Good morning, Broadsheet readers! A woman could soon lead the Navy for the first time, DEI positions are disappearing, and WeightWatchers’ CEO explains to Fortune senior writer Maria Aspan why she’s embracing the Ozempic era. Have a meaningful Monday!
– The end of dieting? Ozempic is everywhere these days: Awards shows, subway ads, all of the headlines—and the ballooning bottom lines of the pharmaceutical companies selling the new class of related weight-loss drugs. But this Big Pharma gold rush has created a more complicated landscape for another big business: the $80 billion weight-loss industry.
For decades, companies like WeightWatchers, Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, and Noom have made billions of dollars by preaching diets, exercise, “behavioral changes”—and above all, willpower. But now it’s much easier, and often more effective, to just take a weekly shot of Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, or another so-called miracle drug. As customers embrace the pharma alternative to their traditional businesses, WeightWatchers and Noom are trying to pivot.
“We’re admitting that we’re learning; that the science has evolved—and therefore we should, as well,” WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani told me, about her company’s March deal to buy Sequence, a telehealth business that allows patients to obtain virtual prescriptions for the new weight-loss drugs. Two months later, Noom officially unveiled Noom Med, a similar telehealth platform.
I spoke with executives at both companies—as well as customers, doctors, analysts, and longtime diet-industry experts—for a new Fortune feature about the impact of the Ozempic era on the traditional weight-loss industry. Even Dr. Linda Anegawa, Noom’s chief medical officer, predicts, “We’re probably looking at the demise of dieting.”
Could we be so lucky? This is a business story, of course—WeightWatchers and Noom have both struggled financially in recent years, while 40-year-old Jenny Craig just shut down and then sold off its brand to Nutrisystem’s parent company—but it’s also a cultural and societal one.
WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani at MPW Next Gen on Nov. 16, 2022.Stuart Isett/Fortune Anyone who’s ever had the joy of dieting knows how boring, hard, and emotionally fraught it is—and it’s also near-impossible to succeed long-term. The average dieter regains more than 80% of lost weight within five years, according to one meta-analysis of 29 long-term weight-loss studies. But those results haven’t kept the dieting industry from making billions of dollars, for years, by selling products that fundamentally aren’t permanent solutions.
So these business pivots raise plenty of outstanding questions about the Ozempic era’s long-term side effects—for investors and executives at WeightWatchers and Noom, for their (shrinking numbers of) employees, for their customers, and for society at large.
“I do see this as the end of diet culture. The focus has shifted from weight loss to weight health,” acknowledges Sistani, who became WeightWatchers CEO in 2022. However, she’s quick to argue that her 60-year-old company will always be an important part of achieving that new kind of health: “I want to be clear that the way you achieve it is through weight loss.”
Can she and her traditional diet-industry competitors succeed at threading this needle? Read the full feature here.
Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
@mariaaspan
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