How many points is a shot of we go vie. WeightWatchers is going all in on trendy new anti obesity drugs. The gamble might save the company, if it doesn't kill it first. By Emma Court and Ellen Hewitt. The ladies at the Rogue WeightWatchers meeting in Norwalk, Connecticut were livid. For years, they'd faithfully gathered, like about a million other members at weight Watchers locations, to conduct the weekly rights step on the scale, share the latest winds and woes, and swap tips on how to hack points or resist that happy hour margarita. Some had been coming for fifteen years. Two had been on and off weightwatcher since the nineteen seventies. They'd lost forty six fifty five sixty two seventy nine pounds. They'd supported one another through retirements, children leaving for college, and debts in the family. Then this March, ww International shut down thousands of in person locations, leaving the group to either make an hour plus drive to a meeting across Long Island Sound or worse a symbol online. So one evening in April, about a dozen of them gathered in a windowless room at a local shoprite for their second self organized meeting. As they munched on Slim and Trim brand popcorn three WeightWatchers points per serving, they fumed about another fresh wound, one that seemed like an even bigger betrayal. The company was getting in on the hottest new thing in weight loss obesity medications. In March, the same month WeightWatchers clamped down on its rent costs, it agreed to pay one hundred and thirty two million dollars to acquire Sequence, a two year old telemedicine startup that prescribes a new, much hyped set of medications called glp ones that can basically melt the pounds away. The drugs, which go by wegovy ozempic and other brand names, have come to be regarded in the past year as a magic weight loss solution. Shrinking celebs like Elon Musk and Chelsea Handler were injecting themselves with the stuff. Some doctors and scientists were predicting the drugs could up end America's obesity crisis, and now Weight Watchers, the arbiter of self restraint was diving in two. They're not practicing what they preached, and now all of a sudden, there's a drug involved. Christine's sister, hen who's been on the program for four years, set at the April meeting. Weight Watchers has kicked us to the curb, said Bob Klein, the lone male member of the group that day, who joined weight Watchers about fifteen years ago. For decades, weight Watchers taught dieters there was only one way to shed the pounds hard won behavioral change. It was a long game, one fought with pre portioned baby carrots and an accountant's worth of spreadsheets for meal logging. But battling food for your whole life is exhausting and the weight almost always creeps back up for most dieters. Now, after sixty years, the company was reversing course, proclaiming that jabbing a drug into your thigh once a week could do the trick. GLP ones, which mimic and naturally occurring appetites suppressant, activate pathways in the brain that make you want to put down the fork even if there's still food on your plate. The cravings just disappear along with the pounds. Weightwatcher's sharp turn to pharmaceuticals is the work of its new chief executive officer, Sima Sistani, a Silicon Valley veteran who took the top job last year. The company has been fighting for relevance for about a decade, mostly by going all in on wellness trends rather than by transforming itself for the digital age that allowed upstarts such as Noom to siphon off customers, leaving WeightWatchers flat footed. When the coronavirus pandemic shoved everything online late last year, nine months after Sistani became CEO, Weightwatcher's stock price dipped to three dollars and thirty eight cents a share, its lowest level in about twenty years. Sistani had recently made a name for herself after selling the video chat app house Party, which she co founded, to a major gaming company for an undisclosed sum. WeightWatchers board hired her to save the company, and within weeks of taking the job in March twenty twenty two, she started looking at GLP one's which were just going mainstream. Sistani says that when she heard these drugs could eradicate obesity in her lifetime, I was just like, Wow, that is a big statement. We need to catalyze this. The strategy seems as audacious as it does desperate, but WeightWatchers has little to lose. The company long succeeded by surfing each wave of diet culture from low carb to fat free. Now it has about one point five billion dollars in debt, more than ten times it's expected twenty twenty three earnings. Its bonds are trading at distressed levels, which suggests investors think that the company may have trouble paying back its creditors. Watchers said earlier this year that it has more than sufficient liquidity. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurs have been rushing to embrace GLP one's Since twenty twenty one, when we Govi became the first highly effective obesity medication to win US Food and Drug Administration approval, dozens of slickly branded telemedicine startups such as Sequence have surfaced, acting as digital matchmakers between patients eager to take weight loss meds and clinicians who can prescribe them. The startups are trying to capitalize on a drug category that analysts at Jeffrey's Financial predict will be worth more than one hundred billion dollars by twenty thirty two. Since the Weight Watcher's Sequence announcement, the traditional weight loss category has only continued to freefall. Longtime competitor Jenny Craig, also saddled with debt, filed for bankruptcy, and Weightwatcher's biggest shareholder, Artall Group, sold its remaining stake, ending a relationship that began in nineteen ninety nine. It's not a vote of confidence, says Mike Holland, a senior credit analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. All of this raises the question what even is weight Watchers? If it becomes just another hawker of diet drugs, it may not matter, Cistani says. It's not like Blockbuster didn't see Netflix coming. Before. WeightWatchers branded postal scales and recipe cards became staples of the American kitchen. A housewife in Queen's, New York was mistaken for being pregnant. The woman, Gene Nidetch, joined a local weight loss program and began meeting with her majen crew of fellow dieters, eventually losing more than seventy pounds and turning the weekly support group into a format that could be replicated. Businessman Al Lippert and his wife Felise became fans and helped Nidetch and her husband Marty found WeightWatchers in nineteen sixty three. It soon expanded