Weight Watchers, the dieting lifestyle brand, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday. Weight-loss drugs, keto and the rest of it left the company an "icon of a bygone dieting era," writes the Wall Street Journal.
The company announced Tuesday it has entered Chapter 11, which "will bolster its financial position, increase investment flexibility in its strategic growth initiatives, and better serve its millions of members around the world." The company, now known as WW International, has struggled with about $1.5 billion in debt and has failed to keep pace with more convenient weight loss options, including GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, over counting points and calories. During the bankruptcy process, its massive amount of debt will be eliminated, and it expects to emerge in about 40 days as a publicly traded company. Operations for its members will continue as normal, it said.
The conspiracy theory that healthcare services are intentionally designed to never cure people is just that. But the very name "Weight Watchers" — not Weight Losers, not Weight Forgetters — was always a reminder that the plan was to sell people on the permanence of their condition. It's no surprise that this hyper-leveraged private equity scheme collapsed the instant Americans actually started losing weight.
Previously:
• Weight Watchers is an RPG
• Gallery of ugly recipes from the 1970s
