We are increasingly told that weight loss can be accomplished with a simple injection. Last week it was revealed that sales of drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy are expected to hit an astonishing £120 billion globally by the 2030s.
It’s all a far cry, of course, from the joyless, restrictive diets of the past that our mothers and grandmothers followed in order to be slim.
One such diet being the original WeightWatchers. It’s fair to say that Jean Nidetch, who founded the company 61 years ago, took a tough-love approach. Not for her any namby-pamby thoughts of examining the emotional reasons that may lie behind an overweight person’s unhealthy relationship with food.
The feisty New Yorker took a firm hand with fatties. She was fed up with women making excuses: their glands, their metabolism, their big bones.
‘Unless a physician has told you otherwise, you are fat because you overeat and you overeat not from hunger but from habit,’ she declared in 1966.
Claudia Connell says she is overweight but is too terrified by the nasty side-effects some people experience on miracle weight-loss drug Ozempic to try it
Jean Nidetch, who founded WeightWatchers 61 years ago, took a tough-love approach to dieting and shedding the pounds
Jean on ‘WeightWatchers Island’ in October 1984
What started as a small weekly meeting in her own home blossomed into an international franchise that today has 4.6 million members around the world generating a £1.2 billion turnover.
I wonder what Jean, who died in 2015, might feel about Ozempic, Wegovy and the rest. The appetite-curbing injections have become such a phenomenon that WeightWatchers has launched a programme designed specifically for people using them.
But I imagine she would have despaired at such an effortless quick fix and stood firmly by the very first incarnation of her diet plan, aimed at chunky housewives who were dipping into the biscuit jar while their husbands were at work.
I’m overweight but too terrified by the nasty side-effects some people experience on Ozempic to try it.
Given that I’m not averse to a bit of straight-talking, I thought why not go old-school and embrace the original diet that spawned a global empire?
The WeightWatchers Cook Book, written by Jean Nidetch, was first published in 1966 and sold 1.5 million copies upon release. Its phenomenal success and the global empire it created means it is surely worth visiting again.
I manage to get my hands on a first edition and am immediately taken with Jean’s own story of her weight struggles. She would hide food around the house and eat boxes of cookies while her husband and children slept. At 5 ft 7 in and weighing 15 st, she says her bulk was so cumbersome that life became an everyday struggle.
‘The fat person doesn’t have many pleasures,’ declares Jean in the book. ‘They can’t bowl, they can’t dance, they can’t do anything because they can barely support their own weight even just walking — so they eat.’
It sounds grim indeed, but here’s the problem: Jean has included a photograph of herself when she was overweight, and she doesn’t even look that big to me. No more than a size 16, I’d say. Same as me. Have I become so acclimatised to overweight people that they no longer stand out?
I’m eager to get started, but before I do, Jean has a little pep talk for me: ‘Chances are you’re a professional weight loser. You’ve probably lost weight a thousand times and gained it back just as often.’
So far, so accurate — but then she hazards a guess as to why I might be trying her diet. ‘Maybe you ran out of friends fatter than you are.’ Woah! Steady on, Jean! ‘Maybe you’re bored of being ‘jolly’ and want to give your mouth muscles a chance to relax. Maybe you’re tired of hearing people say, ‘With a face like yours, why did you ever let yourself go?’ ‘
Instead of using Ozempic or Wegovy, Claudia has chosen to go old-school and follow a WeightWatchers diet
Jean was a feisty New Yorker who took a firm hand with fatties. She was fed up with women making excuses about their weight
Jean is starting to make Marjorie Dawes, the bitchy diet leader on Little Britain, seem warm and supportive. It’s not enough that I want to be thinner, she needs me to be full of self-loathing too.
‘Please don’t start this programme unless you are desperate. Deep down desperate. So desperate that you are miserable,’ she instructs.
I’m probably only a six out of ten on the desperation and misery scale, but I decide to push on regardless. The cookbook contains recipes and ideas based around the original plan. The rules are strict, but pretty simple and certainly far easier to follow than the complicated Pro Points Plan I did when I tried WeightWatchers in 1996.
I’m to eat three meals a day (no skipping) created from a long list of permitted foods. There is no calorie counting but everything must be strictly weighed and alcohol is absolutely forbidden. I’m to eat three portions of permitted fruit a day, one of which must be either an orange or grapefruit.