internationally, and in less than a decade it went The original weight Watcher's plan was strict, banning many processed carbs and emphasizing protein and fruit. Dieters measured out their food and were required to eat liver, the closest thing to a superfood at the time, at least once a week. By the seventies, as convenience foods were starting to boom, weight Watchers began to loosen up, licensing its name for use on frozen meals and other products. Ketchup maker HJ. Hines was in the process of acquiring a line of weight Watchers branded packaged foods in nineteen seventy eight when it decided to buy the company too, for about seventy one million dollars. Under its new owner, WeightWatchers dove deeper into selling in supermarkets, where it faced off against rivals such as Stofer's Lean Cuisine and Jenny Craig, and became Hinz's fastest growing line by nineteen eighty nine. Then in the nineties, researchers discovered a drug combination that could help people lose weight. Millions of people flocked to clinics and daughters willing to turn out for proscriptions of fenfen, an amphetamine like combination that worked to suppress appetite. Jenny Craig and nutri System soon joined the frenzy, getting into the prescription business by enlisting doctors to prescribe fenfenn to their customers. Weight Watchers stayed away, though, causing its membership and sales numbers to drop, but taking a hard line paid off when fenfenn was later linked to heart damage, a discovery that led to recalls and lawsuits. We're not a medical organization and we never pretended to be, a weight Watcher, spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times in nineteen ninety seven. Medical decisions about prescription drugs should be left to people and their personal physicians. Weightwatcher's offerings fluctuated over the years, from weight loss camps to working woman friendly recipes, even as the weekly in person meetings remained constant. In the late nineties, the company introduced the Points system, which gave foods different numeric values based on calories, fiber, and fat that could serve as a simple shorthand and for tracking what people put in their bodies. Dieters got a budget of points, allowing for some indulgences, just not too many. In twenty seventeen, weight Watchers even created a menu with more than two hundred zero points foods, including eggs, fish, and beans, with the implication that one could but probably wouldn't, gorge on them endlessly. The company itself shape shifted too. Heinz sold it to the investment from Artall Group in nineteen ninety nine, and Artal took the company public again in two thousand and one. By twenty fifteen, weight Watchers was in trouble, loaded with debt, largely from purchasing its own stock over the prior decade, and struggling to compete with free online weight loss and fitness tools. The company needed to get people excited about joining again, and nobody weight Watchers concluded was better at getting people excited than Oprah Winfrey. The influential talk show host, had long struggled very publicly with her weight, trying just about every diet out there. After weight Watchers approached her, Winfrey bought a ten percent stake, which would have been worth about forty three million dollars before she joined the company and became a board member. In commercials, she flaunted the forty pounds she'd lost on the program and praised its flexibility. I have bread every day, she declared. Her endorsement provided a much needed facelift to an aging brand, but the core, slightly boring tenets of pursuing a healthy lifestyle remained. I truly wish there was a magic pill, former CEO David Kertschoff told analysts a few years earlier, but there isn't. How people were approaching weight loss meanwhile, was changing. The body positivity movement was shifting emphasis from the scale to overall health, which might now mean eating like a caveman, meditating, sporting a fit bit, swapping alcohol for green juice, or turning to Goop for your medical ailments. Wellness culture ran on good vibes, and dieting had bad vibes, deb benefits. Who leads WeightWatchers, Insights and Innovation, learned when she surveyed consumers, people no longer wanted to talk just about diet, which inevitably implied failure, and instead said things like I want you to look at the whole me. In twenty seventeen, Mindy Grossman, the retail executive who'd reinvented television shopping at HSN, took the helm and continued the wellness makeover. She also marked the third CEO in ten years. WeightWatchers scrubbed the D word from its materials, replacing it with healthy eating, got rid of artificial sweeteners, colors, and preservatives in its products, and for the first time, let people join without specifying a goal. Weight Members could also attend special wellness workshops and vacation on a Weightwatcher's cruise. In twenty eighteen, the company even temporarily scrapped the Weightwatcher's name, truncating it to WW with a new slogan, Wellness that Works. WeightWatchers had an app which updated with headspace meditations and new online groups where members with similar interests could connect, but those changes went largely unnoticed. Ultimately, says benefits, wellness didn't translate into sales. Grossman didn't respond to her request or comment NOOM. Meanwhile, using psychology to help dieters develop and keep healthy habits was suddenly becoming cool. Then, during the pandemic, people were packing on pounds, snacking anxiously at home, while hundreds of least Weight Watchers' locations across the US sat empty. By the time Grossman stepped down in early twenty twenty two, the company's membership was declining, and even Winfrey, still a board member, had offloaded most of her stock early in the pandemic. Cistani was taking a walk around her neighborhood in Menlo Park, California, to mark another day of working from home after a meandering career with stops at Creative Artists Agency and Tumbler. She'd recently achieved a milestone. Many in Silicon Valley dream of selling a company. In this case, it was house Party, a group video chat app popular with gamers and college students, which Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, had purchased. As she walked, Sistani listened to an episode of the Oprah's SuperSoul podcast and heard comedian Tina Fey confess her affection for weight Watchers. Faye told Winfrey that her favorite low points treat was a banana and strawberries with cool whip and chocolate drizzle on top. She said she'd posted about it under a pseudonym on the Weight Watchers app, where she also cheered on other members. It dawned on