Dieting is being re-branded 'wellness', but does that mean it works?

Last week diet company Weight Watchers announced its own size reduction transformation, dropping 12 letters from its corporate waistline, to fit into the more socially acceptable name “WW”.

According to the press release, it’s not just a name change. WW is also dedicating itself to an “even greater mission”.

Commercial weight loss programs have long promised to make us lighter, despite research showing diets don't work in the long term. Now a re-brand sees one shifting the focus to 'wellness', but will it make any real difference in the outcome, asks Kasey Edwards,

Commercial weight loss programs have long promised to make us lighter, despite research showing diets don’t work in the long term. Now a re-brand sees one shifting the focus to ‘wellness’, but will it make any real difference in the outcome, asks Kasey Edwards,

“We are becoming the world’s partner in wellness,” said Mindy Grossman, President and Chief Executive Officer, WW. “No matter what your goal is – to lose weight, eat healthier, move more, develop a positive mind-set, or all of the above – we will deliver science-based solutions that fit into people's lives.”

The company has also given its slogan a makeover, adopting the new tagline: “Wellness that Works.™”

Which is nice, isn’t it? The $USD4.8 billion diet company is now trying to sell a product that actually works (despite what we know about weight loss diets failing to deliver in the long term, even if putting people on them with other therapies can save the health system money).

We have over 50 years of credible research – and by credible I mean peer reviewed and not funded by the weight loss industry or anecdotes from customers – showing weight loss dieting has a failure rate of 95 per cent in the long term.

Sure, most people can manage to drop some kilos, but almost all of those dieters will have regained that weight within two to five years. And here’s the kicker, many of those people will actually regain more weight than they lost in the first place. One of the very best ways to gain weight is to try to lose it.

Clinical Psychologist at Treat Yourself Well Louise Adams sums it up perfectly: "The evidence that weight loss dieting leads to weight regain is just as strong as the evidence that shows smoking causes lung cancer."

Historically, selling weight loss has been a licence to print money. People pay money to a diet company to lose weight, they have initial success which creates brand loyalty, then they regain the weight they lost, plus a few extra kilos.

Because of their initial success, they conclude that their weight regain was due to their personal weakness rather than the failure of the diet product. And then, faster than you can say “repeat business”, they spend more money trying to lose their initial weight, plus the extra kilos they gained.

Australians hand over $641.4 million a year for weight loss services, low calorie foods and supplements. You don’t need a PhD and a research lab to consider that massive investment in weight-loss products and services in the context of ever-increasing obesity rates, and conclude that we’re being conned by the diet industry.

Weight loss is a business model that relies on false hope, self-loathing and very short memories, and increasingly, with the body positivity movement gaining traction, it’s becoming harder to sell.

Focusing on wellness has the advantage of being a vague term. After all, everybody is in favour of wellness. Which is handy, because it can be endlessly expanded to fit with anyone’s lifestyle or goals, meaning a potentially infinite market.

And the best part of selling wellness from a business point of view is that can’t really be measured and, unlike weight loss solutions, shown to fail.

It’s such an attractive strategy that Weight Watchers has tried it before. In 2016, the company launched its See Yourself in a New Light campaign which urged women “to love how you look and love how you feel”.

They sent female journalists a low wattage light bulb as an encouragement to have sex with the light on. The copy that came with the campaign included the following: “sex is pretty damn fantastic. But if you’ve ever felt self-conscious in the sack you're not alone — we’ve heard that more than half of women have avoided sex because they were worried about how they look”.

As you might imagine, the campaign was a disaster, suggesting, rather unsubtly, that fat people shouldn’t have sex with the lights on.

WW’s renewed attempt to reposition itself as a wellness company might be more successful, but their core business is unlikely to stray far from the narrative of salvation through weight loss.

Psychologist and director of BodyMatters Australasia Sarah McMahon says that wellness messages are still often cloaked in a veil that promises weight loss, which leads to behaviour and outcome that are the opposite of wellness.

“On an individual level people are likely to stop engaging in health-giving behaviour if their primary motivation is weight loss. On a societal level the perpetuation of the myth that thinness and wellness are synonymous is also extremely dangerous,” McMahon says.

When you decouple wellness from weight loss, it’s very simple: eat a variety of healthy foods, move your body, and have meaningful relationships with people who don’t require you to pay them membership fees to speak to you.

It’s not at all difficult to understand. You don’t need to hand over your hard-earned cash to a multinational company to explain the mysteries of wellness.

In practice, wellness it not easy to achieve. But that’s because of complex reasons such as poverty, gender roles and other inequality, poor employment conditions, and town planning – things that a company like WW is unable to solve.

There is no multibillion dollar business model to be found in the pursuit of legitimate wellness. Which makes me think that, just like weight loss before and after photos which are notoriously faked, WW’s new makeover is just another trick of lighting and perspective.

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