On top of that, I have to consume 475 ml of skimmed milk daily, including milk for tea and coffee. Sweeteners are permitted (well, it was the 1960s). As well as the diet being very egg- and fish-heavy, the plan calls for any combination of chicken, turkey and ‘organ meat’, or offal as we’d call it (heart, liver and kidney), five times a week.
I can have all other types of meat (bar bacon) up to three times a week, including frankfurters.
There are ‘free’ vegetables that I can eat as much of as I like and ‘restricted vegetables’ that I can only have one of a day. Typically, the restricted veg includes all the ever so slightly more calorific ones I like: carrots, peas, onions, parsnip, tomato and artichoke.
Back in the 1960s, there was no such thing as good fat and bad fat; in those days all fat was bad. It’s for this reason that avocado, olive oil and nuts — foods that would be considered healthy choices and permitted in small amounts on a diet today — are off-limits. The good news is I can have bread and cheese. The bad news is the permitted cheese portion is so stingy it barely amounts to one bite and the ‘bread’ isn’t all it seems either, as I’ll discover.
I’m not much of a breakfast person, but on this diet it’s essential and there are plenty of options available to me, though, unfortunately, none of them are things I would usually eat — especially eggs.
There are more egg recipes in the book than almost anything else, including several suggestions for breakfast. There is Eggs Louisiana — eggs with dehydrated onion flakes. Eggs Foo Yung — with dehydrated onion flakes plus celery and bean sprouts.
Best of all, Eggs In A Nest, where you can have eggs on toast but — wait for it — you must first discard the centre part of the toast and place the poached eggs in the hole. So, essentially, Eggs And Crusts.
I spot a recipe for what we would call a smoothie but what Jean labels Strawberry Delight, made with strawberries, water, powdered milk and sweetener. You can even add a tablespoon of cottage cheese should you wish to make it even more revolting. Instead, I decide to ease myself in gently and eat half a grapefruit and my permitted one ounce of cheese, vowing to cook some of the egg dishes later in the week.
When it comes to ‘luncheon’, as it’s called throughout the book, the recipes are very much created for women who didn’t work but spent their days fluffing cushions before their husbands returned. It means there are very few ‘grab and go’ recipes. Everything is fiddly and requires preparation.
Something called a June Salad catches my eye. I like salad: Greek, Caesar, Nicoise, but I think it’s safe to say I won’t be adding June to my favourites.
As instructed, I put cottage cheese, skimmed milk, paprika, lemon juice, half a green pepper and four radishes into a blender. I then (and I check this several times because it sounds so wrong) tip the contents over lettuce.
The WeightWatchers National Slimming Champion David Serle with Jean at the WeightWatchers Celebration Ball in 1978. Behind them is a photo of David before his weight loss
Jean wrote the WeightWatchers Cook Book which was first published in 1966 and sold 1.5 million copies upon release
Sylvia Hughes, who lost over 100Ibs through the WeightWatchers diet, holds a photo taken of herself before her weight loss
The resulting slop on my plate looks as though I’ve drained a pond and it doesn’t taste much better either. Is that the secret of the diet? Everything is so foul that you end up starving?
It’s only day one but I know I have zero chance of sticking to it if I don’t find something more appetising to eat for dinner. I scour the pages for something appealing that doesn’t contain cottage cheese.
Boiled fish in paper? Pass. Cabbage leaves stuffed with mince? Not for me. Okra soup? I think I’ve had enough green slime, thanks. I settle on Spanish Chicken made with tomatoes and pepper. It’s really just a casserole that I add masses of garlic to in order to pimp up the flavour. It proves rather tasty.
Winging it is clearly not the answer. I need to plan a menu in advance, select dishes that I have a chance of enjoying and stick with them.
So it is that on day two I have spinach omelette for breakfast. Later in the week I mix things up with tinned pineapple and cottage cheese, melon and poached egg, Hawaiian tuna (tinned tuna with pineapple chunks) and something called an Asparagus Puff (asparagus spears coated in breadcrumbs and baked).
The recipe suggests adding sweeteners to the breadcrumbs (I don’t). Folk in the 1960s clearly had a very sweet tooth.
As for lunches, there are many fancy and fussy suggestions for the next time I host a ‘ladies’ bridge luncheon’. Jean is very into putting things into jelly by adding gelatine to cold water, tossing in some ingredients and allowing them to set in a mould. There’s tomatoes and prawns in jelly, vegetables in jelly, turkey in jelly — in fact you name it and Jean will turn it into a jelly.