Sistani, who'd used weight Watchers after giving birth, that the company was more than a fading brand for middle aged dieters. It was a social network. I hadn't really connected those dots, she recalls thinking, and I got really excited about that. She reached out to weight Watchers board, hoping she might persuade them to bring her on. That didn't happen, but two years later, when the company was in day desperate need of a reinvention, the board invited her to interview for the CEO role. Cistani's pitch not only did she understand digital communities, but she could also turn weight Watchers into a tech company. Its customers were already getting used to doing things online, once more evenly split between in person and not members had shifted dramatically during the pandemic, such that more than eighty percent of subscribers opted to pay only for digital access, But often customers weren't connecting with one another on weight Watchers app, instead using places like Facebook and Reddit. To start, she told the board the app would have to improve. You can't even DM people, She says. It was a diagnosis more commonly heard in twenty ten than in twenty twenty two, but it got her the job. By the time Sistani joined, Ozempic and we goovi were becoming household names, and hashtags such as ozempic journey were being circulated on TikTok by users who shared miracle stories of u using weight. Sistani hatched an internal incubator at WeightWatchers to explore whether the company should offer GLP one's benefits. The head of customer insight was interviewing GLP one patients who were calling the drugs magic. Hearing their stories of losing weight after many futile years of trying was so moving that she cried. It felt like I'm living through an inflection point where we may be able to cure a problem in this world that has been getting worse and worse, says Benevetz, who's been with weight Watchers for almost a decade. It wasn't just GLP one patients. Despite all the talk about body positivity, people seemed to have moved on and they wanted to slim down again. They felt like they finally had permission to speak about it more bluntly. The company quietly began calling itself WeightWatchers again. Suddenly, wellness was out and science was in, especially science that explained the biological factors of obesity. In October, Sistani met with wait watchers scientific Advisory Board, which is made up of outside academics and physicians, some of them have taken tens of thousands of dollars from either Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly, both makers of GLP one's. Weightwatcher says it looks for the best scientific experts and hires them based on their expertise, regardless of affiliations. Sistani came away determined to move swiftly, but the company's board was tentative, mindful of the Fenfen fiasco WeightWatchers had dodged decades earlier. Sistani convinced some longer tenured members that GLP one's were different, and Gary Foster, the company's chief scientific officer, was reassured that GLP one's primary side effects nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting were generally mild, and that the drugs had been used for almost two decades by people with diabetes without any safety scandals. Other medications had things that were more nervous system related or agitation or increased heart rate, he says, with GLP one. You're not seeing any of that. Of course, it remains to be seen what happens long term when glp ones are used by many more patients, including already thin people wanting to lose weight, a cohort on whom these drugs have yet to be tested. This month, a European regulator began investigating some GLP ones after the drugs were linked to a small number of reports of suicidal thoughts. The fastest way to move into GOLP onees was an acquisition, and by that time Sistani had plenty of options. Telemedicine had boomed during COVID. To spin up a digital prescription provider, all you needed was a sleek website, some sciencey language, branding, contract clinicians, and a marketing budget. After considering more than thirty different GLP one startups, Cistani was sold on Sequence, which he thought had the best approach to automating insurance appeals, arguably the most labour intensive part of the process. They had a team of engineers who'd come from working on AI driven cars and have figured out a complete automation platform, she says. Sistani decided to buy the company. She says because of its tech stack and a feeling of kinship with its co founders, two ex Google software engineers who'd come along with the deal. I truly believe that five to ten years from now we'll look back on weight management in a very different way than we did, say, a few years ago, says Remy Cossart, the CEO and co founder of Sequence's parent company, Weekend Health. Wall Street cheered the deal, but for many Weight Watchers lifers, the news stung. The acquisition is an antithesis to what I thought they believed in, says Nadine Lee, who's been a member for the past thirteen years. Switching to medications feels like a quick, fixed shift in their philosophy. With the program, every food, from an ice cream Sunday to a piece of broccoli had a points value in this new weight Watchers era, how many points was a shot of ozempic. With the deal moving so quickly to purchase Sequence, it remains uncertain just how weight Watchers will handle the integration. Cistani says her experience at acquired companies, not just at house Party, but also at Tumbler after Yahoo bought it in twenty thirteen, will help smooth the transition. Two thirds of acquisitions don't go well, She says, I'm really lucky to have been part of one that did and one that didn't. Tumbler was acquired for one billion dollars in twenty thirteen and sold for three million dollars in twenty nineteen. Epic shut down House Party in twenty twenty one. Since the purchase announcement in March, WeightWatchers hasn't communicated much about its move into pharmaceuticals. Cistani, who posts videos on TikTok sharing her go to two point smoothie recipe and sporting a sweatshirt that reads saving my points for wine, says she's been surprised by the backlash among weight Watchers loyalists, but some diehards who reach and maintain their goal weight don't pay the company a dime, and even if they did, she's fine rubbing them the wrong way to win over a whole new crowd. Some of the pushback we heard our members, for instance, was like I did it the hard way, and that's not our reason to not help people, Sistani says, comparing their complaints to people griping about student loan forgiveness. Based on conversations with