions” for people to lose weight, then what has it been doing with its customers for the past 50 years?

Advertisement

Oh yes, that’s right, running a highly successful business – one that profits from repeat business.

This is a company that, by its own admission, trades in failure. In her book Bodies, the British psychotherapist Susie Orbach recounts a story in which a former manager of WeightWatchers in Britain said she was dismayed at how unsuccessful the company was in helping people to keep the weight off.

Orbach says we shouldn’t be surprised. The weight loss companies’ profitability ”depends upon failure and their programs ensure that failure happens”.

But now, WeightWatchers wants us to believe that it’s turned over a new leaf. Launching the Plate of Our Nation campaign, Australasia managing director, Joseph Saad, said: ”As the leader in weight management we saw it as our duty to take a bold stand and help lead Australia to a healthier future.”

But the Plate of Our Nation campaign is not focused on health. It’s focused on WeightWatchers core business – the promise of weight loss. And as any health professional should know, weight loss and health are not necessarily the same thing.

The videos on the campaign website focus on artificial measures of health such as dress sizes, and show fat people watching TV, shoving food into their mouths and generally looking like unwashed slobs. When the fat people in the videos are exercising, their heads are often cut off, denying them the dignity of an identity and falsely implying that because they are fat they are necessarily unhealthy.

Lydia Jade Turner, the managing director and psychotherapist at BodyMatters Australasia, condemns WeightWatchers for its fat shaming imagery and messages.

”WeightWatchers is morphing itself to appear as a benevolent public health institution when in fact it is grooming customers for profit,” Turner says.

via Fat chance this will work – and they know it.