WaPo's Megan McArdle: WeightWatchers' big problem? Hunger.
WeightWatchers was one of the most credible players in a generally discreditable space. Its regime was sensible, healthy and designed to fit into everyday life. It also often failed. A 2007 study of almost 700 “lifetime members” of WeightWatchers, who had reached their goal weight and maintained it for at least six weeks, found that within five years the participants had regained most of the lost pounds.
Now WeightWatchers has filed for bankruptcy, because the sensible and medically approved advice failed to fix the actual reason people were overeating. Not because they didn’t realize what kind of food made you fat, or that they lacked willpower, or they needed to deal with deep-seated emotional issues. They were eating, quite simply, because they were hungry. And it took a drug, not a diet, to control it.
Our secretary of health and human services wants to focus on American diets, in hopes that the same thing that didn’t work the last 100 million times might now suddenly succeed. “They’re counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News last year, as though the makers of weight-loss drugs were somehow putting one over on us by solving an enormous health issue. He has support among the American public. I’ve heard these same arguments echoed by many others in real life, along with laments that the drugs stop working if you stop taking them (just like my blood pressure medicine).
But as markets have realized, the WeightWatchers model has decisively failed. Perhaps it was the best we could do at the time, but that time has thankfully passed. Obesity isn’t a social problem or personal flaw; it’s a biological problem, like my hypertension. Like my hypertension, it has a medical solution that works much better than telling me to reduce stress and eat less salt. And I, for one, am grateful we found it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/15/medicaid-democrats-republicans-energy-commerce/