Cistani and her team. It's likely the new Weight Watchers will look like some version of this. A traditional membership now costs about twenty five dollars to fifty dollars per month. For access to the GLP ones, you upgrade to a Sequence membership, bringing your monthly fee to ninety nine dollars. Existing Sequence members already paying this amount automatically become Weight Watchers members. A Sequence membership comes with medical consults and help from a dietitian, but doesn't actually include GOLP one's. To be eligible for a GLP one prescription through the company, you need to have a body mass index of thirty or higher or twenty seven or so with a weight related condition. Once on the drugs, Sequence members have access to weight Watchers new lifestyle services to help with things such as managing side effects and rebuilding strength as weight drops along with fat, muscle inevitably disappears too. The company envisions also marketing these behavioral services to GLP one patients who've gotten the drugs elsewhere. There are plenty of people who are getting these medications from their doctors and not having the right support. Cistani says members who aren't on GLP ones will continue using its traditional program, the point system and virtual or in person meetings. WeightWatchers had about three point five million online and in person members last year, more than half of whom would qualify for a GLP one prescription based on their BMI. That group, along with a segment of the company's twenty million or so lapsed customers, could be interested in upgrading to a SEQUENCE membership, but that doesn't guarantee insurance will cover the GLP ones, which can add nine hundred to fourteen hundred dollars in out of pocket costs a month, an unrealistic expense for most WeightWatchers, says in cases where people can't get coverage, Sequence can provide access to less expensive medications typically covered by insurance. Sistani also concedes that while WeightWatchers has dramatically cut its real estate expenses, reducing from about three thousand locations before the pandemic to around eight hundred, the new business's margins are similar, with costs like employing clinicians as well as staff to fight insurance companies that deny coverage to members. But a bigger threat to weight Watchers is how rapidly the drugs are being commoditized. NOOM recently launched a one hundred and twenty dollars monthly subscription for GLP one users. While the telemedicine startup Row, better known for selling erectile dysfunction medications, plastered New York City subway stations with ads featuring weight loss drug injections, medspas and plastic surgery clinics are pitching ozempic, we go Vy, and Mountjaro alongside facials, tummy tucks, and nose jobs, and blanketing Instagram and Facebook with ads. One nail salon in New Orleans advertises nurse administered injections for semiglutide Saturdays, a reference to the active pharmaceutical ingredient in ozempic and we govhy. The drug seem to be following the Botox trajectory, leaping from medical intervention to cosmetical active, with ozempic injection parties not far behind. Drug companies can barely keep up with demand as they deal with product shortages and knockoffs put out by so called compounding pharmacies which sell cheaper and questionable versions. Novo Nordis recently sued several providers and pharmacies over trademark infringement and other complaints. Soon enough, there should also be GLP one pills for obesity, and likely next generation versions that help people lose even more weight. Middlemen such as weight Watchers could find themselves in erase to the bottom, competing on price, access, and marketing. The uniqueness of this weight Watcher's offer is still a question from my end, says Brian Nagel, a managing director and senior analyst at Oppenheimer. In the best case scenario, weight Watchers members who try ozempic will encourage friends to sign up for the new program, where they can get drugs and support and discover the wonders of points. Those who are and aren't on GLP ones thrive together without resentment. In the worst case scenario, longtime members whose only elixir all these years has been willpower, quit on mass but it doesn't in there. The new people who swarm to the brand for access to the drugs, can't get their insurer to cover them, then abandon it just as quickly. Eventually, some members fear leaders at weekly meetings, sling GLP one pens as newly skinny ozempic users complain about losing too much weight too quickly. Everyone else grinds bitterly through another daily points log on their phone, including one time ozempic takers whose pounds have piled back on. What's left is the illusion of a venerable brand that's turned into a prescription factory with perks. Already versions of the latter scenario are playing out. Cindy Borges, a fifty four year old in Visalia, California, joined Sequence after she heard it had been acquired by Weight Watchers. Sequence couldn't help her secure insurance coverage, though, and she quit soon after. She says she told two co workers who were interested in her experience that it was a scam at the end of the day, until the insurances start paying for it. What's the point, she asks, Even if weight Watchers can satisfy Sequence customers, it could still fade into irrelevance. Kelly Stepfi, a forty six year old mom who lives in an Orlando suburb, was a weight Watcher's member on and off for years before she joined Sequence last fall. A clinician there prescribed Mountjaro, and she lost more than fifty pounds in six months, But the most dramatic results were the ones she felt inside that food noise. The lady in your head telling you to eat all the time. Get a cheeseburger from McDonald's. It's really really good. She's not there anymore, Steffie says. Although Sequence helped weight Watchers recapture her as a customer, it wasn't a stable situation. For one, Steffie's insurance wasn't covering Mountjaro, and a coupon she'd been using issued by the drug company expired in June. She also wanted to keep losing weight, but her SEQUENCE appointed doctor didn't want her to drop any more, so she quit and found another telemedicine provider that prescribed her ozempic at a dose she wanted. This time, her insurance covered it. As for weight Watchers, Steffie isn't interested in going back to paying for the warm and fuzzy sense of community it monetized for so long. She already gets that on TikTok, where she's constantly swapping tips and life updates with fellow weight loss drug takers that she says, is my weight Watcher's meeting with Kevin sima Ucci and Anders Melon