I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw a ‘Danish Pastry’ recipe but as I was starting to realise, Jean is a bit of a tease. The Danish pastry turned out to be cottage cheese on bread with a bit of cinnamon sprinkled on top.
By the time I am four days in, I’m struggling with the blandness of it all and even looking forward to my daily orange. But encouraged by the book’s story of a woman who lost 100 lb, I continue. ‘What a strikingly healthy, firm-toned, happy-looking individual was hidden beneath the flabbiness!’ writes Jean.
A big issue with the dishes is that there are no pictures, just the occasional pencil sketch, which isn’t much help. There’s a recipe for a ‘garden flower salad’ but the sketches detailing how to dissect heads of cauliflower and broccoli and, somehow, make them look like flower petals are so complicated it’s enough to have you reaching for the gin… if only you were allowed.
With no bridge luncheons on the horizon, I stick to more simple lunches: a hot spinach salad, tomato soup, and meat or fish with vegetables. I give the revolting-sounding turnip sandwiches a miss, but do find myself becoming rather partial to frankfurters, even though they would undoubtedly be classed as an ultra-processed food these days.
Dinners are where I get a little more adventurous. Written decades before any cost-of-living crisis, the book recommends lobster, veal and fillet steak recipes, but they’re not within my budget.
Instead, I go for a hamburger recipe made with mushrooms and celery. On other nights I try: spicy mince-stuffed peppers, sweet and sour frankfurters, fried chicken with onions and lamb casserole, jazzing them all up with extra chillis and spices.
However, I think I would rather devour the pages of the book than tuck into kebabs made from a combination of heart, liver and kidney. I’ve already eaten more meat in a week than I normally would in six. Jean has no truck with vegetarians or vegans.
There are also dozens of recipes that would be tasty if you didn’t have to liquidise them. Did people in the 1960s lack the ability to chew? A recipe for salmon bake sounds promising with ingredients that include a slice of bread, an egg, green pepper and celery.
But instead of baking the salmon and having it on toast with the greens, I’m told to put everything in a blender, tip the liquid into an oven-proof dish and bake for 20 minutes. Out of curiosity, I try this and it’s just a soggy mess.
Despite the strange dishes and extra time spent cooking, by the end of the week my clothes are looser, so something is working. Not fancying a single one of Jean’s snacks is definitely helping. There’s a snack that she calls ‘popcorn’, for example, which is actually just celery, cucumber, radishes and raw cauliflower in a bowl. ‘Nibble away to your heart’s content,’ she trills.
She’s positively trolling me when it comes to the ‘roasted peanut’ snack recipe, which turns out to be tinned mushrooms baked in the oven. ‘You didn’t really think you could have peanuts, did you?’ she taunts.
To make the ‘peanuts’ more fun, it’s suggested that I eat them by tossing them in the air and then attempting to catch them in my mouth. If I had made these, I’d be cutting out the middleman and tossing them straight in the bin.
There are cartoons in the book featuring a chunky, frumpy-looking woman eating, underneath which are captions. She is shown eating spaghetti above a caption reading: ‘OK, so the baby is sick, your eating isn’t going to make him well!’
Underneath a drawing of a packed suitcase, it says: ‘Going on holiday? Pack your case not your stomach!’ I guess they’re what passed as a motivational quotes 60 years ago.
Throughout, the message is clear. Thin is beautiful. Fat is ugly. ‘People are much more attractive after losing weight,’ says Jean.
Saying anything like that today would result in instant cancellation. But the thing is, most dieters would probably agree, especially if they’ve previously been slim. It’s why I can’t help but warm to the book and tell-it-like-it-is Jean because, tough though it is, the diet works.
After a week, I’m 5 lb down and my size 16 jeans are much looser on the waist and bum. I’m so pleased I buy a dress from Boden and wear it to a birthday dinner the next day. I’ve got more weight to lose and, although I don’t think I could stick to the diet for more than a fortnight, it’s good to know it’s effective and could be called on in an emergency.
Jean says that hitting your target weight is life-changing. ‘The skies will be a little sunnier, the people are a little friendlier and your step a little gayer.’
I think she’s right, even if will take an awful lot of cottage cheese and bread with holes in to get there.