WeightWatchers is cashing in on the latest weight-loss craze.
After decades of selling a broken calorie model as an obesity remedy for desperate consumers, WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani offered an apology in a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey.
“We introduced the shame for people for whom diet and exercise wasn’t enough,” Sistani said. The legacy weight-loss company is now encouraging members to take popular type 2 diabetes medications like Ozempic, prescribed off-label for weight management. In doing so, WeightWatchers is trying to outsource blame for obesity from gluttonous behavior to an immutable characteristic that only a pharmaceutical intervention can fix. “We want to be the first to say where we got it wrong.”
“Now, thanks to new drugs like Ozempic, Sistani is rejecting that blame-the-dieter approach in favor of the view that obesity is an illness — one her company can help cure,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “The promise that a doctor’s prescription can eliminate extra weight for good has touched off a seismic moment in global health, and compelled WeightWatchers to undergo its most radical change yet.”
By doling out prescriptions for preventable conditions, doctors have become the ultimate enablers in Western medicine. Whether prescribed antidepressants for screen- and lockdown-induced isolation or Ozempic for obesity, Americans are getting hooked on medication to solve their every problem. But how much are pharmaceutical interventions actually solving? Americans are being prescribed more drugs than ever, yet life expectancy is on a steady decline.
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