How many points is a shot of we go vie. WeightWatchers is going all in on trendy new anti obesity drugs. The gamble might save the company, if it doesn't kill it first. By Emma Court and Ellen Hewitt. The ladies at the Rogue WeightWatchers meeting in Norwalk, Connecticut were livid. For years, they'd faithfully gathered, like about a million other members at weight Watchers locations, to conduct the weekly rights step on the scale, share the latest winds and woes, and swap tips on how to hack points or resist that happy hour margarita. Some had been coming for fifteen years. Two had been on and off weightwatcher since the nineteen seventies. They'd lost forty six fifty five sixty two seventy nine pounds. They'd supported one another through retirements, children leaving for college, and debts in the family. Then this March, ww International shut down thousands of in person locations, leaving the group to either make an hour plus drive to a meeting across Long Island Sound or worse a symbol online. So one evening in April, about a dozen of them gathered in a windowless room at a local shoprite for their second self organized meeting. As they munched on Slim and Trim brand popcorn three WeightWatchers points per serving, they fumed about another fresh wound, one that seemed like an even bigger betrayal. The company was getting in on the hottest new thing in weight loss obesity medications. In March, the same month WeightWatchers clamped down on its rent costs, it agreed to pay one hundred and thirty two million dollars to acquire Sequence, a two year old telemedicine startup that prescribes a new, much hyped set of medications called glp ones that can basically melt the pounds away. The drugs, which go by wegovy ozempic and other brand names, have come to be regarded in the past year as a magic weight loss solution. Shrinking celebs like Elon Musk and Chelsea Handler were injecting themselves with the stuff. Some doctors and scientists were predicting the drugs could up end America's obesity crisis, and now Weight Watchers, the arbiter of self restraint was diving in two. They're not practicing what they preached, and now all of a sudden, there's a drug involved. Christine's sister, hen who's been on the program for four years, set at the April meeting. Weight Watchers has kicked us to the curb, said Bob Klein, the lone male member of the group that day, who joined weight Watchers about fifteen years ago. For decades, weight Watchers taught dieters there was only one way to shed the pounds hard won behavioral change. It was a long game, one fought with pre portioned baby carrots and an accountant's worth of spreadsheets for meal logging. But battling food for your whole life is exhausting and the weight almost always creeps back up for most dieters. Now, after sixty years, the company was reversing course, proclaiming that jabbing a drug into your thigh once a week could do the trick. GLP ones, which mimic and naturally occurring appetites suppressant, activate pathways in the brain that make you want to put down the fork even if there's still food on your plate. The cravings just disappear along with the pounds. Weightwatcher's sharp turn to pharmaceuticals is the work of its new chief executive officer, Sima Sistani, a Silicon Valley veteran who took the top job last year. The company has been fighting for relevance for about a decade, mostly by going all in on wellness trends rather than by transforming itself for the digital age that allowed upstarts such as Noom to siphon off customers, leaving WeightWatchers flat footed. When the coronavirus pandemic shoved everything online late last year, nine months after Sistani became CEO, Weightwatcher's stock price dipped to three dollars and thirty eight cents a share, its lowest level in about twenty years. Sistani had recently made a name for herself after selling the video chat app house Party, which she co founded, to a major gaming company for an undisclosed sum. WeightWatchers board hired her to save the company, and within weeks of taking the job in March twenty twenty two, she started looking at GLP one's which were just going mainstream. Sistani says that when she heard these drugs could eradicate obesity in her lifetime, I was just like, Wow, that is a big statement. We need to catalyze this. The strategy seems as audacious as it does desperate, but WeightWatchers has little to lose. The company long succeeded by surfing each wave of diet culture from low carb to fat free. Now it has about one point five billion dollars in debt, more than ten times it's expected twenty twenty three earnings. Its bonds are trading at distressed levels, which suggests investors think that the company may have trouble paying back its creditors. Watchers said earlier this year that it has more than sufficient liquidity. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurs have been rushing to embrace GLP one's Since twenty twenty one, when we Govi became the first highly effective obesity medication to win US Food and Drug Administration approval, dozens of slickly branded telemedicine startups such as Sequence have surfaced, acting as digital matchmakers between patients eager to take weight loss meds and clinicians who can prescribe them. The startups are trying to capitalize on a drug category that analysts at Jeffrey's Financial predict will be worth more than one hundred billion dollars by twenty thirty two. Since the Weight Watcher's Sequence announcement, the traditional weight loss category has only continued to freefall. Longtime competitor Jenny Craig, also saddled with debt, filed for bankruptcy, and Weightwatcher's biggest shareholder, Artall Group, sold its remaining stake, ending a relationship that began in nineteen ninety nine. It's not a vote of confidence, says Mike Holland, a senior credit analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. All of this raises the question what even is weight Watchers? If it becomes just another hawker of diet drugs, it may not matter, Cistani says. It's not like Blockbuster didn't see Netflix coming. Before. WeightWatchers branded postal scales and recipe cards became staples of the American kitchen. A housewife in Queen's, New York was mistaken for being pregnant. The woman, Gene Nidetch, joined a local weight loss program and began meeting with her majen crew of fellow dieters, eventually losing more than seventy pounds and turning the weekly support group into a format that could be replicated. Businessman Al Lippert and his wife Felise became fans and helped Nidetch and her husband Marty found WeightWatchers in nineteen sixty three. It soon expanded internationally, and in less than a decade it went The original weight Watcher's plan was strict, banning many processed carbs and emphasizing protein and fruit. Dieters measured out their food and were required to eat liver, the closest thing to a superfood at the time, at least once a week. By the seventies, as convenience foods were starting to boom, weight Watchers began to loosen up, licensing its name for use on frozen meals and other products. Ketchup maker HJ. Hines was in the process of acquiring a line of weight Watchers branded packaged foods in nineteen seventy eight when it decided to buy the company too, for about seventy one million dollars. Under its new owner, WeightWatchers dove deeper into selling in supermarkets, where it faced off against rivals such as Stofer's Lean Cuisine and Jenny Craig, and became Hinz's fastest growing line by nineteen eighty nine. Then in the nineties, researchers discovered a drug combination that could help people lose weight. Millions of people flocked to clinics and daughters willing to turn out for proscriptions of fenfen, an amphetamine like combination that worked to suppress appetite. Jenny Craig and nutri System soon joined the frenzy, getting into the prescription business by enlisting doctors to prescribe fenfenn to their customers. Weight Watchers stayed away, though, causing its membership and sales numbers to drop, but taking a hard line paid off when fenfenn was later linked to heart damage, a discovery that led to recalls and lawsuits. We're not a medical organization and we never pretended to be, a weight Watcher, spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times in nineteen ninety seven. Medical decisions about prescription drugs should be left to people and their personal physicians. Weightwatcher's offerings fluctuated over the years, from weight loss camps to working woman friendly recipes, even as the weekly in person meetings remained constant. In the late nineties, the company introduced the Points system, which gave foods different numeric values based on calories, fiber, and fat that could serve as a simple shorthand and for tracking what people put in their bodies. Dieters got a budget of points, allowing for some indulgences, just not too many. In twenty seventeen, weight Watchers even created a menu with more than two hundred zero points foods, including eggs, fish, and beans, with the implication that one could but probably wouldn't, gorge on them endlessly. The company itself shape shifted too. Heinz sold it to the investment from Artall Group in nineteen ninety nine, and Artal took the company public again in two thousand and one. By twenty fifteen, weight Watchers was in trouble, loaded with debt, largely from purchasing its own stock over the prior decade, and struggling to compete with free online weight loss and fitness tools. The company needed to get people excited about joining again, and nobody weight Watchers concluded was better at getting people excited than Oprah Winfrey. The influential talk show host, had long struggled very publicly with her weight, trying just about every diet out there. After weight Watchers approached her, Winfrey bought a ten percent stake, which would have been worth about forty three million dollars before she joined the company and became a board member. In commercials, she flaunted the forty pounds she'd lost on the program and praised its flexibility. I have bread every day, she declared. Her endorsement provided a much needed facelift to an aging brand, but the core, slightly boring tenets of pursuing a healthy lifestyle remained. I truly wish there was a magic pill, former CEO David Kertschoff told analysts a few years earlier, but there isn't. How people were approaching weight loss meanwhile, was changing. The body positivity movement was shifting emphasis from the scale to overall health, which might now mean eating like a caveman, meditating, sporting a fit bit, swapping alcohol for green juice, or turning to Goop for your medical ailments. Wellness culture ran on good vibes, and dieting had bad vibes, deb benefits. Who leads WeightWatchers, Insights and Innovation, learned when she surveyed consumers, people no longer wanted to talk just about diet, which inevitably implied failure, and instead said things like I want you to look at the whole me. In twenty seventeen, Mindy Grossman, the retail executive who'd reinvented television shopping at HSN, took the helm and continued the wellness makeover. She also marked the third CEO in ten years. WeightWatchers scrubbed the D word from its materials, replacing it with healthy eating, got rid of artificial sweeteners, colors, and preservatives in its products, and for the first time, let people join without specifying a goal. Weight Members could also attend special wellness workshops and vacation on a Weightwatcher's cruise. In twenty eighteen, the company even temporarily scrapped the Weightwatcher's name, truncating it to WW with a new slogan, Wellness that Works. WeightWatchers had an app which updated with headspace meditations and new online groups where members with similar interests could connect, but those changes went largely unnoticed. Ultimately, says benefits, wellness didn't translate into sales. Grossman didn't respond to her request or comment NOOM. Meanwhile, using psychology to help dieters develop and keep healthy habits was suddenly becoming cool. Then, during the pandemic, people were packing on pounds, snacking anxiously at home, while hundreds of least Weight Watchers' locations across the US sat empty. By the time Grossman stepped down in early twenty twenty two, the company's membership was declining, and even Winfrey, still a board member, had offloaded most of her stock early in the pandemic. Cistani was taking a walk around her neighborhood in Menlo Park, California, to mark another day of working from home after a meandering career with stops at Creative Artists Agency and Tumbler. She'd recently achieved a milestone. Many in Silicon Valley dream of selling a company. In this case, it was house Party, a group video chat app popular with gamers and college students, which Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, had purchased. As she walked, Sistani listened to an episode of the Oprah's SuperSoul podcast and heard comedian Tina Fey confess her affection for weight Watchers. Faye told Winfrey that her favorite low points treat was a banana and strawberries with cool whip and chocolate drizzle on top. She said she'd posted about it under a pseudonym on the Weight Watchers app, where she also cheered on other members. It dawned on Sistani, who'd used weight Watchers after giving birth, that the company was more than a fading brand for middle aged dieters. It was a social network. I hadn't really connected those dots, she recalls thinking, and I got really excited about that. She reached out to weight Watchers board, hoping she might persuade them to bring her on. That didn't happen, but two years later, when the company was in day desperate need of a reinvention, the board invited her to interview for the CEO role. Cistani's pitch not only did she understand digital communities, but she could also turn weight Watchers into a tech company. Its customers were already getting used to doing things online, once more evenly split between in person and not members had shifted dramatically during the pandemic, such that more than eighty percent of subscribers opted to pay only for digital access, But often customers weren't connecting with one another on weight Watchers app, instead using places like Facebook and Reddit. To start, she told the board the app would have to improve. You can't even DM people, She says. It was a diagnosis more commonly heard in twenty ten than in twenty twenty two, but it got her the job. By the time Sistani joined, Ozempic and we goovi were becoming household names, and hashtags such as ozempic journey were being circulated on TikTok by users who shared miracle stories of u using weight. Sistani hatched an internal incubator at WeightWatchers to explore whether the company should offer GLP one's benefits. The head of customer insight was interviewing GLP one patients who were calling the drugs magic. Hearing their stories of losing weight after many futile years of trying was so moving that she cried. It felt like I'm living through an inflection point where we may be able to cure a problem in this world that has been getting worse and worse, says Benevetz, who's been with weight Watchers for almost a decade. It wasn't just GLP one patients. Despite all the talk about body positivity, people seemed to have moved on and they wanted to slim down again. They felt like they finally had permission to speak about it more bluntly. The company quietly began calling itself WeightWatchers again. Suddenly, wellness was out and science was in, especially science that explained the biological factors of obesity. In October, Sistani met with wait watchers scientific Advisory Board, which is made up of outside academics and physicians, some of them have taken tens of thousands of dollars from either Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly, both makers of GLP one's. Weightwatcher says it looks for the best scientific experts and hires them based on their expertise, regardless of affiliations. Sistani came away determined to move swiftly, but the company's board was tentative, mindful of the Fenfen fiasco WeightWatchers had dodged decades earlier. Sistani convinced some longer tenured members that GLP one's were different, and Gary Foster, the company's chief scientific officer, was reassured that GLP one's primary side effects nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting were generally mild, and that the drugs had been used for almost two decades by people with diabetes without any safety scandals. Other medications had things that were more nervous system related or agitation or increased heart rate, he says, with GLP one. You're not seeing any of that. Of course, it remains to be seen what happens long term when glp ones are used by many more patients, including already thin people wanting to lose weight, a cohort on whom these drugs have yet to be tested. This month, a European regulator began investigating some GLP ones after the drugs were linked to a small number of reports of suicidal thoughts. The fastest way to move into GOLP onees was an acquisition, and by that time Sistani had plenty of options. Telemedicine had boomed during COVID. To spin up a digital prescription provider, all you needed was a sleek website, some sciencey language, branding, contract clinicians, and a marketing budget. After considering more than thirty different GLP one startups, Cistani was sold on Sequence, which he thought had the best approach to automating insurance appeals, arguably the most labour intensive part of the process. They had a team of engineers who'd come from working on AI driven cars and have figured out a complete automation platform, she says. Sistani decided to buy the company. She says because of its tech stack and a feeling of kinship with its co founders, two ex Google software engineers who'd come along with the deal. I truly believe that five to ten years from now we'll look back on weight management in a very different way than we did, say, a few years ago, says Remy Cossart, the CEO and co founder of Sequence's parent company, Weekend Health. Wall Street cheered the deal, but for many Weight Watchers lifers, the news stung. The acquisition is an antithesis to what I thought they believed in, says Nadine Lee, who's been a member for the past thirteen years. Switching to medications feels like a quick, fixed shift in their philosophy. With the program, every food, from an ice cream Sunday to a piece of broccoli had a points value in this new weight Watchers era, how many points was a shot of ozempic. With the deal moving so quickly to purchase Sequence, it remains uncertain just how weight Watchers will handle the integration. Cistani says her experience at acquired companies, not just at house Party, but also at Tumbler after Yahoo bought it in twenty thirteen, will help smooth the transition. Two thirds of acquisitions don't go well, She says, I'm really lucky to have been part of one that did and one that didn't. Tumbler was acquired for one billion dollars in twenty thirteen and sold for three million dollars in twenty nineteen. Epic shut down House Party in twenty twenty one. Since the purchase announcement in March, WeightWatchers hasn't communicated much about its move into pharmaceuticals. Cistani, who posts videos on TikTok sharing her go to two point smoothie recipe and sporting a sweatshirt that reads saving my points for wine, says she's been surprised by the backlash among weight Watchers loyalists, but some diehards who reach and maintain their goal weight don't pay the company a dime, and even if they did, she's fine rubbing them the wrong way to win over a whole new crowd. Some of the pushback we heard our members, for instance, was like I did it the hard way, and that's not our reason to not help people, Sistani says, comparing their complaints to people griping about student loan forgiveness. Based on conversations with Cistani and her team. It's likely the new Weight Watchers will look like some version of this. A traditional membership now costs about twenty five dollars to fifty dollars per month. For access to the GLP ones, you upgrade to a Sequence membership, bringing your monthly fee to ninety nine dollars. Existing Sequence members already paying this amount automatically become Weight Watchers members. A Sequence membership comes with medical consults and help from a dietitian, but doesn't actually include GOLP one's. To be eligible for a GLP one prescription through the company, you need to have a body mass index of thirty or higher or twenty seven or so with a weight related condition. Once on the drugs, Sequence members have access to weight Watchers new lifestyle services to help with things such as managing side effects and rebuilding strength as weight drops along with fat, muscle inevitably disappears too. The company envisions also marketing these behavioral services to GLP one patients who've gotten the drugs elsewhere. There are plenty of people who are getting these medications from their doctors and not having the right support. Cistani says members who aren't on GLP ones will continue using its traditional program, the point system and virtual or in person meetings. WeightWatchers had about three point five million online and in person members last year, more than half of whom would qualify for a GLP one prescription based on their BMI. That group, along with a segment of the company's twenty million or so lapsed customers, could be interested in upgrading to a SEQUENCE membership, but that doesn't guarantee insurance will cover the GLP ones, which can add nine hundred to fourteen hundred dollars in out of pocket costs a month, an unrealistic expense for most WeightWatchers, says in cases where people can't get coverage, Sequence can provide access to less expensive medications typically covered by insurance. Sistani also concedes that while WeightWatchers has dramatically cut its real estate expenses, reducing from about three thousand locations before the pandemic to around eight hundred, the new business's margins are similar, with costs like employing clinicians as well as staff to fight insurance companies that deny coverage to members. But a bigger threat to weight Watchers is how rapidly the drugs are being commoditized. NOOM recently launched a one hundred and twenty dollars monthly subscription for GLP one users. While the telemedicine startup Row, better known for selling erectile dysfunction medications, plastered New York City subway stations with ads featuring weight loss drug injections, medspas and plastic surgery clinics are pitching ozempic, we go Vy, and Mountjaro alongside facials, tummy tucks, and nose jobs, and blanketing Instagram and Facebook with ads. One nail salon in New Orleans advertises nurse administered injections for semiglutide Saturdays, a reference to the active pharmaceutical ingredient in ozempic and we govhy. The drug seem to be following the Botox trajectory, leaping from medical intervention to cosmetical active, with ozempic injection parties not far behind. Drug companies can barely keep up with demand as they deal with product shortages and knockoffs put out by so called compounding pharmacies which sell cheaper and questionable versions. Novo Nordis recently sued several providers and pharmacies over trademark infringement and other complaints. Soon enough, there should also be GLP one pills for obesity, and likely next generation versions that help people lose even more weight. Middlemen such as weight Watchers could find themselves in erase to the bottom, competing on price, access, and marketing. The uniqueness of this weight Watcher's offer is still a question from my end, says Brian Nagel, a managing director and senior analyst at Oppenheimer. In the best case scenario, weight Watchers members who try ozempic will encourage friends to sign up for the new program, where they can get drugs and support and discover the wonders of points. Those who are and aren't on GLP ones thrive together without resentment. In the worst case scenario, longtime members whose only elixir all these years has been willpower, quit on mass but it doesn't in there. The new people who swarm to the brand for access to the drugs, can't get their insurer to cover them, then abandon it just as quickly. Eventually, some members fear leaders at weekly meetings, sling GLP one pens as newly skinny ozempic users complain about losing too much weight too quickly. Everyone else grinds bitterly through another daily points log on their phone, including one time ozempic takers whose pounds have piled back on. What's left is the illusion of a venerable brand that's turned into a prescription factory with perks. Already versions of the latter scenario are playing out. Cindy Borges, a fifty four year old in Visalia, California, joined Sequence after she heard it had been acquired by Weight Watchers. Sequence couldn't help her secure insurance coverage, though, and she quit soon after. She says she told two co workers who were interested in her experience that it was a scam at the end of the day, until the insurances start paying for it. What's the point, she asks, Even if weight Watchers can satisfy Sequence customers, it could still fade into irrelevance. Kelly Stepfi, a forty six year old mom who lives in an Orlando suburb, was a weight Watcher's member on and off for years before she joined Sequence last fall. A clinician there prescribed Mountjaro, and she lost more than fifty pounds in six months, But the most dramatic results were the ones she felt inside that food noise. The lady in your head telling you to eat all the time. Get a cheeseburger from McDonald's. It's really really good. She's not there anymore, Steffie says. Although Sequence helped weight Watchers recapture her as a customer, it wasn't a stable situation. For one, Steffie's insurance wasn't covering Mountjaro, and a coupon she'd been using issued by the drug company expired in June. She also wanted to keep losing weight, but her SEQUENCE appointed doctor didn't want her to drop any more, so she quit and found another telemedicine provider that prescribed her ozempic at a dose she wanted. This time, her insurance covered it. As for weight Watchers, Steffie isn't interested in going back to paying for the warm and fuzzy sense of community it monetized for so long. She already gets that on TikTok, where she's constantly swapping tips and life updates with fellow weight loss drug takers that she says, is my weight Watcher's meeting with Kevin sima Ucci and Anders Melon